Late Night with the Devil (2024)

3 1/2 Stars (out of 4)

Hereafter Hours

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

Making incredible use of the found footage subgenre, the near-great horror movie Late Night with the Devil feels so authentic it tickles, and David Dastmalchian's performance is a mesmerizing piece of showmanship mastery.

Jack Delroy (Dastmalchian, The Suicide Squad, The Last Voyage of the Demeter) is a late night talk show host. Although he has had a measure of success, all throughout the 1970s, he has never once been able to beat Johnny Carson's The Tonight Show in the ratings.

But, on Halloween, 1977, he has special plans for his show Night Owls. His guests will include a psychic, Christou (Fayssal Bazzi), a former magician-turned-debunker-of-the-supernatural, Carmichael Haig (Ian Bliss), and Dr. June Ross-Mitchell (Laura Gordon), who has written a book about Lilly (Ingrid Torelli), a young girl who seems to be possessed by a demon.

Christou's act goes sideways when he detects the presence of something powerful and is carted away in an ambulance. Dr. Ross-Mitchell reluctantly calls up Lilly's demon, and it looks legitimate. But Haig makes a demonstration on Jack's sidekick Gus (Rhys Auteri), showing how things can be faked. However, Jack is convinced that Lilly is for real.

Written and directed by Australian siblings Cameron and Colin Cairnes, Late Night with the Devil opens with a bio of the fictitious Jack Delroy, providing essential backstory and dropping hints about his involvement with a cult-like group in Hollywood. Then the show begins, presented as the complete October 31, 1977 broadcast, with behind-the-scenes footage taken during commercial breaks included. (The broadcast footage is shown in fuzzy color and a narrow aspect ratio, and the behind-the-scenes footage opens up to widescreen and switches to black-and-white.)

It all feels like an honest-to-goodness piece of history. Jack and Gus have a silly little byplay that effortlessly recalls Carson and Ed McMahon or Conan O'Brien and Andy Richter, as if they really had been together for years. In this setting, the horror stuff has an organic feel, as if it's happening right in front of us, rather than being engineered by clever filmmakers. The spooky stuff builds in ways that are genuinely shocking, moving slowly from realism to unhinged terror.

If there's one flaw, it's the ending. While it certainly works, is a little bit of a mess. It just runs out, rather than having that satisfying snap that a movie this clever might have had and deserved. Nonetheless, that's just a quibble, and Late Night with the Devil is sure to become a horror — and especially a Halloween — favorite with fans.