The new horror film The Last Exorcism arrives in theaters at midnight tonight on screens all over the country, and even though it’s a relatively low-budget affair, the word of mouth on Twitter and other social media platforms has been largely positive. (You can read more of my thoughts on it here from when I saw it at Comic-Con.) All that is very exciting for German filmmaker Daniel Stamm, who was successful in his goal of avoiding a straight, conventional horror movie. “I pride myself in that it’s more sophisticated and more complicated than that,” he says. One other reason it works on a large scale: It stars actors you haven’t seen a million times before, such as Patrick Fabian, who plays preacher and skeptical exorcist Cotton Marcus, and newcomer Ashley Bell, as the possibly possessed farm girl Nell. “It has that purity and that authenticity and the immediacy, because you hopefully buy these characters as these people, and you don’t always see the actor who’s trying to overcome his or her own persona to get into the character,” says Stamm, who says he hopes his next film will be a supernatural thriller. He likes the genre, and he found possession to be a fascinating theme because it’s not an external scare like a hungry vampire or a snarling werewolf. “It’s something that’s inside of us, which I always find scary,” Stamm explains. “The exterior is still the same – it’s someone you know, someone you love, but something on the inside of them is eroding away. That’s such a strong metaphor to a lot of stuff that happens to people, like people losing their minds. You’re losing grip on someone, but the person is still there. That to me makes it much scarier because you can’t fight it with conventional methods. A serial killer in a slasher movie, you can kill them and that’s it. But when it’s inside of you, it’s a whole different process and it’s much more character-based because it works with who you are as a character and perverts that.” Check out a clip from The Last Exorcism below, and come back tomorrow for an extended interview with star Patrick Fabian.

Photo courtesy of Lionsgate