Taglines: Believe In Him.
When he arrives on the rural Louisiana farm of Louis Sweetzer, the Reverend Cotton Marcus expects to perform just another routine “exorcism” on a disturbed religious fanatic. An earnest fundamentalist, Sweetzer has contacted the charismatic preacher as a last resort, certain his teenage daughter Nell is possessed by a demon who must be exorcized before their terrifying ordeal ends in unimaginable tragedy.
Buckling under the weight of his conscience after years of parting desperate believers with their money, Cotton and his crew plan to film a confessionary documentary of this, his last exorcism. But upon arriving at the already blood drenched family farm, it is soon clear that nothing could have prepared him for the true evil he encounters there. Now, too late to turn back, Reverend Marcus’ own beliefs are shaken to the core when he and his crew must find a way to save Nell – and themselves – before it is too late.
Whether practiced by Catholic priests, evangelical ministers or Episcopal charismatics, the ancient rite of exorcism is alive and well in the new millennium, with many academics and practitioners stating in recent years that its practice is actually on the rise. The results of a 2005 Gallup poll found that 42% of Americans believe in possession by the devil.
Whether practiced by Catholic priests, evangelical ministers or Episcopal charismatics, the ancient rite of exorcism is alive and well in the new millennium, with many academics and practitioners stating in recent years that its practice is actually on the rise. The results of a 2005 Gallup poll found that 42% of Americans believe in possession by the devil.
Last year, the Archdiocese of Chicago appointed its first full-time exorcist in its 160-year history; and in New York, a group of four priests have officially investigated about forty cases of suspected possession every year since 1995. Father James LeBar, the former exorcist for the Archdiocese of New York, recently claimed that one in every ten Catholics in the United States has either witnessed or been part of an exorcism. “Ten years ago I had no cases,” he reported, “and now I have three hundred.”
The growing trend has reached the highest levels of the Vatican. Amid the Catholic Church’s concerns about growing worldwide interest in Satanism and the occult, Father Gabriele Amorth, the Vatican’s chief exorcist for 25 years, announced an initiative supported by Pope Benedict XVI to “fight the Devil head-on” by training hundreds of priests as exorcists. Many now attend the Vatican-backed Regina Apostolorum Pontifical University, a conservative Catholic University on the outskirts of Rome, which offers a specialized curriculum on exorcism for priests.
In the evangelical arena, popular pastors like Bob “The Real Exorcist” Larson in South Carolina and Tom Brown in El Paso, Texas consult on or perform hundreds of exorcisms every year. Michael Cuneo, a professor of sociology at Fordham University, reports, “By conservative estimates, there are at least five or six hundred evangelical exorcism ministries in operation today, and quite possibly two or three times this many.”
In the last two months alone, media outlets have reported on the death of a 4-year-old Russian boy caused by a brutal exorcism rite and on the disturbing rise of child exorcisms by evangelists across Africa.
Are these exorcisms real? Is demonic possession a reality, or is it simply a symptom of overwrought religious fanaticism or mental illness? Lionsgate’s release of THE LAST EXORCISM examines these questions from a skeptic’s point of view with the story of Reverend Cotton Marcus. Raised a true believer in the evangelical faith, Reverend Marcus has spent over twenty-five years conducting exorcisms he’s known were fake. Wanting to come clean, he lets a documentary film crew in on the tricks of his trade while he performs one last exorcism on Nell, a Louisiana farm girl…only to find himself face to face for the first time with evil incarnate.
“Throughout the film the question is: Is it supernatural or is it human evil? Is Nell schizophrenic or is she possessed?” says director Daniel Stamm. “That to me is the interesting question. The film is about faith, the role faith plays in your life and what that does to you – how it can help you, and how it can destroy you.”
“The film is about how you perceive good and evil,” adds Patrick Fabian, who stars as Reverend Cotton. “It’s about what your convictions are and if they’ll come through for you when you need them most.”
THE LAST EXORCISM began with producer Eric Newman’s interest in making a film about demonic possession that hewed closely to reality. He approached writers Andrew Gurland and Huck Botko, whose previous feature, MAIL ORDER WIFE, used an effective faux-documentary style that was the perfect stylistic match for Newman’s story idea. As they developed the script, Gurland and Botko were inspired by a famous 1970s documentary entitled MARJOE. Explains Gurland, “MARJOE is about a preacher who allows a documentary to be made about him, and he takes you behind the curtain and let’s you see how the whole thing is a fraud. He doesn’t believe in it and he’s trying to get out of it. We thought that would be a good beginning for the story.”
While THE LAST EXORCISM’s primary aim is to terrify audiences, Gurland and Botko remained committed to creating a dramatically compelling story. “We wanted the movie to work even if it was just a straight documentary, even before we got into the supernatural stuff,” says Gurland. “We thought it would be a good documentary to show behind the curtain of a guy who’s doing phony exorcisms – and if it were just that movie and there were no supernatural elements then it would still be a good movie. So we tried to approach it like that: what would be a good documentary and then how could we twist out of that.”
According to the writers, THE LAST EXORCISM’s documentary style also afforded them more creative freedom. “Truth is stranger than fiction,” Botko explains. “We get away with a lot of things that we can’t when it’s a regular narrative, which has its three-act structure and cues that everyone has come to expect. In a documentary you can do stuff that in a regular movie people would say was too weird or too strange.”
Producer Eli Roth, who is also an actor and director (INGLORIOUS BASTERDS, HOSTEL), immediately agreed to partner with Eric Newman upon reading the finished script. “It was one of the scariest, most original scripts I’ve ever read,” he reports. “I literally could not put it down and had chills all the way through. I loved the idea that it was a film about debunking exorcisms, showing that it’s all fake, and slowly realizing there are forces far greater than your comprehension and that you shouldn’t mess with them. It kept me guessing all the way through.”
In search of an appropriate director, Newman and Roth were drawn to the burgeoning talents of director Daniel Stamm, whose previous film, A NECESSARY DEATH, was an award-winning, documentary-styled narrative picture. “Daniel’s film was really incredible in terms of its reality and the performances,” says Newman. “It’s a different kind of a movie – much more of a psychological exercise. But it demonstrated that he could work in this style as well as anyone.”
While Stamm’s aptitude in the realm of psychological terror was apparent, the horror genre was new ground for the director. “A lot of the horror scenes were new to me,” Stamm says, “so that was kind of challenging from a technical point of view. The most exciting scenes to shoot were the character-based ones, where you can have the actor just go and you don’t know what the outcome is going to be. You get something different every time you do it.”
Stamm believes that the awareness of the camera within the world of the film, a hallmark of documentary filmmaking, is a critical component to the success of the film’s realism. He says, “The cameraman actually exists in the film as a character, and represents the audience, which I really love because it forces the audience into an intimacy with what’s going on that sometimes may be uncomfortable. And I think for a horror movie that’s brilliant, when you get the audience closer than they would ever want to be.” He adds, “In a normal narrative film you probably wouldn’t go to that extreme close-up as we’re doing in the documentary style. So we’re in people’s faces much more than they’re used to, which I think really helps with the intensity.”
In preparation for the shoot, actors Patrick Fabian (“Veronica Mars,” “Big Love”) and Ashley Bell (“United States of Tara”) studied footage of actual exorcisms in order to avoid resorting to pop culture clichés of what an exorcism looks like. Says Stamm, “We didn’t want to try to imitate movies like THE EXORCIST. We wanted to give the fans of the genre something new and fresh, a new spin on things, rather than to repeat old clichés.”
“We wanted our exorcism to feel raw, real and fresh, like you are truly in the room with someone who could be possessed,” adds Roth. “What you see is one-hundred percent Ashley Bell – we did not use any makeup, CGI, or special effects in her scenes, it’s all her doing everything you see, down to the bulging veins on her neck and the back bends.”
Keeping the question alive as to whether demonic possession is possible or not, Bell also examined a range of psychological disorders as possible explanations for Nell’s behavior. “I looked into post-traumatic stress disorder and various manias,” she says. “But I kept coming back to those tapes of real exorcisms I heard. You’d be listening to what you recognized as people, and then all at once you’d hear a sound that was neither male or female, human or animal. You’d just get chills.”
During production, Stamm maintained a tightly sealed set to foster a sense of intimacy for the actors. “We had no one in the room,’ he says. “There was only one monitor on the set. There was no video village where people were watching, so the actors knew there weren’t fifty eyes on them.”
He also had the actors perform more takes than usual, sometimes to the point of exhaustion. “I try to throw the actors into the scene so that they come up with things that I would never come up with,” says the director. “I let them be themselves and just react. We do a lot of takes, and what really works for me is to do so many that they get tired and upset or annoyed. Because then you get some raw emotions that show really well on screen. We’ll do fifteen or twenty takes to get that.”
“Daniel really knows just how far to push the actors and how to get the best out of them,” adds Roth. “He’s also got a very dark sense of humor and knows how to mine scary moments from humor, and humor from scary moments. He’s an incredible talent.”
Improvisation was encouraged on the set, with Stamm allowing the actors to follow their impulses and develop their characters in unexpected ways. “The most important thing to me,” says the director, “is that the actors develop their own character flavor, which is the same style I worked on in my last film.”
The Last Exorcism (2010)
Directed by: Daniel Stamm
Starring: Patrick Fabian, Ashley Bell, Iris Bahr, Louis Herthum, Jamie Alyson Caudle, Shanna Forrestall, Victoria Patenaude, John Wilmot, Denise Lee, Logan Craig Reid, Sofia Hujabre
Screenplay by: Huck Botko, Andrew Gurland
Production Design by: Andrew W. Bofinger
Cinematography by: Zoltan Honti
Film Editing by: Shilpa Sahi
Costume Design by: Shauna Leone
Music by: Nathan Barr
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for disturbing violent content and terror, some sexual references and thematic material.
Studio: Lionsgate Films
Release Date: August 27, 2010