Late Night With the Devil is a supernatural horror movie that discovers the recording of Jack Delroy’s last late-night show, Night Owls. During this Halloween broadcast, Jack invites a possessed girl named Lily and her guardian/parapsychologist June amongst others and all hell breaks loose on camera. This movie is so great yet the decision to use AI for its cutaway scenes left an icky taste in my mouth.
Starting with what I loved, the story is so good. We follow Jack as he tries to save his show’s rating by pulling out all the stops on Halloween. David Dastmalchian is great. He shows a compassionate side as when things become out of the ordinary, he cares for his guests and their mental and physical well-being. However, he is also still a desperate TV show host who strong-arms his crew and guests into doing what he wants to boost his ratings. As the movie goes on, the deeper we get into what he has been hiding beneath the surface and the reveals are great.
The aesthetic of the movie is beautiful. I was not alive for the 70s but from other movies, it looked the part. The editing of the film matches that perfectly, mixing in a grainy main camera with the “behind-the-scenes” shots done in black and white. I love that the movie is framed as a documentary, I think it adds a mysterious element as it leaves us the viewer to decide what happened.
The surrounding cast is also excellent. Ingrid Torrelli plays the possessed Lily and she is terrifying. Even when she isn’t possessed, the way she stares deep into the camera is haunting. It’s like she was looking at me deep into my soul and the unbroken eye contact made me wriggle in my seat. Speaking of wriggle, she calls her demon Mr. Wriggles and the flip in both her appearance and her demeanor is remarkable. She is a highlight of the movie.
Laura Gordon is also really good as Lilly’s guardian. She cares for her and wants her to be safe, yet she still succumbs to goading from Jack and Carmichael Haeg, a former magician turned skeptic played wickedly well by Ian Bliss. Carmichael is an annoying prick, to put it politely, but he is a good heel, as he is the nonbeliever amongst us who tries to find logic in the madness.
Late Night With The Devil is truly scary as well. The movie is phenomenal at creating and maintaining tension, relying less on jumpscares and focusing on an atmosphere that makes your skin crawl. The movie also draws from a lot of analog horror, as there are many “blink and you miss it” flashes that would make you want to pause, rewind, and slowly watch it back. The practical effects are also very well done. I went to the bathroom once and I came back to see some of the grossest body horror effects I’ve seen. The ending is a mind trip that is impossible to look away from and makes me want to go back and rewatch it again soon. That’s why it is so frustrating for the movie to rely on AI.
Each commercial break of the show is cut by AI-generated graphics. I truly don’t understand how after a year where unions walked and picketed to keep AI out of the movie-making process and halted the industry for months, we turned the calendar and went right back to undervaluing art. The directors Cameron and Colin Cairnes have come out and said they only used three images and they were then edited by people afterwards. But if that was the case, why could they not have just let the people make the interstitials from the start? I don’t know if it was a budget issue but given how many studios were attached to this, I have a hard time believing it was anything but them cutting corners to save time and money. Ultimately, the interstitials were brief and had no impact on the story or performances themselves, but I hate that it happened and I truly hope the backlash is a signal for the suits to let the artists make art.
