Every time I go see a scary movie, I walk out terrified and vow to never go back and see another one ever again. Then, shortly after, I see another trailer and my heart starts racing and I end up back in the same place, hating myself for loving the intensity and thrill of good horror. These days there seems to be a disturbing trend of new movies marketed as horror that have replaced the old time classic (fear inspired by intense creepy music with any number of things popping out at you when you least expect it) with fear coming from showing the most gruesome images imaginable (or unimaginable as the case may be). I really don't enjoy these kinds of movies and given that one of the producers of The Last Exorcism has several of these in his repertoire (Eli Roth of the Hostel series), I wasn't sure what I was getting myself into when I headed out to see this one. Fortunately, it's more of a classic type of scare with minimal gruesome imagery. Unfortunately, despite a strong beginning, everything inexplicably goes terribly wrong at the end, making this yet another mediocre movie in the Summer of Disappointment.

One of the things that makes the ending (which I won't give away) so upsetting is that the beginning is actually pretty good. As you can guess just from the title, the film is full of references to God, the devil, and demons, and as a whole makes a fairly strong case for the existence of all three. It is filmed in faux documentary style with the Reverend Cotton Marcus, a lively, charismatic, and popular gospel preacher, at the center. Cotton has performed what he claims to be hundreds of exorcisms over the years and has had a successful career in healing many from the curse of possession. As he has grown as a preacher, though, Cotton has been slowly realizing an unnerving change in his own personal spirituality. As a man who at one time touted, "If you believe in God, you have to believe in the devil," Cotton has come to the conclusion that he actually doesn't believe in either God or the devil.

This crisis of belief had been a long time in the making, but culminated with the complicated birth of Cotton's hearing-impaired son. At a time when Cotton should have found himself praying to and thanking God for the survival and protection of his son, he found himself trusting more in the doctors who were taking care of him and offering his thanks to them instead. Now, as a man grappling with his own belief system turned upside down, Cotton has decided to come clean and expose the truth behind his exorcisms and how he has made such a successful living off of curing people who believed themselves to be possessed. To help him achieve this task, Cotton has brought in a team of documentary filmmakers to capture the last exorcism he will ever do, once and for all uncovering all the tricks, gimmicks, and deceptions behind his supposed exorcisms and make the case that there is no such thing as real demonic possession.

After a quick scan through his "exorcism mail," Cotton, in a seemingly random act, selects a letter from a small town farmer Louis Sweetzer, pleading for the exorcism of his daughter Nell who, while possessed, has supposedly been offing Sweetzer's livestock. Cotton, thoroughly unconvinced of the existence of any demonic possession, gets to work first doing his best to convince Nell that she is actually afflicted by a demon, then using an elaborate array of tricks and sleight of hand to make her believe a demon comes into her body as is then drawn out by Cotton himself. Cotton feels that if Nell thinks a demonic presence has been causing her to act out and that that presence has been removed, she will be healed in the same way she would have been if she experienced a real exorcism. Believing his work to be done, Cotton and his unwelcome film crew pack up to head home. What Cotton hasn't bargained for is that something much bigger than he ever could have expected or imagined is actually afflicting Nell and it will require every ounce of faith Cotton Marcus has left to escape with is own life.

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