10 Most Underrated Horror Movie Performances

When The Last Exorcism was first released in 2010, many immediately rubbished it as yet more also-ran found footage slop. And given how utterly inundated the subgenre was with low-effort fare at the time, it was easy to appreciate why.

Despite this, Daniel Stamm's film is decidedly smarter than it at first seems, and benefits enormously from Ashley Bell's incredible central performance as Nell Sweetzer, a naive farmer's daughter who appears to have become possessed by Satan.

Bell's empathetic performance brings an effortless humanity to a part that's actually much tougher to play than it first seems, as the actress needs to keep the audience in the dark about the precise nature of her predicament until the end, not tipping her hat too far in either direction. It's also a tremendous physical performance, with Bell using her own hypermobility to perform most of the on-screen contortionism herself.

Though Ashley Bell did receive an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best Supporting Female, she's never really received the wider praise from the horror community for the role that she so thoroughly deserves.