Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian) is struggling to keep his late-night talk show, Night Owls, on the air.  Ratings keep slipping each time he tries to reinvent the show to connect with audiences.  In a last-ditch effort to capture an audience, he mounts a special Halloween episode packed with guests who are all tied to the occult.  He opens with Christou (Fayssal Bazzi) the mystic, transitioning to Carmichael Haig (Ian Bliss) a retired hypnotist-turned-skeptic, and for the show’s finale, he welcomes on June Ross-Mitchell (Laura Gordon), a ghost hunter, and Lilly (Ingrid Torelli), the subject of her latest book and who, June claims, is possessed by the devil. 

Writer/Director pair Cameron and Colin Cairnes blend the anything-goes energy of late-night television and found footage horror in Late Night with the Devil, a 99-minute manic escapade that debuted at the 2023 edition of South by Southwest and bowed to general audiences in theatres during spring of the following year ahead of its streaming release on Shudder.  It opens with a narration from Michael Ironside detailing Jack’s struggling rise in popularity in the late-night scene, his affiliation with an elite men’s group that meets at “The Grove,” and his quick spiral downward after the passing of his wife, Madeline (Georgina Haig).  Once in the film proper, it plays more or less in real-time across the length of the film, but the Cairneses do betray the found footage angle during the commercial breaks, instead allowing us to go behind the scenes with Jack, his production crew, and his guests.  While purists of the form may reject this approach, it allows the film to set up more narrative stakes and gives it a little more form than your standard issue variety hour, though it would be amusing to get some ad placements like Cheddar Goblin à la Panos Cosmatos’ Mandy (2018). 

Centered on Jack, Dastmalchian excels in the role of the 70s personality being pulled in a million directions at once.  The nature of the role requires the actor to quickly shift gears, not only in his current action but in his demeanor with the guests and crew.  It is a real balancing act, and Dastmalchian is able to navigate through the chaos of the entire film, but especially in the first act when, ironically, things are at their slowest but audiences are at their most likely to tune out for any number of reasons be it that the late night television template is inherently unexciting on the big screen or that Late Night with the Devil is a bit of a slow burner after Christou’s less-than-impressive opening act.  We stay involved though because Dastmachain takes Jack the showman and makes him into an incredibly sympathetic and eventually tragic character.  We want to see Jack save the show, and for that reason, we keep our eyes on the screen. 

The stumbling of Christou’s opening act really helps buy the Cairneses some time before they need to rachet up the scares.  It also sets the film up tonally as that prior-mentioned tragedy, not in the grand sense, but we can see the writing on the wall for Jack just as much as he can as his mystic guest only, sorta-kinda makes some soft revelations about someone in the guest audience.  He finishes the act on a strong note, but once Carmichel takes the stage, we get this sense of dread that the show really is not hitting the marks intended.  Everything is helping to set the stage for June and Lilly, so while Carmichel’s antagonism does help inject some energy into the scene, the narrative on stage is still quite formless.  It is not until the ad breaks that we begin to move the narrative forward as Jack is working with his producers to keep a fatal secret from the rest of the cast; Christou is dead. 

There is barely time to get the details, and even less to mourn, as the next set of guests are due on in a moment.  June and Lilly are the real key to unlocking the horror elements of Late Night with the Devil and while creepy kids and exorcisms have been mined pretty thoroughly at this point, the assumed shoestring budget that was pooled together by an almost comical litany of production houses from the opening credits force the Cairneses to get creative as they employ some of these expected tropes.  Gordon and Torelli have great chemistry together and they put Jack in the middle of a tug-of-war between being reasonable and going for the ratings.   

Eventually, June caves, and agrees to perform a communication ritual to speak to the demon that is in Lilly, and we get all the expected checkpoints on a cinematic exorcism; growling voices, scandalous secrets, and floating furniture.  A part of us believes, but it is a little down and dirty so when Charmichel begins to investigate and try to poke holes in what was just seen, we are beginning to side with him that this may have been an elaborate smoke and mirrors trick.  We are invested and we really do not know what to believe.  Doubling down, Charmichel agrees to show how hypnotism works and brings on show Emmcee, Gus (Rhys Auteri), to prove that the contact we saw was little more than a work of hypnotism on a mass scale.  This is when Late Night with the Devil begins to get a little mean in all the best ways as Charmichel taunts Gus into thinking that he is full of worms and he begins to tear open his stomach to get all the worms out.  He awakes and the tape is played back and it is a humiliating display to watch without being under Charmichel’s spell.  It is a real testament to the Cairneses that they are able to make us care and empathize with this cast so immediately.  We feel like we have been loyal audiences of Night Owls for years so when we see what “actually” occurred, we feel deeply sympathetic towards the humiliated Gus. 

As we turn into the finale, things begin getting weird.  A total descent into madness is far from a new way to conclude a horror film, but what is nice about Late Night with the Devil is that its showstopper actually tracks with everything that came before it.  So often, filmmakers get so preoccupied with gore or shock that the ending feels like something separate; they are focused on individual scenes and moments that end up existing in a vacuum.  Here, things are moving fast and wild enough to turn your own head backward, but everything we see has been previously established or alluded to so that the ending actually makes total sense, even in its most wild and furious swings. 

Now, for all the creativity and care taken to replicate the 70s setting, Late Night with the Devil debuted among some unfortunate controversies.  The intertitles used during the ad breaks were made with generative AI.  Without knowing this fact going in, the cumulative screen time is at most a minute across the various ad breaks and seen at any given time for mere seconds. Their use and placement fit pretty seamlessly into the overall experience and are unnoticeable in the moment.  Knowing this, however, does put the film in an uncomfortable position especially so soon after the strikes in which the use of AI and protections for artists were major sticking points.  To be fair, the film was in production well before the strikes and well before the massive steps forward in generative AI that occurred in early 2023, but the backlash was pretty instant and intense after the filmmakers made a statement about its use.  Taking their words at face value it seems like a decision that was made in conjunction with the art department and that the generated images were further edited by human artists in their design team already wearing multiple hats as is often the case in micro-budgeted independent film, but it still sets a slippery slope and we can be sure that penny pinching and corner cutting execs at studios that most certainly have full enough coffers to pay artists are watching carefully how this all plays out so that they can see how best to exploit its use in their own titles. 

Late Night with the Devil is still a highly enjoyable and inventive film that plays best in cinemas because it really helps sell the live studio audience concept, though late at night with a bowl of cold, leftover popcorn and the remains of a now-warm beer could easily recreate that experience, too. It is a scrappy film that works in the tradition of stretching its budget and means to find creative ways to break new ground as many independent films have done before. The entire film’s slowly slipping descent into madness is well charted and carefully navigated by Dastmalchian as he imbues Jack with a surprising amount of tragedy while never losing the fun, lighthearted nature of late-night TV. The result is a surprisingly complex entry into the found footage cannon that is at once charming, scary, and even downright sad.