Late Night with the Devil is a deceptively simple horror film set in the 1970s on a late night television show. In some ways, it feels more like a play than anything else: a single room, with a format that allows for you squirm in your chair waiting for the other shoe to drop as the guests come onstage and riff with the host, played by a beguiling host, David Dastmalchian (AKA Polkadot from The Suicide Squad). LNwtD has already broken records as the most financially successful indie horror film opening weekend of all time, if I’m reading this correctly, which drew comparisons with the arthouse horror film Skinamarink from last year, a divisive mass of creepypasta that I never made time for and never will because I want to be able to sleep at night.
At ninety minutes, the plot is fairly sparse. A talk show host down on his luck, tries for one last Hail Mary by inviting on a child demonically possessed by a Charles Manson-type figure for the country to see on the Halloween special. A skeptic and old friend of the host serves as an excellent audience surrogate, pushing back against all of the glitz and glamor of the early acts, including a fairly run-of-the-mill mind reader Mr Christou. There are some references to the Build-a-Bear group at Bohemian Grove. Yaddah yaddah yaddah.
But mostly there’s some business with (and here’s our spoiler) hypnosis, but with sort of a twist, because we have playback, and I think that’s what makes this hypnosis scene so original and lovely. We get to see the focalized experience of the audience and then rewatch and then test the hypothesis for another scene, which ramps into our climax: a quick and dirty one-two punch that ultimately pays off for the finale.
As a morality tale, Late Night doesn’t have much to say and it’s hard to imagine the way in which this movie holds up to any amount of critical scrutiny, but it looks so fun and retro and they do such a good job with the small goals they’ve created for it.
It’s got about eight different production companies that have laid claim to it, so many that it almost feels like a joke (people in the audience were audibly laughing at it), and yet it’s clear that all eight of these companies felt like they were taking care of their baby while working on it.
Honestly On The Sly 