Late Night with the Devil (2024)

 

I almost pulled the trigger on this with one of my streaming services, but on the podcast, one of my guests did say it was playing in theaters, which I had not realized. I immediately went in search and found a screening in one of our favorite venues, and boy am I glad I did. This is an early contender for top film of the year, and seeing it with a sold out audience was fantastic because when a horror film hits, you can feel it in the people around you, and I definitely felt it.

David Dastmalchian plays Jack Delroy, a late night talk show host in the 1970s, who has had great success but can't quite climb the mountain of Johnny Carson's Tonight Show. The Halloween episode of his show in 1977, will feature some macabre guests and stunts, and as you can probably guess, it does not go quite the way it was anticipated. The film is presented as if it were the video record of that nights show. With the exception of an seven or eight minute prologue feature, which is made to look like a short documentary, the film plays out over the course of what would be a ninety minute late night show. Setting it in the seventies gives the staging a verisimilitude that a contemporary setting would lack. Nowadays, a huckster like the character Christou, would be doing YouTube or TikTok readings for his psychic demonstrations. There is a character, Carmichael Haig, that is based on James Randi, a magician and psychic skeptic, who made numerous appearances on talk shows of the era, debunking paranormal phenomena. His skills are used to help extend the mystery we are witnessing, but he becomes the subject of debunking as well.   

A horror film can only be said to be successful if it frightens the audience. The fact that Delroy's audience is subjected to some unpleasant surprises, offers us a couple of jump scares, but more importantly, an aura of dread hangs over the interview and demonstration of  parapsychologist author June Ross-Mitchell, June's subject Lilly D'Abo. Lilly's back story is highlighted in the film with another documentary short that is presented as a film clip on the show. The two film segments do a lot of exposition in a way that makes perfect sense for the media that we are watching. The combination of behind the scenes video with what was purportedly broadcast, allows the story to play out in a more narrative form than it would otherwise be able to achieve. 

Like most 70s films, this is a slow burn with the climax pulling out all the stops to make the show frightening. Although the effects and actions have been seen before in a dozen other horror films, they work really well here. The use of practical effects helps the movie as well, and when the events are shown as they might have appeared in the television camera, they seem even more creepy. There is a little bit of a twist in the wrap up, that feels a bit conventional but it ties everything together pretty well, and the seeds for it were planted early on. 

Dastmalchian is convincing as  a desperate TV Host but especially as a skeptic turned believer who is frightened by what he sees. Australian teen actress Ingrid Torelli is chilling as the subject of possession that drives most of the film's second half. All the other actors have been well cast and they get to play with the effects and the story to make their characters interesting. There is a hypnosis sequence that is pretty startling. Directors Colin Cairnes and Cameron Cairnes, have made the found footage style film work by dropping it into the late night TV venue of the 1970s. Lots of clever touches here and there. The AI controversy that has popped up is a nothing burger that you can safely ignore without surrendering to Skynet. Find this film in a theater and treat yourself to some genuine scares and a really well made film. 

One of the LAMBs has an interview with star David Dastmalchian, you might want to check out.