The Horror of Entertainment

Late Night with the Devil is…fine.

Figured I’d do another Halloween review for the season. As always, if you enjoy my writing, consider becoming a subscriber: $50/year, $5/month.

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Colin and Cameron Cairnes Late Night With the Devil is an entertainingly meta Faust riff, which manages to simultaneously channel 70s possession films, found footage, and David Lynch. It doesn’t necessarily add up to all that much, but it does have an undeniable soulless watchability…which is no doubt the point.

The movie starts with faux contextual documentary background which introduces a faux rebroadcast of an infamous 1977 Halloween episode of Night Owls with Jack Delroy. Jack (David Dastmalchian) is a comedian/mc whose show is a perennial second best to Johnny Carson, and he’s worried about cancellation. In an effort to juice ratings during sweeps week, he brings on Dr. Laura Gordon (June Ross-Mitchell), who claims to be able to contact a demon residing in the body and mind of a young girl named Lilly (amazing child actor Ingrid Torelli).

Jack is shaken when the first guest on the show, the psychic Christou (Fayssal Bazzi) appears to contact his famous actor wife Madeleine (Georgina Haig) who died of lung cancer. But it’s when Laura contacts Lilly’s friend Mr. Wriggles that things really spiral (predictably but enjoyably) out of control.

The Cairnes are wonderful visual and stylistic mimics; they get the fusty jocularity of 70s late night just about perfect. Dastmalchian also does a great job of not-acting acting, projecting borscht belt schtick for the tv cameras, and increasing nervousness for the movie camera as reality begins to go off the rails.

Like many a moralistic Hollywood parable about the emptiness of Hollywood success, the theme here is the hollowness of fame and how it corrupts. Jack is involved with some sort of pseudo-Satanic, pseudo-Masonic men’s club, and he’s haunted by his dead wife, who he fears he may have mystically sacrificed for a rating’s boost.

The cheerful hypocrisy is no doubt intentional; Jack is scrambling after success by showing horror and blood and guts to titillate his audience, just as the Cairnes brothers are showing horror and blood and guts to titillate their audience, which is to say, you. There’s even a skeptic guest on the show, Carmichael Haig (Ian Bliss) who insists that all the ectoplasmic vomiting and levitating and devil voices are just special effects—and, of course, they are just special effects. The trick is to tell you over and over that it’s just a trick so you can root for it not being a trick, even as you know it is.

The self-referential wit and the verisimilitude make this worth watching for horror fans (or I guess late night fans) who want a fun hour and a half distraction. But be warned that the Cairnes’ formal skills aren’t matched by emotional depth.

The best found footage films (The Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity), manage to use their intimate home movie pretense to make you feel like you know their protagonists intimately; the up-the-nose low-fi presentation gets you up close and makes you invested as the nightmare unfolds.

Late Night With the Devil, though, takes place mostly on the sound stage; you don’t really get to know Jack outside of his public persona. The Cairnes’ try to get around that with background voiceover and dream sequences. But it feels forced, and doesn’t end up being all that effective. Ultimately, Jack isn’t sympathetic enough to make you worried for him and isn’t loathsome enough for you to root for his demise. As the lights dim, you mostly end up wondering why the devil bothered with him to begin with.

Of course, the devil bothered with him to keep you watching. Like tuning into late night, Late Night with the Devil gives you pretty much exactly what you expect. To some extent, that’s comforting; to some extent it’s disappointing. But that’s show business.