Horror Watch: Late Night With The Devil (2023)

Watched:  04/25/2024

Format:  AMC+/ Shudder on Amazon (free trial)

Viewing:  First

Director:  Cameron Cairnes/ Colin Cairnes

When I saw the trailer for Late Night With The Devil (2023) I was pretty jazzed, or as jazzed as I get about trailers for horror films.  Most horror trailers just look to me like "here are people who are in a place where they do not feel safe, and, indeed, they will now be murdered, but the good part is how and why".  And I could not be more bored seeing a group of people trapped and about to be murdered.  Unless it is death by angry animal.

But the trailer for Late Night With the Devil was something novel - a period piece about a latenight talk show and then stuff gets out of control because they are messing with forces they do not understand.  On TV.

So, two things struck me before the movie began.

The first was that two trusted sources responded with a solid "meh" to this movie in their letterboxd reviews.  The second thing to give me pause were the 10 separate slates for the companies involved with this movie before we saw a single credit.  I've literally never seen that before, and it made me think "whatever was happening with this movie must have been a mess".  

Briefly: underutilized actor David Dastmalchian plays Jack Delroy, a competitor to Johnny Carson.  It's the late 1970's, and after the tragic passing of his wife, Delroy is back, but his show is failing.  With sweeps week upon him, Delroy and his producer pull together a Halloween episode.  Rather than the usual wacky skits and other frivolity, they're going to bring on A) a famed medium, B) a professional skeptic/ debunker, and - most importantly - C) a parapsychologist and her client/ ward, a teenaged girl, who is the soul survivor of a satanic cult's mass suicide.  

But, hey, studios take note:  a lot of us were so happy to see David Dastmalchian in a lead role, we really didn't care what the movie was about, we just wanted to see him get a shot, and I stand by that.

I'll be honest - my two pals who were "meh" on the movie were right.  

Firstly, I'm not sure why this was set in the 1970's.  The first real late night TV wars didn't occur until Carson was departing in the 1990s.  Prior to that, everyone who came up against The Tonight Show flailed and failed, from Joan Rivers to Pat Sajack.  Real-life figures referenced with characters on the show, like The Amazing Randy (our skeptic), were still active for decades after the the 1970's.  Anton LaVey died in 1997.  The Bohemian Grove wasn't really in the public consciousness until the late 1990's when (sigh) Alex Jones snuck onto their property and took video.* 

Mostly, this movie fails as the supposed "lost mastertape"/ found-footage thing it wants to be.  

Aesthetically, it fails as the 1970's. Sure, everyone is dressed correctly for the era.  It *easily* could have succeeded, but it's like the filmmakers decided to make it a found footage film after it had already been shot or something, instead of planning the movie as found footage.  The movie does not follow the actual multi-cam operation of those shows, it doesn't leave cuts long enough to look like 70's television or film, the camera is in too close.  There's cutaways to what is supposed to be behind-the-scenes footage that makes no sense.  We *do* see someone toting a 16mm camera in exactly one shot, but that requires separate sound recording and elements, so it's just magical black & white footage.  There's none of the actual problems that plagued 70's era tube cameras (any of the FX at the end would have blown out the image in interesting and colorful ways).  

It's not hard to reference 1970's late night talk, or daytime talk, to see what it looked like then.  Tom Snyder, Dick Cavett.  Go look at Donahue.

They aren't alone.  It seems like folks keep wanting to make things that are ostensibly of a period, or reflective of that period, but can't be bothered to study up on what that means - or convince themselves modern audiences won't stand for it (if your movie is good, they will).  I'm not saying it's easy - it never is.  But starting off by saying "we aren't going to try" is a huge mark against what you're ostensibly doing.

Look, I try not to say "this is what I would have done", but...  Flat out - what this movie needed to succeed was maybe a text framing device, and then *just* footage from the broadcast.  That's how this is *scary* and not just a series of things happening on screen.  I have literally no idea why they didn't do this other than that the writers were not clever enough to get on-screen the things they needed to get on-screen.  Dastmalchian could have easily led that movie.  And they had him.  The girl (Ingrid Torelli) who plays the possessed kid is great, as is her psychologist (Laura Gordon).  So it feels, to me, like a lack of craft on the part of the filmmakers.   How much creepier is it if we find out Christou (Fayssal Bazzi) is dead through a shaken Jack Delroy having to find out mid-show, on-stage, and having to carry on, and all we hear is his side on his lapel mic?  Or an announcement to the audience before the final minutes of the show?

If your concern is "well, it's an hour show, which leads to a 44 minute movie if we consider commercials" - write around that.  It's a 2 hour Halloween special.  They stop going to commercial for the live broadcast.  You include footage as if tape is still rolling when they go to commercial.  Everything is solvable!  But the artificiality of the thing kills the vibe, and horror is 95% vibes.  But, man, those tube cameras were huge and difficult.  And I don't think this set even had them.

And if making the 70's work was too hard,  I can verify that we were still experiencing Satanic Panic well into the 1990's.  The syndicated talk show explosion really happened in the late 1980's and through the 1990's - and you were way, waaaaay more likely to see a talk show host pulling in an exorcism on Geraldo or Sally than you were on Carson.    

I also absolutely do not get the hypnotism bit by our skeptic, Carmicheal Haig (Ian Bliss).  The skeptic on the show is a great idea!  But the whole worm bit was... dumb?  Narratively unnecessary or misguided?  Keeping *everything else* grounded except for what's happening with Lilly is what works.  Showing that hypnotism is a magical thing that can entrance a whole room in 30 seconds doesn't help - and since it's immediately shown *not* to be what's happening with Lilly, makes no sense.

You can't frontload the marketing with the notion of "we're going to interview this girl and she's possessed by the devil" and then make us wait til way, waaaaay late in the movie for the girl to show up.  It's like having a single band on the ticket and then having to wait through two or three supporting acts before your band hits the stage.  There were ways to counterbalance this - bringing her out way earlier, for example.  After all, on Carson the guests would often stay on stage as the next guest came on, which they do here.  But why not have her fail to do anything on the first go-round?  Have things get progressively worse while Lilly is out there?

Anyway - I just don't think this is a very well made movie.  It's a killer idea, the cast is really good to fine.  And so it's a bummer to see it flop around on screen, not really delivering on the promise.

*no, really.  It was wild.  I remember watching that footage on Austin Community Cable before Jones was a thing.