Indie Focus: What’s seen and unseen in ‘The Last Exorcism’

Revealing itself layer upon layer like a freakishly deformed onion, “The Last Exorcism” begins as a film about a disillusioned preacher who wants to debunk the idea of demonic possession by staging a phony exorcism for a documentary film crew. When he encounters a young girl among a backwoods Louisiana community whose condition he can’t explain away, it turns everything he knows and believes on its head.

Shot in the style of a documentary, with crew members popping into frame and visible equipment, “The Last Exorcism,” opening Friday, gains much of its unsettling momentum by insistently repositioning what is portrayed onscreen. The unraveling and revelation of multiple deceptions leads to a formal quandary regarding the film itself — is it faux horror, fake reality, mock documentary?

“‘Mock-doc’ kind of suggests that it’s funny somehow,” responded director Daniel Stamm. “I don’t think there is a really good term for it, which is a real problem. It makes it a twilight genre that isn’t really a genre. It’s such a rich style that you can do so much in.”

Stamm knows the territory well. The project originated with producers Eric Newman and Marc Abraham, who at first planned to have the film made by the writer-director team of Huck Botko and Andrew Gurland (still the credited screenwriters). After Gurland and Botko left the film to direct their own upcoming reality-based comedy “The Virginity Hit,” Newman and Abraham saw Stamm’s 2008 fictional documentary on the planning of a suicide, “A Necessary Death,” and knew they finally had their director.

Next came the challenge of casting. The documentary conceit meant that they wanted relative unknowns who wouldn’t bring the baggage of a star persona. Patrick Fabian, a veteran character actor with one of those vaguely recognizable faces, was cast in the lead role as the disheartened exorcist Cotton Marcus. For Nell Sweetzer, the near-feral, scared teenager overwhelmed by what is happening around her, the team found the young actress Ashley Bell.

“Part of what makes the film work is it’s all fresh faces,” said Eli Roth, the horror auteur behind the two “Hostel” films who became involved with the project as a producer before the arrival of Stamm. “If you have a known movie star it doesn’t work. Even though we’re not pretending it’s real, it has to feel like a documentary.”

Newman and Abraham, whose producing credits include “Children of Men,” “Dawn of the Dead” and the upcoming “The Thing,” often work on films with vastly bigger budgets than “The Last Exorcism.” In making a film for less than $2 million — which Abraham admits by way of comparison could be “somebody’s perk package” on another of their films — they found the experience essentially the same. “There’s never enough money, and there’s never enough time, no matter how much money or time you have,” said Newman.

The film was shot over 24 days last summer, with Louisiana providing both atmosphere for the story and local tax breaks for the production. Stamm’s experience with making a fake documentary meant he was well aware of the mechanics of crafting a believable on-screen reality. The piercing, searching circle of light from atop a single camera, perhaps made most infamous in “The Blair Witch Project,” often makes what is not on-screen far scarier than anything that is seen.

“A conventional film will show you everything you need to see, there will be a cut to another shot if there is something else the audience should see,” said Stamm. “With this style, where you only have the one camera, the audience becomes very aware there is a whole world outside your frame, they become more vulnerable to the actual setting. You could get attacked from any side at any moment, with the awareness of the entire 360-degree angle around you.”

In exploring whether Nell is genuinely possessed by a demonic spirit, the film’s story repeatedly rearranges who is deceiving whom and whether the explanation might be rational or something supernatural. Again, the grounding in a documentary structure provides the story with a jumping-off point to wilder, unexpected places.

“We would even take it further, asking ourselves, ‘Who edited this movie?’” said Newman. “Is this the greatest pro-exorcism propaganda ever made? Is everybody in on it? Is this a big conspiracy? It was really fun, and I think we made the right decision and sort of left it a little inconclusive.”

“That to me is the movie,” said Stamm of the big questions the film leaves suspensefully open-ended. “We didn’t want to do it through blood or gore or gimmicks. We wanted to keep the audience involved by always throwing question marks out there and then delivering the answers bit by bit. Those were the two real backbones: Is Nell possessed or is she crazy and the other is who is really responsible, who is the bad guy?

“I really like that you’re watching a whole movie and it’s not a slasher movie or a classic horror movie. It’s very much a character drama and then the darkness takes over. You don’t know what genre this is to the very, very end.”

Besides “The Blair Witch Project,” one of the most obvious points of comparison for the film is William Friedkin’s landmark “ The Exorcist,” which Roth refers to as the “gold standard for the scariest film of all time.” Yet he insists that such a high bar didn’t intimidate the filmmakers. “There’s never been a scarier film than ‘The Exorcist,’” said Roth, “but that doesn’t mean you can’t make a great scary movie.”

calendar@latimes.com