Demonic possession doesn't frighten me for a number of reasons, the most important of which is that I know demons do not exist. If a horror movie strongly features demonic possessions, presenting them as a terrifying elemental fear, it's unlikely I'll be bothered in the least. Despite all of this, and possibly because of it, The Last Exorcism chilled me to the bone.

The Last Exorcism is in the "found footage" genre of horror. More simply put, the whole film is shot in the first-person perspective. The story is that a faithless priest has hired a documentary crew to put the last exorcism he will ever undertake on film. His intention is to prove, once and for all, that exorcisms are total bunk. His motivations are reasonable, his means plausible. There is almost nothing improbable in this movie.

Probability is an exceedingly important factor in found footage filmmaking. The entire purpose of the technique is to make the viewers directly relate to what they are seeing on the screen, to have them feel as though they are there. When the audience insert holding the camera behaves illogically or acts unreasonably, it jars the viewer out of the moment.

A good example of an exceedingly stupid found footage cameraman is the "Hud" character from Cloverfield; he brainlessly follows his friends on their unbelievably thickheaded attempt to rescue an almost certainly dead person from a colossal monster destroying a city.

The Last Exorcism evades this particular issue by having absolutely nothing divisive happen between the documentary crew and the priest. There is no reason for any of them to get upset and decide to go check out the barn in the middle of the night, and you trust in them to make the same decisions you would, given the circumstances. They do have a clichéd argument over whether or not they should just leave, but I was certain that if I were in the same circumstances they were, I would have stayed.

The writing has a certain level of intelligence to it seldom seen in this kind of horror. In the end, it's less of a horror movie than a mystery, and it's one of the only movies I've seen that has actually kept me guessing how it would all end.

Not only do the characters act rationally, but there's also some incredibly brilliant foreshadowing that you would never pick up on unless you've seen the movie twice, despite it being very in-your-face.

I would say that The Last Exorcism is the pinnacle of documentary-style horror. It easily sidesteps the pitfalls of bad dialogue, irrational behavior and improbable threats and dives headfirst into the visceral fear of deep-south homeschooled psychopaths that has been cultivated in our society since Deliverance was first released.

Even then, it keeps some surprises hidden until you're safely tucked in to its premise.

(Nick Shuler is a freshman at the University of North Carolina in Wilmington. He is majoring in film studies.)