“Late Night”: nightmare before a live audience LATE NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL Rated: Running time: Where to watch:
“Late Night With the Devil” is trimly effective horror of a rare sort: I found myself wishing, halfway through my screening, that I was watching it on my TV. Not because it doesn’t work in a theater — horror almost always benefits from being seen in a crowd — but because its writerdirector duo, brothers Colin and Cameron Cairnes, make shrewd use of some of the uniquely creepy things about television, especially its intimacy. The TV set is in your house, and you’re sitting 6 feet away from it, and especially in the wee hours, whatever’s staring back at you can feel eerie, or impertinent. Over time, the late night TV host becomes your best friend or a figure that haunts your fitful dreams.
That’s why people watch late night TV, of course: to laugh, to be entertained and to feel some kind of companionship when the rest of the world goes to bed. “Late Night With the Devil” twists that camaraderie around on itself, layering in familiar 1970s horror tropes about demonic possession, satanism and the occult. The result is a nasty and delicious, unapologetic pastiche with a flair for menace. I had a blast.
The host of the movie’s invented late night talk and variety show is Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian), a younger, snappier Johnny Carson who is desperate to climb to the top of the ratings. Framed as found footage wrapped in a pseudo-documentary, the film briefly fills us in on Delroy’s career trajectory hosting “Night Owls With Jack Delroy,” a show that can’t quite overtake its competitors. As narration informs us that Delroy
is risking going down in history as an also-ran — always Emmy nominated, never the winner — we learn that we’re about to watch the night that “shocked a nation.”
On Halloween night 1977, the first in the crucial sweeps week for “Night Owls,” Delroy and his producers come up with a desperate, last ditch idea to spike ratings: They design a show full of spectacle that will tap into the cultural craze for all things occult. The guest list that night includes a medium and a skeptic, plus a parapsychologist and the girl she’s been treating for demonic possession. The master tapes have been found, the narrator informs us, and that’s what we’re about to see. Buckle up.
All of these characters seem familiar. Carmichael the Conjurer (Ian Bliss), the film’s abrasive skeptic, seems based on James Randi, who appeared on
“The Tonight Show” to debunk others’ claims to paranormal abilities, most notably illusionist Uri Geller in 1973. Randi also confronted mediums on live TV (such as this film’s Christou, played by a hammy Fayssal Bazzi) and was an outspoken critic of parapsychology.
“Late Night With the Devil” also evokes “Michelle Remembers,” the now-discredited 1980 bestseller by psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder about a patient, Michelle Smith, who claimed to have been subjected to ritual satanic abuse. Here the doctor is a parapsychologist played by Laura Gordon, whose performance combines vulnerability and conviction in a fruitful counterbalance to some of the camp. She’s accompanied by her charge, Lilly (Ingrid Torelli), whose oscillation from dead-eyed to vibrant is devilishly disquieting. (If there’s one rule in horror, it’s that there’s nothing creepier than a little girl.)
The film moves a little slowly, unfolding at the speed of the “Night Owls” episode. That’s good. We’re forced to watch it all in real time, just as the audience at home would have, which more or less transforms us into those people in 1977, sitting on the couch in the middle of the night, by turns titillated, captivated and horrified by what’s unfolding on live television.
Eventually they — we — are sucked into the whole illusion, an effect I can only imagine is enhanced if you’re watching it all unfold on your actual TV set. You aren’t watching a movie anymore; for a few minutes, you’re part of it.
All of this would have been completely seamless but for one disappointing formal choice. We’re told the master tape we’re about to watch will be accompanied
R93 minutes in theaters