Doc Rotten's Movie Monster of 2010: The Last Exorcism

For each weekday throughout December, Doc Rotten will be looking back at 2010 examining 20 Movie Monsters of the year. Check back each day and rate how successful the monster worked on the big screen, DVD or BluRay. On December 31, we'll look at all 20 Monsters in order of their popularity. Let's take a look at today's Movie Monster of 2010.

While the Last Exorcism belongs to Patrick Fabian as Reverend Cotton Marcus, it would not have been as effective without the extraordinary performance from Ashley Bell as Nell, the child suspected of being possessed by a demon. Brilliantly portraying Nell as both an innocent child with a heavy religious background and the same child possessed by the devil, contorting her body in horrendous ways, Bell is able to elicit sympathy and fear at the same time. Its a horrifying character arc that ends as disastrously as the audience fears it might, despite the lead character believing it is all a scam. Much like Jennifer Carpenter in the similarly themed The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Ashley Bell brings the fear, innocence and terror to the character to enable the film on which she is the subject to become one of the most frightening films of the year. The film grossed over $64 million on a budget of $1.8 million.