I think I first started hearing about Late Night With the Devil a few months ago. It looked like a novel take on the found footage horror subgenre—which I generally enjoy—and I was intrigued. It’s been getting pretty good chatter on the festival circuit, so I had been waiting for it to show up on Shudder.
(Shudder, by the way, has turned out to be among my favorite streaming services. I didn’t even mean to sign up for it, but only discovered that I had access to it via the AMC+ account I had signed up to watch their Interview With the Vampire series last year.)
ANYWAY…
The movie appeared in my “new for you” listings a last week and I was pretty excited to watch it.
Jack Delroy is a late-night TV talk show host in the late 1970s. Once the Next Big Thing, Jack has been unable to reach the big time and his show is slipping in the rankings. Hoping to stop the slide, he has booked a girl rescued from a satanic cult as the guest on his Halloween night show. The girl may or may not be possessed by a demon and is accompanied by her therapist who is also her guardian and may or may not be sleeping with Jack.
The movie consists of that night’s episode of “Night Owls with Jack Delroy” plus backstage footage.
(Spoilers from here onward—consider yourself warned.)
This movie was… okay. I went in with pretty high hopes—which, admittedly, were based on little more than the premise and the trailer—and it did not live up to them. It wasn’t a terrible movie and I appreciated what they were trying to do but it just didn’t hold together for me.
The first half of the film is quite good and builds tension pretty well. It starts to come apart about midway through, though. It feels like the filmmakers have thrown too many different ingredients into the pot and end up spoiling the soup.
Is Jack having a mental breakdown? Is it the demon that possesses the girl? Is it mass hypnosis? Is it the Bohemian Grove-type cult that Jack is maybe involved with that is behind the whole thing? I certainly don’t want the film to give me neat answers to all of my questions and I can imagine a version where all of this ambiguity works as a part of the overall story. But in this version, none of it holds together.
I think they struggle a bit with the found-footage format as well. As I mentioned at the top, I have a soft spot for found-footage horror and generally do not get too hung up on questions like “Why would they still be filming all this?” However, I felt like the conceit started to come apart the longer this movie went on. By the end, what we are seeing as part of the footage makes sense in really only the hand-wavyist of ways.
The period setting seems like it should be neat but ended up being a bit of a distraction for me. There was obviously a lot of attention paid to the tropes and fashions of the late 1970s but I am not sure it made for a better film. Neat, to be sure, but I wish they had instead spent that energy on the story.
That all may make Late Night With the Devil sound terrible but it really wasn’t. The performances are quite good, there are some cool ideas in it, and it manages to build and maintain a good sense of dread for probably the first ¾ of the runtime. I didn’t feel like I wasted my time watching it; I just wish it had focused a bit more on the core of the story.