Late Night With The Devil is a truly frightening film.

Jack Deloy (David Dastmalchian) is the host of Night Owls, a late-night talk show.  Deloy has spent his entire television career competing against The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson.  Deloy has a loyal audience.  He has several Emmy awards.  But he has never been able to beat The Tonight Show in the ratings.  Even when he interviewed his dying wife (Georgina Haig) and got the biggest ratings of his career, he still finished second to Johnny Carson.  After his wife died, Deloy went into seclusion before eventually returning to his show.

It’s Halloween night in 1977 and Deloy is hosting a live broadcast of Night Owls.  He and his producer (John Quong Tart) are convinced that they’re finally going to achieve their goal of winning the ratings race.  On the show, they have the medium Christou (Faysal Bazzi).  They have Carmichael Haig (Ian Bliss), a pompous former magician who now makes his living by exposing charlatans.  They have parapsychologist June Ross-Mitchell (Laura Gordon) and Lilly (Ingrid Torelli), a young woman who claims to be possessed by a demon that she calls Mr. Wiggles.  Deloy’s sidekick Gus McConnell (Rhys Auteri) fears that it’s not a good idea to mess with the occult on Halloween night but Deloy is determined to get those ratings.  In fact, Deloy is willing to do just about anything for the ratings.

Opening with narration from Michael Ironside and introduced as being a documentary about what happened that mysterious night, Late Night With The Devil is a found footage horror film but, unlike a lot of films of the genre, it doesn’t get bogged down with people saying stuff like, “Are we recording?” or “Are you getting this?”  Instead, the film’s directors actually make good use of the format, suggesting that there might still be a spark of inspiration to be found in the found footage genre.  The contrast between the grainy color of the show and the stark black-and-white footage of what went on whenever the show went to commercial is one of the things that makes Late Night With The Devil so memorable.  It keeps the audience from getting too comfortable with what they’re watching and it’s a reminder that what one sees in a controlled environment (like a talk show) is often meant to hide the chaos lurking under the surface.  Towards the end of the episode, when the color footage goes from being grainy to suddenly being very bright and vivid, it’s truly unsettling.  (The film does such a good job of keeping the audience off-balance that the directors can even get away with abandoning the found footage format at a key moment.)  Late Night With The Devil does a wonderful job recreating the look and feel of an old late night talk show.  One look at the Night Owls set and you can literally smell the combination of stale cigarettes and outright desperation.  Looking at the ugly set and the tacky clothes, it’s easy to buy that we actually are watching some long-buried archival footage from 1977.  One reason why the film is frightening is because it feels authentic.

(And yes, it feels authentic despite the inclusion of some AI-images.  AI was used to create the intertitles that appear whenever Night Owls goes to commercial.  They appear for less than a minute and, if not for the online controversy, I never would have noticed them.)

David Dastmalchian plays Jack Deloy as being a showman who is an expert at manipulating the audience and who will do anything to get people to watch.  Still, even the most jaded horror fan will be shocked to see how far Jack Deloy is willing to go to win the ratings race.  (For all the supernatural elements of the film, nothing is more disturbing than its portrayal of human avarice.)  A major subplot deals with Jack’s membership in the Grove, a society of the wealthy and powerful that is based on the very real Bohemian Grove.  Bohemian Grove is, of course, a favorite of conspiracy theorists who assume that the rich and famous are up to all sorts of nefarious deeds whenever they gather for their annual meeting.  Those conspiracy theorists will find much to appreciate about Late Night With The Devil and Dastmalchian’s performance.  (Of course, one can also read Jon Ronson’s Them, which features an entire chapter about Ronson traveling to Bohemian Grove and discovering that what was advertised as being a day of dorky fun for the rich and powerful actually was just that.)

Obviously, many films did influence Late Night With The Devil.  The end credits begin with a land acknowledgment but it could have just as easily contained a film acknowledgment.  “The filmmakers acknowledge the influence of The Exorcist, Cannibal Holocaust, The Last Exorcism, the careers of James Randi, Uri Geller, and Sylvia Browne, Michelle Remembers, The Conjuring franchise, The Larry Sanders Show, the films of David Cronenberg, and Ghostwatch.”  It’s a testament to the skill of the directors and the cast that, despite all the obvious influence, Late Night With The Devil stands as an original and genuinely unsettling work of art.