It seems as though late-night talk show hosts have it pretty easy. They walk out to a crowd primed to applaud at their every quip, breezily speak to robotic and predictable guests who are there to promote, and gesture toward the musical act, all while making light banter with apparent ease. On the face of things, the job of a late-night talk show host seems so simple, any schmuck with a mic could do it.
Cameron and Colin Cairnes’ Late Night with the Devil laughs maniacally in the face of such a naive notion, revealing the task of the late-night host, like any performance-based profession, to be the grueling and hellish grind it truly is.
The film follows Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian), a hard-working and enterprising late-night talk show host in the ‘70s, who, much to his chagrin, constantly comes in second to Johnny Carson in terms of ratings. Having used every sensationalist trick in the book in an effort to land top ratings (and still ultimately coming in second), Jack and his producer embark on a live Halloween-night special capitalizing off the Satanic Panic of the times. They do so by bringing on supernaturally-inclined guests: a medium by the name of Christou (Fayssal Bazzi), a former magician and present-day skeptic Carmichael Hunt (Ian Bliss), and a parapsychologist, Dr. June Ross-Mitchell (Laura Gordon) and her possessed patient Lilly (Ingrid Torelli), who are on tour to promote their Michelle Remembers-esque book. The night takes a dark and satanic turn when Jack, in an effort to scandalize and titillate (read: boost ratings), urges Dr. Ross-Mitchell to speak to the entity haunting Lilly, so as to demonstrate to his TV audience that the paranormal realm is credible.
The entire film takes the form of a singular talk-show episode, but ups the ante and ingenuity by continuing to capture on-set dynamics and antics during commercial breaks, having the audience watch through cameras that continue to roll, as required by the special’s live broadcast format.
Late Night with the Devil is a deeply captivating and exhilarating rejuvenation of the found-footage mode, showing the sub-genre’s technical potential and the space it allows for creativity. What we get from Dastmalchian’s Jack is not only the strained and kitschy night-show host, but also a sense of the man he is when he takes off the host’s persona: obsessed with ratings; Jack scans as a desperate man who will do anything, milk and broadcast any relationship, so that he might become America’s most-watched host.
Found-footage horrors have always mischievously played with ideas of public and private, volleying ideas of responsibility and blame by bursting through the boundary between the two realms. These films place us, as the audience, in a curiously culpable position because they make us feel as though we’re peeking into events like a voyeur; by continuing to watch, we, the film tells us, sign an imaginary contract that assigns us a certain responsibility. The evil might very well infect us in the way it does those private individuals we watch, and this will be our own fault — this is the found-footage film’s warning, its alluring thrill.
It’s a dialectic we’ve come to expect from many found-footage horrors: the warning at the start that we’re watching footage that has been recovered, that none of it has been edited, warnings that imply that what we’re about to see is dangerous, and that we ought to watch at our own risk; these are paradoxical warnings working to give us an “out” that the film knows (or hopes) we never will take. Antithetical as the “out” would be to the filmgoing experience, it works to heighten the sense that we’re doing something verboten or ill-advised, something naughty, as we choose to watch something personal – not meant for public consumption.
Late Night with the Devil curiously and endlessly entertainingly frustrates the proscriptive warnings of traditional found-footage films. With a documentary-like introduction that surveys Jack Delroy’s career, outlining his hungry professional desires, we are ushered into the body of the film primed to believe, because we are told, that we are about to see something haunted and doomed: the talk show’s episode as it was broadcast live on Halloween night in its entirety, which, once it starts, there is no turning off even if we wanted to, for it is live.
Accordingly, we serve as the audience on two levels: first as the real people watching the film, and secondly, as Jack’s on-set audience initially given strict instructions about how to and how not to respond to the show, when to laugh, when to participate. This film becomes interactive in a way that very few found-footage films have been in the past, and for this reason it’s almost revolutionary. We become deeply invested in ways we might never have been before, but we also become a collective, Jack’s audience, those people he wants more than anything to entertain and please, those on whom he depends for his success. We become Jack’s judges, even as and while we watch in awe and deference to Destmalchian’s pitch-perfect performance.
The Cairnes have created an endlessly intriguing and beguiling gem of a film that not only is a hauntingly joyous watch, but also is a cerebral exercise leaving us with much to think about in our roles as consumers of media. Late Night with the Devil is smart, funny, and challenging, everything the typical and palatable, kitschy late-night talk show isn’t, and what a blessing that is!
