A slow-burn found-footage horror flick that offers show business satire as well as a refreshing new spin on demonic possession.
David Dastmalchian is “that guy”, a character actor with arrestingly strange looks and sinister presence, who’s recently popped up in big releases like Dune and Oppenheimer. Here he finally has a lead role, as a talk show host Jack Delroy. In 1977, Jack’s TV career is in freefall as Night Owls, his evening show, is struggling to keep the audience and is in danger of being cancelled. In desperation, Jack and his producer have pulled out all the stops for their occult-flavoured Halloween special. The guests includes a psychic, a former magician turned bullish sceptic, a parapsychologist peddling her new book, and the subject of the book, a young teenage girl with a very dark passenger inside her.
Horror is not usually the genre to lure me into a cinema, or a genre I naturally gravitate to, but even so I’m pretty aware that a young girl possessed by evil is a well-worn trope. This movie does lean into the usual possession clichés like the scary make-up and distorted demonic voice, but it does so in a novel and inventive setting. The horror takes place in a brightly lit studio during a live broadcast, in a movie that functions as a cynical warning about the price of fame.
The film is presented as a long-lost master tape of the doomed Halloween special, intercut with black-and-white backstage footage. It’s a gloriously convincing re-creation of a 70s TV show, complete with retro aesthetics, cheesy opening monologue, jokes and commercial breaks. It takes its time before the parapsychologist and her young charge finally take a seat next to Jack, with ominous, unexplained occurrences suggesting that communing with a demon on live TV might not be the best idea.
Though I wouldn’t say that I found the film particularly scary, it has a great sense of mounting suspense and creepy atmosphere as it builds towards the eventual blood-splattered mayhem. It is also genuinely funny in places. My experience was no doubt enhanced by watching the movie with an audience, which made it easier to imagine yourself as a member of Jack’s live audience.
Dastmalchian is fantastic as Jack, all charm and energy while the cameras are rolling, slippery and desperate during the breaks. Full praise must likewise go to Ingrid Torelli as the possessed girl, who is actually more disturbing when she’s not possessed. The movie also throws in a couple of intriguing curveballs through the character of the sceptic, who argues that perhaps we shouldn’t trust anything we see onscreen.
It’s a pity then that Late Night with the Devil does drop the ball at the very very end. Without spoiling anything, in its last few remaining minutes the movie abandons the TV footage concept to take a surreal widescreen trip inside Jack’s own mind and shed light on his Faustian deal. It effectively shatters the spell and yanks the viewer right out of the experience, suddenly making you acutely aware of the silliness of the whole thing. Judging by the couple of walk-outs in my cinema, I wasn’t the only one who thought that this switch didn’t work. Ultimately, it didn’t ruin the movie for me, but I just wish that the filmmakers stuck to the format throughout and found another way to convey the same ideas.
P.S. The trailers before the film made me feel like I was living in a parallel universe where no movies other than the horror movies were made. They also reminded me why I generally don’t care for the genre; the same old dark and spooky houses, fake-looking special effects, jump scares, bright young things getting murdered one by one, yawn.
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