Late Night with the Devil (2023)

Rated R for some demonic stuff and some pretty gnarly horror effects throughout the movie.  There's also language, violence, gore, and some upsetting imagery that has to do with cancer.  A lot of the movie is tame until it is not.  It has the structure of a Paranormal Activity movie that is framed around suspense until it unleashes the drop, so you can watch a chunk of the movie waiting for something to happen.  Still, I would not let kids watch any part of this movie.  R.

DIRECTORS:  Cameron and Colin Cairnes

I'm so bad about spooky season this year, guys.  I really have a list of movies that I want to watch.  But I'm also watching too many TV shows (now that fresh episodes of shows are coming out weekly) that have spoilery things that will happen and I don't want them ruined for me like the reveal of the Teen on Agatha All Along was spoiled for me.  My life is really hard, guys.  Secretly, I'm a little happy that all this TV watching has given me a short break when it comes to updating the blog, but I do want to fill this space with some really great horror that I haven't seen before.

I almost got a Shudder account for Late Night with the Devil.  This is a specific button that I have probably talked about on here, but faux nostalgia done right is one of my favorite things.  I understand that, if I like Late Night with the Devil, I would probably like the WNUF Halloween Special.  I don't know what it is about really well done found-footage that gets me so well, but Late Night with the Devil hits almost every button I have.  To be sure, there are beats that I think might need some polish.  I hate to comment on any one performance, but a lot of the stuff coming from Ian Bliss's Carmichael Haig seems a little more archetypal than nuanced.  But he has a lot of good beats, so I'm willing to excuse some shortcuts for the sake over the overall story.

I can't deny that a lot of my attraction to this film is because of the late '70s aesthetic and attention to detail.  I'm easily swayed to begin with on a lot of movies. But this movie won me over pretty well with its focus on making this really feel like a documentary.  It felt like I was watching something truly underground and elicit.  Honestly, if someone handed me a copy of Late Night with the Devil on a VHS with a scrawled version of the title on the label, that's the only thing that could have put the whole thing over the edge.  Do I have some whiny stuff to say?  Absolutely.  That should be the name of this blog:  "Whiny Things to Complain about Movies".  But there are a few moments where the verisimilitude is lost for the sake of storytelling.  I'm going to just list them here because they aren't dealbreakers for me.  It just pulls me out a bit.  I didn't love the behind the scenes stuff.  While all of that stuff narratively matters, it is absolutely absurd to think that the behind the scenes stuff was being filmed that way.  The information, as boring as it would have been, should have been caught by an abandoned camera poorly framed.  The whole point is that there was a filmmaker who discovered all of this footage from a watershed moment in television history and cobbled it together.  The notion that someone was walking around with high def cameras gathering every detail is a bit silly.  But again, let it go. 

A similar gripe is the HD finale of the film.  If the point of the movie was to make this movie feel like found footage, seeing Jack get his comeuppance in an alternate dimension --while good for the narrative --has very little explanation.  I know that there's a bit of a tease to make us question if the high def portion of the movie really happened or was part of a mass hysteria is a cool idea.  I just don't think the film finally sold that ending as concretely as the movie thinks it did.  Still, we kind of needed to have our hand held a little bit to close up all of this world building that was being sprinkled throughout the film. 

But to complain about these things is missing the point of the film.  While I don't necessarily think that movies like Late Night with the Devil are loftier films, it is addressing an almost alternative narrative that preys on fears that we keep returning to.  I adore that the film introduces itself with the smallest amount of context with the Satanic Panic.  It's funny.  The Satanic Panic was a throwback to an era where people were incredibly gullible.  It was something to point at and show how far we've come as a people in terms of understanding of how information works.  But I'm in the shadow of Marjorie Taylor Greene spreading misinformation about Democratic hurricane machines and maybe Late Night with the Devil plays something fairly interesting with us.  Now, if I was to say that Late Night with the Devil is a commentary on how misinformation is dangerous, that'd be wrong.  Part of the thing that we're rooting for -and, by proxy, against -is for the devil to be real.  Carmichael's entire character is there to be annoying.  He's Walter Peck for the EPA.  We understand that what he's doing is probably the moral thing in the room, but the way he approaches it is insufferable.  It's marrying the bad person with the moral crusade.  When Abraxas reveals himself, it's almost cathartic knowing that the silver lining to the whole thing is that Carmichael is seen to be an idiot.

But I also love that there's almost a haunted house quality to the film.  I'm not talking as if the film was about a haunted house.  I'm talking about something that you do at Halloween.  (At least, I did as a kid.) There's this sideshow element of trying to get the audience involved in the scares that is fascinating.  For a minute, I was incredibly skeptical about the hypnosis scene.  I just did not care for it.  I thought that it didn't make sense for us to see what Gus is seeing.  But by the time the giant worm came out of Gus's eye (yup!), I was completely on board.  If the conceit of the film is that you are watching something elicit and underground, there's no greater reveal than you, the viewer, being part of the show.  It works really well.  Like, I went from being a skeptic about that scene to maybe doubling down on how that might have been one of my favorite reveals in horror that I've seen recently.

The oddest part of the movie --which is actually a horror staple that I missed --is the odd moral character of Jack Delroy.  Jack is incredibly sympathetic for a lot of the movie.  It's amazing that the directors managed to get us to sympathize with Jack considering that his goals for the film are incredibly superficial.  He wants to be the most famous man ever.  That's not something that you give a character that we're meant to sympathize with.  That's usually the bad guy's trait.  In fact, as the film goes on, we learn that Jack is almost in no way sympathetic.  My biggest complaint about Smile is that the protagonist doesn't do anything immoral to deserve all of the torture that is laid upon her for the film.  But Jack?  Jack keeps pushing that button a little further.  Then we found out the very thing that elicits our sympathy is actually caused by the protagonist.  I love that.  I mean, it's not subtle.  Jack is almost too endearing to be true as a late night host.  We've also been programmed to understand that hubris needs to be punished and the filmmakers knew what to do with that as a character.  The odd thing is to juxtapose him with Gus.  

Gus is the moral dope of the movie.  I don't mean that those with morality are dopes.  Gus is a dope.  He's also the voice of reason in this movie.  But you combine those two archetypes, you get yourself questioning your own morality.  You need a Gus.  Jack can't keep pushing for the story to go bad.  Instead, the movie gives us the angel and devil tropes though the form of Gus and the producer.  But we also know that we only get Gus in the form of complaining Gus.  It's a bit unfair, but it's also the exact character that you need for that spot.  It's the character that warns us about stuff, only to be right the entire time.  Yeah, I don't like Gus. But I think that's more damning about the state of people that we don't like Gus.

Honestly, Late Night with the Devil is top tier horror.  I wasn't disappointed with this one, which is rare for me in spooky season.  Do I want this on VHS?  Absolutely.  Will I probably watch it again?  You know what?  This might make a perfect party movie.