Movie Review : Late Night With The Devil (2023)
If you haven't lived through the pre-internet era, you can't possibly understand its magic. Time was linear back then. If you saw something odd on television, the only possible barrier between that specific occurrence and total oblivion was your memory. Hours of disposable content aired on television and then disappeared forever. There were so many surreal blips in popular culture. If you want to understand what these blips felt like (or just feel them again), indie horror movie Late Night With The Devil's got you covered.
Late Night With The Devil tells the story of an ambitious late night television show host named Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian). After his wife (Georgina Haig) passes away from a swift and unexpected cancer, his show is taken off the air momentarily only to come back on Halloween night with a special guest: a parapsychologist (Laura Gordon) and a thirteen years old survivor of a Satanic cult (Ingrid Torelli) who claims to be possessed by a demon. No one's ever seen this episode of the show until now.
Everyone's got a demon inside them
This is a new breed of found footage movie. No more shaky cam bullshit, it's all grainy archive footage with creative liberties taken here and there. There are two demons in Late Night With The Devil: the literal demon possessing young Lilly and the metaphorical demon of greed eating away at Jack and one wants to party with the other. I loved how co-creators Cameron and Colin Cairnes used the Satanic panic as a backdrop to explore deeper issues regarding American mythology and the morality of success.
Jack is pursuing an abstraction for himself (being no. 1) requiring him to make sacrifices in his immediate life. The whole Satanic premise of having to make sacrifices in order to get what you want works both on real and metaphorical level here. I felt the balance was a little off, though. Good possession stories shrewdly surf the line between the plausible and the supernatural, but Late Night With The Devil is throwing everything at the wall. The demon inside Jack totally woke up an abomination from another world.
The movie surf the line as well as anything for the first hour or so, but ends up taking a clean-cut decision when I don't believe it needed one. Great horror always leaves you filling the gaps for yourself because what you're afraid of will always work better than whatever they have to offer and I feel like Late Night With The Devil didn't have much in the pants in that regards. There's a shitload of CGI in this movie and almost none of it looks good. I get that there were finance limitations, but even more reason to hold back.
The Otherworldliness of Late Night Television
The found archive footage should've been played straighter too. It's a great idea and 50% of it is well-executed, but it's not confident enough in its own narrative to play it with a poker face. I thought the documentary-style opening was completely unnecessary and that the overstylized black-and-white commercial breaks would've came out creepier had they been filmed like the cameras on set just kept rolling. The constant change in tone and aesthetic kept pulling me out of its atmosphere.
Listen, I'm a big fan of late night television. There's nothing natural in having to sit in a studio in the middle of the night and talk about your pet spider for an audience of graveyard shift workers and insomniacs that clearly don't give a fuck and the Cairnes brothers (at least, I believe they are brothers?) nailed this otherworldly atmosphere. A lot of people hated the skeptic character (Ian Bliss), but I thought he was of his time. They should've trusted their gut more. Audiences for movies like this are small, but super smart.
*
Late Night With The Devil is a bold movie. It's also messy and overeager, but it has a fun energy that warrants at least one viewing. I’m not a blood and splatter guy at all when it comes to movies. I feel like Cameron and Colin Cairnes were just so afraid we wouldn't "get it" that they spelled it out loud and aimed for the widest possible audience. There are strong images throughout, but it's definitely a case of quantity over quality. Watch Late Night With The Devil at least once because it's daring, but I was slightly let down.
