Modern filmmakers have a bit of paradox on their hands with audiences. Box office receipts for Horror films, MCU, mythology, etc. bare out that what people most want from movies is to see slight variations on the same concepts they’ve seen a dozen times before. On the OTHER hand, follow too closely to any one of those influences and you get labeled a hack, one dead set on wasting people’s time. People expect familiarity and originality all at once, and that is not an easy tightrope to walk, no matter how many digits are in your budget. The Filmmakers Dilemma.
Every so often a movie comes along that creates something that feels new, in spite of its many recognizable components. Star Wars: A New Hope utilized WW2 footage and Flash Gordon serials. Scream renewed the slasher subgenre by directly referencing its predecessors by name, visual, and score, as well as some whodunit mystery in the mix. Kill Bill combined… like, an entire Mid-90’s Blockbuster worth of material. And more recently the success of Everything Everywhere All At Once has proven that this approach can be effective on a number of levels. Combining material is viable a path to success, both artistically and commercially. The Colin and Cameron Cairnes helmed Late Night with the Devil is, I would argue, a worthy tightrope walker in this field. And so I’ve decided to list it’s 5 biggest influences that I identified.
SPOILER WARNING: This film releases 4/19/24 Shudder.
1. Johnny Carson, Don Lane and the Acrimony of the Late Night Landscape
Late Night with the Devil is the story of an unearthed live Halloween recording of a fictional late night chat show that goes about as wrong as any one show could. It is brimming with references & homages to folklore, individuals, and pop culture, but perhaps the most obvious one is the very premise and setting itself. The film’s fictionalized 'Late Night' show of the 70’s, dripping with both charisma and a heavy layer of cheese. Host of the late night program 'Night Owls,' Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian) fits seamlessly into this role, creating a likable on-screen persona, but is driven by a ruthless drive to unseat Johnny Carson, undoubtedly the bigger fish in this pond. As written, Jack is modeled after Aussie’s real-world answer to Carson, Don Lane. But the performance is general enough to represent any number of that smarmy-but-likable showmen filling these positions.
We Americans have now lived through TWO heavily publicized 'Late Night Wars.' Infighting and studio subterfuge pockmark the careers of Jay Leno, Dave Letterman, Conan O’Brien. In the mid 90’s a book called The Late Shift by New York Times reporter Bill Carter detailed the intense acrimony that surrounded the void left behind by Johnny Carson’s retirement. Just over 15 years later, history would repeat, with the book The Late Night Wars (again by Bill Carter) covered the feud that dominated Jay Leno’s early retirement and Conan’s ill-fated run on The Tonight Show.These stories are as cutthroat as they are legendary. The ruthless competitiveness between these figures left a sense that behind a host’s charming on-camera facades may lie a pandering, bullish, petty narcissist. And that’s not to even speak of the networks and their endless skullduggery.
2. The Larry Sander’s Show: A Descent Into Pettiness
The public’s growing characterization of hosts as soft, whiny narcissists wasn’t introduced by the works of Bill Carter however. Two years before his first book not eh subject, beloved comedian Garry SHadnling was already pinpointing his fine-tuned mass-media criticism lasers right on the late night scene. He himself humanized and scrutinized these hosts and the phoniness of Hollywood in general via HBO’s landmark mockumentary series The Larry Sanders Show. Larry Sanders is one such host, and he is undoubtedly a mess. Capable of oozing charm on stage but pathetically hiding from daily conflicts and desperately clawing for ratings. Dastmalchian’s Jack Delroy presents (at first) perhaps a gentler version of this, a man who begs and pleads with anyone or anything to improve his late night standings.
While Jack’s producer Leo Fisk may be a slightly poorer substitute for the absolutely stunningly hilarious Artie (Rip Torn) in The Larry Sanders Show, they serve a similar function behind the scenes, by employing the show’s most innovative trick of turning into a single-camera documentary when the host cuts to commercial. They serve as the smugly capable right hand to their respective hosts. By going into these behind-the-scene segments, each of these projects allows a more intimate view of what hides beneath the struggling host, their producer, and even their beleaguered and dull-witted sidekicks Gus McConnel (Rhys Uteri) and “Hey Now” Hank Kingsley (Jeffrey Tambor). Through this technique the Cairnes are capable of telling a far more complete story. While I would struggle to call this approach “found footage” because the cameraman behind the scenes is never acknowledged. But the language works beautifully to show the insecurity, fear and subtleties that we could only assume otherwise. And it doesn’t dampen the immersion bought by the found footage format to any real degree.
Jack himself seems quite different from Larry Sanders and his ilk at the beginning of this lost broadcast. An explicit opening narration depicts him (publicly, anyway) less as a bundle of self-serving impulses, but as a devoted husband, grieving his late wife. He is simply trying to regain the career momentum he lost with her passing. But as time goes on, the Larry Sanders style behind-the-scenes cam chips away at this.
3. Ghostwatch: Live Broadcast Gone Pear-shaped
Those are the easy ones, of course. But there’s so much more. This film also owes a great debt to another, that is currently cementing as a bonafide Cult Classic. Upon my second viewing, I heard no fewer than two utterances of “Ghostwatch” as I left the theater.
BBC’s Ghostwatch shares a great many similarities to Late Night; It’s filmed in ‘real-time’ and mainly on a TV news set. There’s little girls and demons, a smarmy skeptic, a passionate professional believer, a likable host, a seance and (of course) a TV studio as it’s hub. The key difference between them primarily is that Late Night With the Devil is clearly a fictional film, whereas Ghostwatch famously fooled English viewers into a War Of The Worlds style panic. It was banned from broadcast for many years after a young disabled man’s suicide letter specifically referenced the program.
Late Night is, clearly, a much sillier brand of found footage though, and that is clearly by design. The benefit it has over Ghostwatch is that Late Night programming always has a thick layer of empty cheese layered right ion top of everything, creating a pretty helpful smokescreen for the events as they unfold. In both we have onion layers of what is truly happening peeled back bit by bit, creating and maintaining a level of tension throughout. Through the majority of the broadcast of DelRoy’s 'Night Owls' program it’s unclear whether Jack DelRoy, the possessed guest, the endlessly smug skeptic, or anyone else is hiding sinister intentions that lead to the incoming disaster. What’s going on here? Is it real or is it illusion? Which leads us to…
4. Uri Gellar, James Randi, and the Mystic/Skeptic Schism
Using the late show format as a launchpad, Late Night With the Devil brings in a sort of Greatest Hits of era-specific late show programming. His first guest of the evening for example is psychic and cold-reader Christou (Fayssal Bazzi). Christou is plainly an amalgam of a number of supposed psychics, telekinetiks and mystics who frequented these sorts of talk shows in the era depicted, as the fear of Mysticism gave way too full-blown Satanic Panic in the 1980’s and 90’s. One such mystic, Uri Gellar was such a hit on these shows he made quite a living on it for many years, and created a potent cultural signifier for psychic manifestation: a bent spoon. These were easy time fillers, with supposedly real supernatural talents that would fit comfortably in a carnival or Vaudevillian performance… and they present themselves as wholly genuine.
Christou puts on a show of it, as expected. He does an embarrassing job of cold-reading the audience at first. This is treated sincerely by Jack, but Christou is clearly depicted as a bog-standard “cold-reader,” using well documented tricks of that trade to wow audience menbers and Jack alive… until a distressing breakdown that sends Christou to the hospital… and that we later discover has taken his life. That’s some trick.
Was this the real deal? Is there something truly supernatural in this vision? This is complicated by scrutiny from an even more obvious homage in the form of guest 2, Carmichael Hunt (Ian Bliss), a stand-in for the famous magician and skeptic James Randi. Though, perhaps not a terribly kind version. Randi became something of a proto-mythbuster on many of these late night programs, actively proving many of them to be frauds, live on the air. The character Hunt even carries with him a sizable check written for anyone who can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the paranormal is real… something James Randi was famous for. (I recommend the documentary An Honest Liar for more about Randi’s incredible life and the sorts of people homaged via Christou) Hunt is characterized as not just confident, however, but immensely smug and self-righteous. He eventually is forced to hand over that check, and eat a king’s share of crow, before the film ends. For a skeptic, he does seem to be harboring some sincere belief in the stuff that ries beyond a stage magician’s toolbox.
5. The Satanic Panic, Michelle Smith and Bohemian Grove
Image courtesy archive.org
Bohemian Grove: Where the rich and powerful go to misbehave
The titular Devil in Late Night with the Devil comes in the form seemingly possessed schoolgirl Lilly D’Abo (Ingrid Torelli), accompanied by her psychologist June Ross-Mitchell (Laura Gordon). This duo performs something of a seance, with June acting as hypnotist and Lilly really playing up the Creepy Possession angle.
If this is sounding a little familiar, that’s because this sort of mysticism too was fair game on late night shows for several years. One such famous case, that of Michelle Smith and Lawrence Pazder, is largely responsible for the kickoff of the famous Satanic Panic of the 80’s. Pazder claimed to have unlocked Michelle’s repressed memories of ritual satanic abuse in a long discredited book called Michelle Remembers. And the late night circuit ate it up. Pazder’s discredited book Michelle Remembers was the talk of the early 80’s, and resulted in a decade awash with moral panic. These events are investigated in the 2023 true crime documentary Satan Wants You.
This film, however depicts June as an unwilling but passionate caregiver, not a con-woman out for fame and fortune. Lilly, likewise is never believable as a typical little girl, though the nature of her affliction (either psychological or supernatural) is hotly contested by Carmichael Hunt. We as an audience aren’t so easily dissuaded, and canonically, there is indeed a devil at play, who appears to know Jack quite well.
Hold on, what? How exactly? Well in this lies the core reveal of Jacks character. You see, in the narrated preamble there is a mention of 'The Grove,' aka 'Bohemian Grove,' a real-world location and event, where a cadre of American and international celebrities, business moguls and other powerful types gather for… undisclosed frolicking. (This is famously the one thing Alex Jones did that turned out to not be entire bullshit. Way to go, asshole!) It’s here that Jack apparently made a deal with this demon… indicated by many factors, including the deep pockets funding his show, The Cavendish Group, named after occult writer Richard Cavendish, author of The Black Arts. In the film, their motto is “let’s shake on it.” This evokes, for me, a clear line drawn between Jack and the tale of Faust making a deal with the Devil.
Closing Act
Late Night with the Devil touches on something that we all know (or believe we know anyway, as outsiders) about the world it depicts; what does any given person in showbusiness sacrifice in the name of success? For Jack’s part, his sacrifice is steep indeed. In the end he’s revealed to have sacrificed the life of his beloved and devoted wife... for an opportunity to save his waning career. Dastmalchian’s performance makes it clear that this was not a slam-dunk decision for him… his feelings of guilt are very palpable. But the promise of success was, in the end, the most important think in his life. More important than the safety of his guests. More important than the risk one takes when dealing with Devils. More important than even the love of his life.
In the end, it all sounds very Hollywood, doesn’t it?
