The closest analog to The Last Exorcism is the acclaimed first season of True Detective, which covers a lot of the same ground in its setting and social commentary. His mixed record aside, Eli Roth produced the best exorcism movie in the last 20 years with this 90-minute stunner—and it’s probably the best found-footage movie in the post-Blair Witch Project era.

The Last Exorcism follows a charismatic preacher in poverty-stricken Louisiana, who has spent the last decade performing exorcisms despite losing his own faith. Reverend Cotton invites a film crew to document the titular ‘last exorcism’ he will ever perform, which he intends to use to expose the practice as a fraud. But this last case pushes the boundaries of what he believes, descending into something more from the world of H.P. Lovecraft than Billy Friedkin’s 1973 demon possession classic.

It works so well because the writers, directors and cast, no pun intended, have faith in this otherwise familiar material. The cast is particularly phenomenal, giving us a level of emotional buy-in that found-footage usually doesn’t demand. Even the exorcism itself defies our movie-made expectations, visually and emotionally. 

Plot twists run out the clock in a particularly disorienting third-act finale. All of them make sense in the context of the story, even while the movie frustrates us with so few definite answers. The Last Exorcism is such an economized horror movie that I find myself revisiting it every few years—never given a moment to feel boredom as the story unfolds at a breakneck pace. 

On a side-note: How about the rash of horror movies in the 2010s featuring the demon Paimon? Hereditary is best-known, of course, but how about Last Shift (2013) and The Last Exorcism? Maybe all of the ‘Satanic Hollywood sickos’ and elites who control us were really working over-time to make offerings to Lord Paimon... I suppose we will never know.