“Splice,” a very good horror movie, and “The Last Exorcism,” a decent one, end on about the same note. This note sounds logically after a long, slow creep toward the abyss in “Splice,” while it is banged out at the last minute in “The Last Exorcism,” but it’s recognizably the same. It is both mournful and zany, mixing religious awe and pulpy kick in a distinctively horror-movie kind of way. The note is one of doom, a cynical curse on the world — but one that implies ideals and yearns for them.

Both of these two movies, especially “Splice,” have some connection to the loose subgenre of horror movies that they call “body horror.” “Last Exorcism” has a couple scenes of fairly tame “The Exorcist”-style mutilation, while “Splice” has its opening credits written in veins on the innards of a multi-animal genetic hybrid. In the final plight of its main female character, “Splice” also echoes David Cronenberg’s great, wrenching “The Fly,” surely the “Oedipus Rex” of the gross-out canon. “Splice” and “Last Exorcism” don’t hold a candle to the emotional force of Cronenberg’s movie, but they share some of its fear and trembling over the mysteries of flesh. While “The Fly” is fatalistic, with decay as the final word, the newer movies imply a beyond, for better or worse. Their body horror is really soul horror.

“The Last Exorcism” could perhaps use more of the body part of the equation. As a study of a man in spiritual crisis, it is tangible and real; as a horror movie, it’s a bit abstract. It is refreshing that director Daniel Stamm avoids the vomit-spewing sensationalism of “The Exorcist,” and much care is taken to explore the characters and set the mood. It builds the scares up slowly, which is the best way to do it. Yet the scares themselves are generally conventional and unstylish. The premise — a self-identified unbeliever of an evangelical preacher documenting his last exorcism to show the world that it’s all a fraud — is delicious, and Patrick Fabian strikes an appealing balance between sneering cynicism and moral sincerity as the irreverent reverend. As the movie, with its restless, handheld cameras, worries and frets about its central dilemma — is the fragile young girl actually possessed, or merely suffering abuse from her overbearing father? — Fabian guides us through the confusion, cool-headed but vulnerable, and a little at sea in this rural, religiously charged milieu. This is an intriguing character, waiting for a terrifying enemy to challenge and change him, but all he gets for most of the movie is an assortment of generic Creepy Things happening around him — the killing of some livestock, disturbing drawings, weird voices, etc.

The big reveal that comes crashing down at the end of the movie corrects this vagueness, though it does so too late. It is genuinely impressive in its strangeness and in the way that strangeness infects what came before. It’s a little hard to take, though, and it feels only partly organic. The horror of the ending centers on violation of the sacredness of flesh and blood, yet there is something disappointingly immaterial about it. This may result from the movie’s unwillingness to startle and scare us before this last-minute shock, and from its general indifference toward the visceral. The bulk of the narrative is admirably uncertain, focused on psychological nuance and intellectual ambiguities; the conclusion of the narrative, on the other hand, is admirably certain, pointing at Evil with a boldly accusative moralism. This jamming-together of complexity and simplicity is awkward. But it’s interesting.

While “Last Exorcism” deals with the anxieties and fears of settled middle-age — the reverend’s decision to quit his bogus ministry is motivated mostly by concerns about the safety of his two children — “Splice,” by Canadian director Vincenzo Natali, is all about youth. It is colorful, energetic, and often goofy. Most youthfully of all, it is constantly and cosmically ironic. This is the kind of movie where the scientists go too far, and you know it, and deep down they know it too, and the thrill is in a queasy sense of transgression. Clive (Adrien Brody) and Elsa (Sarah Polley), a hip young scientist couple, are hot stuff in the scientific community, having just produced genetic hybrids of different animal species, and they want to go to the next level: human-animal hybrids. Their superior says no, but of course they do it anyway. They tell each other they will kill the hybrid moments after it is born, but of course they don’t. They solemnly swear not to get emotionally attached to this being, which becomes more and more humanoid as it grows, but of course they do. Et cetera. Normally, this would be annoying. These people are supposedly brilliant, yet they fail to realize they are in a conventional sci-fi plot. Brody is a wimp and Polley is a control freak. The one really alive and engaging character is the gracefully grotesque hybrid, Dren (Delphine Chanéac), and she’s not even quite human.

Weirdly, this is actually what makes the movie so compelling. Part of horror-movie reverence is the shock of realizing the insufficiency, in the face of death and its associated terrors, of the things that make us proud — our intelligence, our love life, our coolness, our youthfulness. “Splice” is humorous about these things, but it is also deadly serious. The world turns upside down for these characters. Their cleverness becomes a bottomless pit of ego, their morals turn them into hypocrites, their control over the creation of life takes away their control over their own lives, and the fulfillment of their desires costs them happiness. Not bad insight for a goofy little horror movie.