-By Maitland McDonagh

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The Reverend Cotton Marcus (Patrick Fabian) was a charismatic child preacher who grew into a cynical huckster with a specialty in exorcisms. As he admits to documentarian Iris Reisen (Iris Bahr) and her unseen cameraman, Daniel, he doesn’t believe in demons or possession; their film will be a kind of public confession that will ease his conscience and shed light on the ways in which the faithful can be exploited.

For years, Marcus justified performing exorcisms as a kind of mental-health service—if a true believer is tormented by what he or she thinks of as “devils,” then a religious ritual can provide the same relief as therapy or psychotropic medication. But after nearly losing his own child, Marcus has decided to pursue a less morally compromised line of work. He agrees to perform one last exorcism for the filmmakers, simultaneously revealing the studied showmanship and behind-the-scenes tricks that fool the gullible into thinking they’ve seen a genuine display of God’s power to vanquish evil.

The subject is 16-year-old Nell (Ashley Bell), the shy, home-schooled daughter of widowed Louisiana farmer Louis Sweetzer (Louis Herthum). Sweetzer believes Nell has been slaughtering his livestock while under the influence of malevolent spirits; she claims to remember nothing of what she does at night that leaves her clothing soaked with blood. Nell’s sullen, teenage brother, Caleb (Caleb Landry Jones), is overtly hostile to the preacher and his entourage, and claims that his father is a drunk and a bully, hinting that Louis is to blame for whatever’s going on, not Nell.

Like 2005’s uneven The Exorcism of Emily Rose, The Last Exorcism walks the line between explaining away supernatural phenomena as the product of superstition, abuse and mental illness and admitting that those “imaginary” ghosts and ghouls can be pretty damned frightening when the lights go out and the dark country night closes in. And while the mockumentary structure that seemed so terrifyingly fresh in 1999’s The Blair Witch Project has been overused by low-budget filmmakers, it works beautifully in The Last Exorcism; by filtering events through a single perspective, the filmmakers can reveal information at their own deliberate pace.

Ultimately, though, the film lives or dies on Bell and Fabian’s performances, and both deliver: Bell has the tougher part physically—her contortions are shocking in a way no scary make-up or mechanical effects could be—but Fabian pulls off the subtle task of conveying Marcus’ emotional contradictions and growing uneasiness as his show takes on an unsettling life of its own without ever appearing to be acting. Hardcore gore-hounds will be disappointed by the lack of flashy special effects, but The Last Exorcism is more concerned with psychological chills and succeeds admirably in evoking them.