Late Night With The Devil will scare the hell out of you

Horror is one of the easiest genres to sell; give an audience a killer hook (in this case, what if some people accidentally summoned a demon on a 70s talk show) and they will show up in their droves.

Late Night With The Devil has become a surprise word-of-mouth hit thanks to the clever premise, and controversy surrounding the use of AI in the film has granted it mainstream attention.

The film itself is one of the most terrifying films of recent memory.

People who were lucky enough to see Ghostwatch when it aired for the one and only time on BBC One in 1992 may get a striking sense of deja vú from Late Night With The Devil.

Where this film succeeds is going even further than the infamous BBC drama ever did and wracking up the tension to unbearable, stomach-churning levels.

The film follows late night talk show host Jack Delroy who is 2nd banana to Johnny Carson and puts on a spooktacular Halloween version of his show in a bid to drive ratings.

Jack’s attempts to drive ratings come with a heavy cost however, and things gradually go very, very wrong.

The genius of Late Night With The Devil is using the pastiche and visual shorthand of gaudy 1970s television and presenting it in the faux-retro style.

Aussie directors Colin and Cameron Cairnes really did their homework of what 1970s telly looked like, with everything from the cheesy sidekick, the psychedelic wallpaper and graphics from a time before computers faithfully represented.

After a while, you get locked into the look and feel of the film and you can almost be convinced you’re watching a lost episode of a talk show from the 1970s.

That’s when the film pulls the rug out from under you and starts raising hell.

Like Ghostwatch, the presentation is such a crucial part of playing a trick on the viewer, so just when the viewer is comfortable it brings the hammer down.

David Dastmalchian has appeared in dozens of noteworthy TV shows and films over the years and is a recognisable “that guy” actor.

Dastmalchian does a fantastic job of playing the affable talk show host and you’d buy him as a real talk show host.

Seeing him gradually lose his mind over the course of the night while things are going horribly wrong around him is one of the highlights of the film; it is a terrific performance from an actor you’ve seen in a million other things but can never quite place.

The cast is largely unknown, made up of Aussie TV actors and character actors, but the likes of Ian Bliss as the surly non-believer, Laura Gordon as the well-meaning parapsychologist and a downright terrifying scary little girl performance from Ingrid Torelli bring the whole thing home.

Last year, The Exorcist attempted a big-budget comeback and fell flat on its face.

50 years on, the legacy of that film still looms large over horror.

Not even The Exorcist franchise itself can escape its own shadow but Late Night With The Devil makes the idea of demonic possession new again.

When our intrepid host Jack asks the audience if they want to see the experiment go ahead, you shout out “no!” in the classic horror way, like shouting at someone not to go up the stairs when a killer is chasing after them.

The gradual escalation and the film becoming an outright assault on the senses in the final 15 minutes is unforgettable and will probably leave you sleeping with the lights on.

As stated, the Cairnes’ have studied the classics and know how to effectively replicate post-Hays Code horror.

Split screen shots evoke De Palma’s work on Carrie, Richard Donner’s grounding of the potentially silly in the deadly serious in The Omen is duplicated here and most notably, we can’t quite shake the feeling the Cairnes’ used Ghostwatch as their template.

Horror films are built on lifting the best bits from other movies – just last week, we praised Immaculate for marrying the styles of Verhoeven and giallo together – but Late Night With The Devil is sometimes a bit too liberal with taking inspiration from other sources.

The AI discussion surrounding the film is the major sore point here; we are still going to recommend it, but it should be stated in the most unambiguous terms that using AI-generated images or audio is not the way forward.

Show intertitles and graphics are generated using AI-generated tools, so not only is it a slap in the face to hard-working production designers, it also looks cheap and looks distracting once you notice it.

People using the excuse of it being a cheaply made independent horror film should go back and look at the last 50 years of the genre; the genre is at it’s best when people come up with amazing, unforgettable moments with little money.

Taking the easy way out just cheapens the whole experience.

However, if you can look past that major issue, we can guarantee that no film will scare you more this year than Late Night With The Devil.

The film works fantastically well in a crowd setting, and may well play better on streaming when you can slow down and rewind the film to make sure your mind is playing a trick on you.

With this, the Ti West A24 brand of horror, Talk To Me and Immaculate lighting up screens, it’s a great time to be a horror fan.