Playing Around with Movies: “Late Night With the Devil”

I’m currently training a training camp in the mountains of Chile with no cinema nearby, so I convinced my editor to let me do a streaming film. Not just any streaming movie, but the one I mentioned a few columns ago that I adore so much: Late Night With The Devil. On a second viewing, I can confirm that it is perhaps the best horror film of this century since Barbarian.

When I clicked play, a miracle happened: the teenagers sharing the couch and living room fell silent. Then they put their phones away and leaned a little closer. The children, who were wandering aimlessly around the house, stopped and found places to sit on the floor; They stayed awake rather than succumb to their sleepy eyes after a four-day mogul ski block. Something about the first five minutes, in which the rich voice-over drones on about a conspiratorial story that plunges us headfirst into the world of the film.

Shot in real time as found footage from a night full of terrible television tragedies, the majority consists of the fictional, hour-long late-night show “Night Owls”, in which host Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian) is a supporting actor on the hunt for the real thing at the time -Life of incumbent television host Johnny Carson. While found footage is a well-worn horror film, real time certainly isn’t. The footage you find tends to feel overly edited and jumps back and forth in time, losing the authenticity of the old footage you just came across. The combination with real time, where every minute of running time is a minute in the film, is an excellent solution. It’s a high-risk, high-reward venture that makes a film deliciously haunting or terribly pretentious.

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“Late Night With The Devil” manages this flawlessly by allowing Dastmalchian to take 100% of the film’s focus and screen time. From a canon perspective, it makes sense that the show’s host is on screen every moment during his own show, but also from an artistic perspective. Dastmalchian is one of the most underrated actors in the game right now, perhaps ever, and it’s refreshing to see him given the opportunity to be the driving force of a film. An opportunity to prove that he is more than just a character actor, but someone who deserves the best castings. Here he balances the goofy, light-hearted brevity of a mainstream late-night host, delivering his frothy lines with a deep bass in his voice that hints at a man inside carrying the heavy burden of failure and grief.

The script does a wonderful job of turning the very real, very flawed people into heroes and villains while you wait for the eponymous devil. By investing in their very practical fate, we then engage with their supernatural fate and are ultimately ready to be swept up in the extraordinary. Although the characters differ greatly in their goals, motivations, and vulnerabilities, they are united in their all-encompassing quest for immortality. Furthermore, their short-sighted view of the curse of immortality blinds them to the fact that a turn to evil is undeniable.

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Speaking of evil… the film is far from perfect. Two major deficiencies in overcontrol shake up the delicate immersion. Shots with camera movements that mimic 70s live television but still manage to build drama through a cinematic framework, with slow, decisive zooms, quick cuts and a shot template that is dutifully followed. This delicate framework is then torn down when the “behind-the-scenes” moments that accompany Delroy when the “live” camera goes off switch to black and white. The black and white is inexplicable and completely unnecessary to make it clear to the audience that we have left the A plot. Director-brother duo Cameron and Colin Cairnes trusted their audience to follow Bohemian Grove’s convoluted backstory; Surprisingly, they didn’t show the same politeness in these moments. There was a surplus in one area and a shortage in another. The underlying current of “Bohemian Grove” is not adequately explained, ultimately leading to a confusing ending awash in myths both contrived and founded.

Ultimately, the film holds back its biggest scares well until the end, but is still frightening enough to make sleep a little restless that night. Combining practical effects with exquisitely executed tricks, Late Night With The Devil is well worth the effort to find on streaming services.

Critic Rating: 9.1/10

Can be found on: Apple TV, Amazon Prime, Shudder

Jack Simon is a mogul trainer and writer/director who enjoys eating food he can’t afford, traveling to places beyond his budget, and creating art about skiing, food, and travel while doing so is broke. Visit his website jacksimonmakes.com to see his travelogue series “Jack’s Jitney.” For inquiries of any kind, you can email him at [email protected].