"Daniel Stamm’s The Last Exorcism is another of those “found footage” films; one that claims to contain a true document of real-life events. Much like Paranormal Activity and The Blair Witch Project before it, the film suggests that we are witnessing horrifying, supernatural events for reals. Exemplifies more humour, heart, and: most importantly; horror, than Hollywood’s biggest of blockbusters. No lie." Simon Miraudo QUICKFLIX "Daniel Stamm's The Last Exorcism is one of the most interesting and accomplished horror debuts of the last few years. The first thing horror fans should know is that “The Last Exorcism” is not quite what you think it is from the previews. Expertly directed and very well-performed." Brian Tallerico HOLLYWOOD CHICAGO "The method is well-worn and the subject-matter familiar, but this is a smart, scary little picture." Kim Newman EMPIRE MAGAZINE "When I left the theater, I was exhausted and freaked out and totally bejeezus-less." Mike Scott TIMES-PICAYUNE "The Last Exorcism gives you good reason to be very afraid of the dark. The Last Exorcism delivers the heebie-jeebie goods. Meaning when you least expect it." Peter Travers ROLLING STONE "A clever, small film that depicts showman-preachers and horror movies with a wink and nod, The Last Exorcism spends most of its 88 minutes staying a cut above the average horror flick. When The Last Exorcism finds its creepy zone, it succeeds as being an inventive take, on an old story." John Wirt ADVOCATE "For too long, horror movies has been typified by senseless levels of gore, irritating jump scares and bimbo characters with more botox than brains. But change is in the air. Thanks to the success of films such as The Blair Witch Project, and Paranormal Activity, the handy-cam style of filmmaking has effectively helped revive the genre into something worth screaming about. For proof, see Daniel Stamm’s low-budget chiller The Last Exorcism. " Anders Wotzke CUT PRINT REVIEW

"Satan stalks the bible belt, as the occult locks horns so to speak, with free lance forensics, family dysfunction, and more sociopathic urges. Tossing together mockumentary, evangelical fundamentalism and Rosemary's Baby, and spicing it up with a dash of devil worship, The Last Exorcism may also be the first of its kind in weirdly overhauling the horror genre as well." Prairie Miller PURPLE REVOLVER "Enough to keep you scared when you go home and try to go asleep with all the lights out and the house going bump in the night. There are some genuinely scary moments, mostly due to the excellent performance by Ashley Bell as the possessed Nell Sweetzer." Kevin Carr 7M PICTURES "I really liked The Last Exorcism. Surprised the heck out of me. The movie is shot in documentary style, taking you along for the action. The style and no-name movie cast makes this very believable." Chuck the Movieguy COMING SOON "It's fun and it will have you jumping out of your underpants." willie waffle WAFFLE MOVIES "Brilliantly directed, superbly written and genuinely scary, this is a hugely enjoyable horror flick." Matthew Turner VIEW LONDON "The terror it evokes is of such a primal nature, that it is not easily thrown off, burrowing relentlessly into the very marrow on one's bones, and into the deepest, darkest part of one's psyche." KILLER MOVIE REVIEWS "More than a decade after The Blair Witch project turned the mock-doc format into a horror cliche, this low-tech horror show uses it to chilling effect in this story of cynicism vs. things that go bump in the night. The Last Exorcism, whose producers include Hostel director Eli Roth,is a low-tech horror show that makes top-notch use of the mockumentary format to tell a story of faith, cynicism and the limited ability of rationality to protect against things that lurk in the dark." Maitland McDonagh MISS CHICK FLICK

The Inside Story Reverend Cotton Marcus was brought up a true believer in the evangelical faith, but after twenty five years of conducting fake exorcisms, he's had enough of the charade. Deciding to come clean in "The Last Exorcism", he lets a documentary film crew in on the tricks of his trade, while performing one last exorcism. Only he couldn't know that this time, he would come face to face with the real thing. When writers Andrew Gurland and Huck Botko were introduced to the idea for "The Last Exorcism" by producer Eric Newman, they didn't hesitate to get on board. As Gurland says, "Eric came in and said he had a great idea." And what was it? He just said demonic possession and they thought, "Okay!" Gurland’s and Botko's previous work had caught Newman's attention: one film in particular, which was also documentary-styled, convinced him that they were the right choice to write the script. "Huck and I made this movie called Mail Order Wife and Eric Newman saw it and had the idea to do a supernatural thriller with us," recalls Gurland. "He was really like the third writer on this, and he came up with the tag-line." Which was? "If you believe in God, you believe in the devil." The writers had another film in mind which they used as inspiration for the basis of the project. "There's a famous documentary from the 1970's called Marjoe 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. And we thought that would be a good beginning for a movie like this," Gurland ("Mail Order Wife" & "The Virginity Hit") explained. He then elaborated on the creative process, and how a film like "The Last Exorcism" should work from a realist perspective, as well as that of a dramatized piece, saying: "What we try to do when we work on a faux-documentary type of movie, is make the movie work even if it was just a straight documentary, even before we get into the supernatural stuff. We think 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 can we twist out of that." One of the reasons the writers were so fascinated by the project was the unique creative opportunity offered in "The Last Exorcism" documentary style of filming. Huck Botko ("Broken Condom") explains: "We get away with a lot of things that you can't when it's a regular narrative, because you've got your three-act structure and you've got your cues that everyone has come to expect. And we always say 'truth is stranger than fiction.' And in a documentary you can do stuff that's so weird and strange, and if you put it in a regular movie people would say that's too weird or that's too strange." It's also fascinating to be exploring themes that, as Gurland notes, "scare the bejeezus out of people." To take it to the next level, Eric Newman then tapped the burgeoning talents of the director Daniel Stamm, whose previous film was an award-winning documentary-style picture. "We had seen Daniel's film, "A Necessary Death" which was really incredible in terms of what he had accomplished, in terms of its reality, the performance," says Newman. "It's a different kind of a movie: much more of a psychological exercise. And it told us that he could work in this style as well as anyone. He's been our quarterback and winning games every day." While Stamm's aptitude in the realm of psychological terror was apparent, horror, as called for in this production, was new ground. According to American Film Institute directing programme graduate Stamm, "The Last Exorcism" is best described as a character based horror movie. "A lot of the horror is new to me," Stamm says, "so that's kind of challenging from a technical point of view. The most exciting scenes to shoot are the character-based ones, where you can have the actor just go, and you don't know what the outcome is going to be. It's fresh every time you do it: you get something different." Stamm describes how the perspective that "The Last Exorcism" is shot from, with it's first-hand immediacy is a critical component to the success of the film's desired impact of realism. "In this film, because of the first-person narrative, the cameraman actually exists in the film, 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. 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 their intensity." Because it is central to Stamm's process, his actors endured a Kubrickian filming environment with a tightly sealed set, multiple takes and often exhausting conditions. "What was important to me was to keep the intimacy for the actors by having no one in the room, and not having monitors outside. There's only one monitor on the set. I'm trying to throw the actors into the scene so that they come up with things that I would never come up with. 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." Newman notes:"the script is really just a blueprint for where you want to go and what you want to accomplish." Improvisation was a dictate on the set and going off-script allowed for the film: and the actors; to develop in ways that surprised the director and enhanced the realism of the narrative. "The most important thing to me is that they don't have lines in their head that they're trying to reproduce, but rather their own words and their own character flavor, which is the same style I worked in on my last film, A Necessary Death," Stamm says. The improvising lines based on the script might have been the most challenging aspect of the shoot, for the actors. Louis Herthum who was cast as Louis Sweetzer notes: "The improv nature of the film is fascinating: it's an amazing opportunity. It's very liberating but it's very scary too. Probably one of the scariest things I've ever done: but also one of the most rewarding." Producer Marc Abraham ("Slither" & "Dawn Of The Dead") points out what allows an approach like this to be successful: "Daniel's point of view is so strong and because of that, actors trust him a lot." Stamm had his actors watch footage of actual exorcisms to prepare for the role. "I wanted them to know how exorcisms have been performed in the past so as not to go into cliché territory. This film had to be character-based, 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." Because of the improvisational nature, "the content of the film, on a micro-level, changed constantly," Newman ("Slither") says. "On a macro-level, it hasn't changed much from its original design, it's very much the movie that was originally conceived." "The Last Exorcism" was filmed on location in rural Louisiana, shot in a real farmhouse, surrounded by alligators, snakes, vermin and a history to the house that allowed for a degree of verisimilitude and organic 'creepiness' that would otherwise have been a struggle to attain through fabrication. Production Designer Andrew Bofinger ("Way of War") found that much of his work was cut out for him, for that reason. "Daniel Stamm and I had a lot of time together in the beginning, we went on numerous scouts, especially of the main location, the Sweetzer farm, where eighty five percent of the movie takes place. Coming into this house, there's just so much stuff that we could do. We have hundred year-old armoires and antique furniture. It really made it easy set dressing wise, you had everything to choose from. And the house itself already had that creepy feel. There's no way we could have afforded to create this." For Stamm, working with the two other principal mood makers, 2008 Golden Reel Award winning cinematographer Zoltan Honti ("Torn from the Flag") and editor Shilpa Sahi ("Life Is Hot in Cracktown"), was second-nature. Honti was his best man, and Sahi, the minister, at his wedding. "Zoltan, Shilpa and I have worked to together since our first student film at AFI, and we wanted to work together again, we worked for three years together on our previous feature, so we know what works and what doesn't, we know each other's tastes, and we just know the format really well. I think it really helps me to have them on board, not just because they're so talented, but because they know the process so well. There's a lot of stuff we don't have to talk about, we just know the shorthand." So, has anyone ever had a religious or supernatural experience? Abraham recalls "I once encountered a ghost. I had just moved into an apartment, and the woman who rented me the place was an elderly lady. She had been willed the apartment by her husband. And the first night I spent there, I was awakened at three or four in the morning by a buzzing sound. It was coming from the stove, which hadn't been touched in months. And when I looked up there was some sort of vision, a whisp of a spirit. And it was very powerful." "Supernatural-wise, I was in the Caribbean once, on St John, in the ruins of an old sugar plantation. They call their ghosts 'Jumbies' down there. And there was an evening when I was definitely visited by an old slave-ghost. It pulled all the hair off me, the goose-flesh, the whole nine yards," says Fabian, who plays the Reverend Cotton Marcus. "It was really something!" Eric Newman ("Dawn of the Dead") reckons, "Every time we release a movie is like a religious experience to me." And, does anyone thing that there are families like the Sweetzer's in America today? Stamm is sure they do. "Exorcism isn't something that ended in the middle ages, it still happens today. And that's because there still are these problems that people can't deal with and they're looking for solutions." Abraham believes there is: one hundred percent. "The stuff that goes on in this country is mind-blowing. There's people who sacrifice their children. There's people who believe in Armageddon. Our country's so founded on the principles of God, which is fine. But like anything it can be taken to an extreme. It's a slippery slope." And which is more terrifying. Human evil or supernatural? "When it's human choice, that's always a lot more disturbing. Supernatural evil is scary too, though, because we have no control over it," says Iris Bahr ("Fair Game"), "but at least the first one has a solution to it." "If there's really supernatural evil floating around the universe, I don't want to know about it," Abraham said. What It's All About

When the Reverend Cotton Marcus arrives on the rural Louisiana farm of Louis Sweetzer, he expects to perform what should be a '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 will encounter there. With his own beliefs shaken to the core, Reverend Marcus and his crew must find a way to save Nell and themselves, before it is too late.

The Verdict "No it's not 'The Exorcist'! Yes it is "The Last Exorcism" and despite its nice, warm, fuzzy, start, it does turn ugly. Meet the Reverend Cotton Marcus, a second generation Baptist preacher who takes us on what should be, a simple casting out of a demon, otherwise known as an exorcism. But has he met his match? Can he defeat the demon that has made its home inside sixteen year old Nell Sweetzer. 2008 American Film Institue Festival Award winner Daniel Stamm, his cast and crew, have put together a film that starts out as both endearing and funny before it moves on into darker realms. For some the finish may seem a little cramped, but those astute horror fans will realize that when you're dealing with demonic powers, the situation can change rapidly. Patrick Fabian, who plays the Reverend Cotton Marcus, will be a familiar face to those who are fans of major TV Series such as: "NCIS", "Burn Notice", "Bones", "Just Shoot Me!" and, "Veronica Mars" (in which he played Professor Hank Landry). His film credits include "Must Love Dogs" and "Endgame". A nice addition to the horror (scary) genre. Recommended. 4 STARS." Who's Playing Who?

Patrick Fabian Ashley Bell Iris Bahr Louis Herthum Caleb Landry Jones Tony Bentley John Wright Jr Shanna Forrestall Justin Shafer Carol Sutton Victoria Patenaude John Wilmot Becky Fly Denise Lee Logan Craig Reid Sofia Hujabre Adam Grimes

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Cotton Marcus Nell Sweetzer Iris Reisen Louis Sweetzer Caleb Sweetzer Pastor Manley John Marcus Shanna Marcus Justin Marcus Shopkeeper Motorist Spindly Man Becky Davis Nurse Logan Winters Cafe Manager Daniel Moskowitz

The Production Team Directed by Daniel Stamm Written by Huck Botko & Andrew Gurland Produced by Marc Abraham/Thomas A Bliss/Eric Newman/Eli Roth Original Music by Nathan Barr Cinematography by Zoltan Honti Film Editing by Shilpa Sahi Casting by Lauren Bass Production Design by Andrew W Bofinger Costume Design by Shauna Leone Key Hair Stylist Marcos Gonzales Key Makeup Artist Krystal Kershaw Run Time 87 minutes Rated MA15+ [AUST] Copyright ©2010 - Hopscotch - All Rights Reserved ©1999-2010 - The Movie Pages & Impact Internet Services - All Rights Reserved. Protected by Australian & International Copyright, Trademark Laws & Intellectual Property Rights.