Ashley Bell ('The Last Exorcism')

Ashley Bell is quite possibly the best thing about The Last Exorcism, the new documentary-ish horror film in theaters about a possessed teenager and the man desperate to prove she isn’t possessed.

Oh! And we interviewed her.

Imagine a young Julie Haggerty, then mix in a cup of Anna Faris and a dash of Gilda Radner, and you have Ashley Bell. Only she isn’t playing funny – she’s terrifying and unnerving as Nell Sweetzer. In fact, there’s been a buzz that she deserves an Oscar Nomination for her performance (stranger things have happened! I mean, remember when Gwyneth Paltrow won for the unwatchable Shakespeare in Love or Kate Hudson for being Goldie Hawn’s daughter? And they didn’t even act well.)

There is something comedienne-y about her, definitely, and perhaps it comes from her mom Victoria Carrol, founder of the Los Angeles comic improve troupe The Groundlings. Though Bell has a real-life comedy appeal to her, her performance in The Last Exorcism is anything but comedic.

Bell makes some really weird, almost inhuman facial expressions throughout the movie. She transforms slowly from a normal teenager to a grotesque demonic creature – with absolutely zero makeup. That’s right. No makeup or visual FX whatsoever aided bell in her transformation. Which is almost unbelievable when you watch the movie. I could swear, several times, that there was some kind of manipulation of the scene with a computer, but no. It’s all her. That’s what makes her, and the film, stand out from all the other horror films out there right now. In order to accomplish this, she watched and listened to hours of tapes of real exorcisms.

“Also I got a chance to talk to people that had actually been around real exorcisms. The fear in their voice – they were actually scared to tell me about them because they thought it would come back to haunt them. I saw it their eyes and I heard it in their voice – the sheer fear surrounding the subject. And when I was watching it. I also had a chance to study a book called The Invention of Hysteria, where people would get out of their human form, and had images running through their heads, they’d be contorting to not look like humans anymore, even though it was real life and they were real people. They wouldn’t look real anymore. So I tried to keep a lot of those images in my head when we were filming.”

She won’t say definitively whether she believes in the possibility of demonic possession based on her research for the role. I’m not sure if this is to stay out of any kind of religious controversy the film might dredge up, or because she doesn’t feel comfortable sharing that kind of personal information with the public, but she will say that she isn’t sure what to think about some of the exorcisms she watched.

“I saw things that were unbelievable, and I heard things that were unbelievable. I had a journal of things written down of the words that would be coming out of their mouths, and it’s not explainable, because what they’d be talking about and where they’d be coming from and the images and the sexual references, was so horrendous. It wasn’t like anything that a human being could come up with. In and out of different languages, of different tongues, and then this noise would come out that would be neither masculine nor feminine, nor animal nor even human. Just primal. Not even that! You don’t know what it is. And that’s when you go, ‘What am I seeing? What am I listening to? Where did this come from?’”

I, for one, would be terrified to watch such a thing, let alone portray it. And I get the feeling Bell was a bit too, and concentrated instead on her acting job so as not to freak herself out.

“Honestly, when I was preparing for it, I just, I wanted to just do my job for the character I was playing. In terms of religious. Whatever Nell would be going through and whatever Nell would be going through, that’s all I thought about.”

Shockingly, all the physical strangeness that accompanies Nell when she is ‘possessed’, including strange neck bulges, backbends, finger manipulation, and an assortment of uncomfortable-looking movements are not computer effects. Bell is extremely flexible and double-jointed and was able to bend over backwards in ways that would probably kill most of us. It’s her physical acting that makes Nell Sweetzer’s scenes so spectacular.

“I loved the physical aspect of this,” she recalls happily. “The night before we shot the second exorcism scene, Daniel [Stamm, the director] asked me if I had any ideas. First of all, that’s awesome, to get asked that. I said I’d been working on the backbend and the splits, can I show you? He said great, let’s put it in! I feel like I’m stuck now. Every time I go into an audition, I have to do a backbend or something."

One of the disappointing aspects of the movie, unfortunately, is that while Nell is the main character of the film, we learn instead what the periphery males in her life feel about her situation, and not what Nell feels. Her father, her brother, and the preacher who arrives to exorcise her are all complex but understandable people with constant communication with the audience. She is an enigma, however. It is never clear, 100%, no matter what, whether Nell is truly possessed, or mentally unstable. And we aren’t supposed to know. Because of this, her true feelings, thoughts, and motivations are hidden from the audience. While frustrating, this plot point makes the film more mysterious and forces you to think and debate the plot long after you see it.

“When I started looking into the character and what had happened to her, Daniel also gave me the hint to focus on the fact that she maybe wasn’t possessed,” says Bell. “That she was going through a breakdown. And I immediately researched post traumatic stress disorder and what goes on with victims in those cases to try to hide that. Honestly, I think that’s cool that the audience is held away from what’s going on. When we were filming it, the question was hovering: when is she actually possessed? When do you really get to see Nell for who she is? And that was the most exciting part of preparing? And getting a chance to figure that out and to play two different characters was fun. Figuring out what Nell hasn’t seen of the world and why she hasn’t been exposed to things in the world.

She seemed to be this girl from the backwoods of Louisiana, and then she transforms to have those two different characters. Daniel told me to play them off each other, and play off the camera and find the moment to look into the camera and the moments not to look – to manipulate people, the audience."

Horror fans will like The Last Exorcism, thinks Bell. “I was so surprised by the final product, what a smart film it is. And I think that’s what Daniel [Stamm] and Eli [Roth] manipulate people. It’s such a smart film. The way Zoltan [Honti, the cinematographer] shot it – it’s a device that’s been used, but the way he used it and the way he figured out how to shoot angles and to see things – it honestly feels like a new type of horror film. I'm honored to be part of a new breed of horror film.”

The sincerity of the movie will really grab you – particularly Bell’s innocent and believable Nell Sweetzer. It’s a creepy movie with a weird twist and some unexpected story arcs.

“I think it is so fascinating that midway through the film you have a preacher who tells my father to get a therapist, and my father is telling the preacher that they need an exorcism. The same things Louis [Nell’s father] says in the film feel true and feel real to people who have experienced exorcisms in real life.”

You can watch Bell next in the upcoming comedy Stay Cool. Until then, catch her performance. It’s a good one.