hunter albert

I have a weird aversion to the genre of horror. It’s not that I refuse to engage with it completely, but it’s not a genre that has brought me much joy. There are incredible horror movies. I love The Exorcist and The Silence of the Lambs, but there are plenty of cheap hacks out there like House of Wax or The Devil’s Rejects. I’m also not afraid to admit that sometimes certain horror movies will keep me up at night. While I will boldly proclaim that I at least don’t wet myself, I’m a bit of a weenie. If I’m watching a horror movie, it’s during the day. An increase in nightmares as I’ve gotten older hasn’t helped this aspect.

I also know that I don’t have to live like that either.

Biases against horror aside, I’ve purposely tried to engage with the genre… a little more. Jordan Peele’s Nope was one of my favorite movies of 2022. Some may argue that Nope isn’t a traditional horror movie (and I would agree), but I’m not exactly ready to jump into the depths of films such as Hereditary.

Enter the latest horror film to make a splash this year: Late Night with the Devil. The film starts off portraying itself as a documentary that covers the life of Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian), host of the late night television show Night Owls with Jack Delroy. The show competes with The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, but is struggling in the ratings. As the ratings for Night Owls continue to slump, Delroy becomes more desperate–and invites more controversial figures onto his late night program. Compounded with the sudden cancer diagnosis and death of his wife, Madeleine (Georgina Haig), Delroy is a shell of his former self. This culminates into a night that changes the history of television. It’s the show from Halloween 1977 and as the narrator describes, everything we’re about to watch is the never before seen master recording from that night.

I found the intro to Late Night with the Devil to be pretty corny. Perhaps purposeful, the narration and editing almost felt straight from a documentary that you would find on a television screen in a hotel lobby at 2am. Thankfully it does a solid job of making the footage you watch of the tv show feel very authentic. There’s a countdown, a fade to black, and then the intro for the television show. The announcer introduces Jack Delroy and he comes out to the Halloween themed set and does a quick monologue. The aspect ratio matches that of TV in the 1970s, the square 4:3. It does feel like entering a time portal and revisiting television of the era.

The meat and potatoes isn’t found in the corny and dated jokes of the monologue, but the interview segments. It’s here where Late Night with the Devil gets predictably weird and interesting. A psychic, a skeptic, and woman who claims to have a child who is possessed by satan himself come out for various segments. It’s a dichotomy of real vs imagination. All of this is layered into the the talks shows behind the scenes politics. It’s all for show and it’s all for ratings. Until it isn’t.

Where the film kills the immersion for me is when the show pitches to commercial break. For an introduction that sells itself as a found footage movie of sorts, Late Night with the Devil breaks its own rules. The moments between commercial breaks are filmed in black and white and full aspect ratio of 16:9. It’s a clear signal that what we see, the television broadcast, and these moments in between–are different. If these moments are meant to be captured as a behind the scenes look, it’s certainly never explained and at best, it’s disorienting.