Patron Pick – Late Night With the Devil

This special reward is available to Patreon patrons who pledge at the $10 or $20 monthly levels. Each month, those patrons will pick a film for me to review. If they choose, they also get to include some of their thoughts about the movie. This Pick comes from Matt Harris.

Late Night With the Devil (2024)
Written and directed by Colin Cairnes and Cameron Cairnes

Horror changes with the times. One of those changes is centered around technology. Before television or film, horror was spread to the masses through radio broadcasts. Before the radio, horror was printed; even before that, it was part of the oral tradition. As technology changed, it didn’t just alter the medium through which people experienced horror but expanded what kind of horror could exist. Ghosts and demons were now able to use modern technology as a means to invade people’s lives. Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds worked as a horror artifact – a horror story told as if it was a piece of media. The found footage genre is a continuation of this, an ask of the audience to suspend their disbelief and fully invest in the reality of the horror. But it doesn’t often work, at least for me.

Framed as a documentary about an unexplained televised event, the film begins with a prologue that sets up the story of Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian) and his late-night talk show Night Owls. After the tragic death of his beloved wife Madeleine, Jack descends into a strange headscape that culminates on an occult-themed Halloween broadcast. The first few guests are your standards: Christou is a medium who does cold readings but seems to tap into something real. Carmichael Haig plays a version of James Randi, a talented sleight-of-hand magician who is also deeply skeptical of those proclaiming the supernatural is real. Things take a decidedly darker shift when parapsychologist June Ross-Mitchell brings on Lily, the sole survivor of a mass suicide by a Satanic church. Jack starts ignoring warnings June gives him, and Haig keeps goading the teenage girl so he can prove this is all a ruse. But the evil is very real.

Dastmalchian is the only thing keeping this movie afloat. There’s nothing about the premise I haven’t seen done better in other media pieces, especially literature, where horror works best. The performances of everyone around Dastmalchian do nothing to help make this an immersive experience, as everyone is playing things way over the top. If the purpose is to create a found footage/artifact type of movie, it fails because I could never feel like I was watching a real lost broadcast. The filmmakers know this because shortly into the picture, I noticed the cinematic lighting rather than the harsher studio lighting you would expect from a 1970s live studio audience production.

While the rest of the cast plays things way too big to the point of silliness, Dastmalchian centers Jack Delory in a very human place. The script never overdoes his grief, remembering he’s a media personality, and so he’s experienced enough to hold that back. Eventually, he does crack when things go crazy in the studio, and then it makes sense that he would become more vulnerable. Without Dastmalchian centering this lead character, Late Night would have been a completely forgettable horror flick, which is a shame because the premise is intriguing. 

The film’s opening was a sign that things would be rough as it was a parade of a dozen or more production companies involved in making and distributing the film. I’ve always found that the more hands you have in the pot, the worse the final dish turns out. While the movie isn’t a total wash, having a more focused production rather than one so spread out would have provided a clearer vision. Add to this the use of AI-generated art for the commercial bump graphics, something the filmmakers only disclosed once keen-eyed critics pointed out in reviews, and you have a film that never quite reaches the heights it wants to. Once you know these images are AI-generated, it is tough not to see the glaring flaws. 

My biggest complaint about media that attempts to recreate a past era is that these shortcuts hinder immersion. We get a caricature of the 1970s, which does not accurately represent how life or even media looked at the time. The filmmakers clearly understand that just featuring the show is not enough, so we have these strange black-and-white handheld segments during commercial breaks, often between Jack and his announcer/co-host. This is an admission of the failure of the premise. If you want to make your horror movie an artifact, you have to commit to that and work through the creative challenges that come with it. Cutting from the documentary with the lost episode premise to seemingly disconnected narrative segments did not work. 

Late Night works for a fun one-off watch, but it will not be a horror film that becomes part of any rotation for me. That’s a shame because David Dastmalchian is a very talented character actor who hasn’t entirely been given a role that fully uses his strengths. The final act is strong and provides an exciting twist or two. Getting there is a less fun journey, though, and the hamfisted acting by the supporting cast really took me out of the experience. Yet again, this is another found footage/artifact horror movie that can’t deliver as strong as a solid horror short story.