David Dastmalchian’s wonky presence slots right in to Late Night with the Devil, a horror movie with a difference, though if I say “found footage” and The Exorcist you might wonder where exactly the difference is.
A preamble explains that what we’re about to see is a lost recording of a live, late-night TV chat show that went spectacularly bad on the night of Halloween 1977. It also explains that Jack Delroy (Dastmalchian) is a wannabe Johnny Carson whose successful TV chat show has been on the skids for some time now. After losing his wife to cancer, and having courted some mysterious conspiratorial organisation called The Grove, Jack is now casting around desperately for something that will give his ratings a boost. He and his producer have hit on a night of hocus-pocus and spookiness.
Preamble over. Roll tape… we’re back in 1977. Where Jack’s first guest is a medium called Christou (Faysall Bazzi), a phoney who calls forth messages from the great beyond by cold reading the dupes in audience. Followed by Carmichael Haig (Ian Bliss), a stage magician who’s had a poacher-to-gamekeeper conversion and now loudly calls out fakes in the world of spiritualism, especially when vulnerable people’s feelings are being exploited. After Haig and a word from the sponsors, the show’s main event – June Ross-Mitchell (Laura Gordon), the head of a psychic research institute, who has brought along with her Lilly (Ingrid Torelli), a 13-year-old schoolgirl in white knee-length socks.
Things have not been going quite according to plan all evening – Christou projectile vomiting, Jack agitatedly revealing that he thinks Christou’s message from the other side might actually have been for him. But it’s only when June and Lilly come on, with sweet, harmless Lilly a reminder of Linda Blair in The Exorcist, that the temperature goes up, or is that down?
I’ll say no more, but demonic possession is obviously what’s on the cards, with Jack getting so much more of what he wanted in terms of spectacular water-cooler TV that it simply cannot be used.
There are two ways of watching this movie, and they interlace fairly gloriously – as a great scary story but also as a pastiche on 1970s chat shows. The guests for example – Christou seems in the Uri Geller/Kreskin territory, Carmichael is much more obviously a reference to the great debunker James Randi, with Bliss’s performance in particular nailing Randi’s huckster-showman style.
Because what we’re watching is supposed to be the mastertape, we also get scenes in the studio while the adverts are on, between Jack and his yes-man sidekick, Gus (Rhys Auteri). Or Jack and his producer Leo (Josh Quong Tart) indulging in frantic discussion about which way to steer events, in a manner highly reminiscent of The Larry Sanders show, but without the laughs.
It looks the part and production designer Otello Stolfo has really caught the look of a TV show from the era. Dick Cavett meets Johnny Carson in a sea of brown and orange. The camera movements don’t always keep the faith though, the occasional bit of handheld shattering the illusion that this is a 1970s show shot on hulking TV cameras.
There is an explicit verbal reference to The Exorcist and a few visual ones, but things also go slightly Wicker Man towards the end, when innocence is revealed as something else and gets its own reward, while the venal (Jack, obviously) are also called out for past misdemeanours.
Blind believers in the rational – Carmichael Haig – turn out to be as bad as the phoneys and the directors, brothers Cameron and Colin Cairnes, also attempt some awkward straddling of the pastiche/satire divide, all the while suggesting, half-heartedly and perhaps with a wink, that horror movies and light entertainment are polar opposites. When, as this admirably entertaining movie proves, that’s just not the case.
Late Night with the Devil – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
I am an Amazon affiliate
© Steve Morrissey 2025
