Late Night With The Devil – What’s on Shudder
Directed by Colin and Cameron Cairnes, 2023
Warning: mention of suicide
Jack Delroy began his career hosting late-night TV by joking that he’d never beat out Johnny Carson. That was in 1971. In 1976, it’s not quite a joke anymore: He can never catch up, his beloved wife Madeleine is dying, and even bringing her on TV to jerk the viewers’ tears doesn’t quite catch him the top slot. By 1977, he’s widowed, failing, and scrambling for ratings with increasing panic.
By the end of Halloween that year, people will be dead.
We know the set-up by now: this movie is of the small-but-significant stable of mock-live-broadcast horror. Let’s get it out of the way and agree that it’s been done before, most notoriously – depending on who you ask – either in Orson Welles’ 1938 War Of The Worlds radio broadcast, or in the BBC’s 1992 Ghostwatch.
And you know, that’s fine. Late Night With The Devil isn’t pretending otherwise. First times only happen once and there’s no law against trying it again on a better-prepared audience. In a way that might even be a good thing. It’s funny to hear that War Of The Worlds caused havoc, but Ghostwatch was associated with an actual suicide: eighteen-year-old Martin Denham had learning difficulties and couldn’t shake the idea it was real, and so he went to join the ‘ghosts’. And as the mother of a kid with learning difficulties I’ve always found that hard to move past … which is why I’m being a downer in a review, but what I’m saying is that when it comes to genre-breaking scares, you can’t go home. Nobody’s ever going to be the first to do it again, and we’re at the point where mock-broadcast is best treated as a small, interesting genre where we know the conventions. It’s easy to come in hoping to be tricked again, but let’s just admit that we can’t be and go from there. The question is no longer ‘Did/would this convince me it was real?’ but ‘Did this use the form to tell a good story?’
And on that score, Late Night With The Devil is excellent.
For starters let’s talk about the cast. Everyone is on point: they’re all playing types, they know what type they’re playing, and they get them right. A shout-out right away to Rhys Auteri for playing Jack’s put-upon assistant Gus, if for no other reason than because Auteri plays ‘the man who gets overlooked’ so effectively that I feel obliged not to! But as to the guests, if you’re familiar with 70s occult pop culture you’ll recognise them all. There’s the Uri Geller ‘psychic’ who gets more than he bargained for. There’s the James Randi debunker who’s way out of his depth. There’s the Sybil/Michelle Remembers/Exorcist little girl and her foster mother/minder/publicist/owner. Considering the horrendous malpractice in those cases I’d have liked to see the exploitation of children being skewered harder, but I guess a possessed little girl is too useful a device to pass up in a tale like this, and Ingrid Torelli’s performance as the half-adorable-half-terrifying-even-when-she’s-not-possessed Lilly is one of the highlights in an already strong ensemble, so let’s enjoy it for what it is – and also give them credit for not leaning on her for lazy storytelling. There’s a lot going on in this plot and it hangs together more interestingly than you might expect. Real thought went into this.
But a scenario like this lives or dies on whether the show host is convincing, and David Dastmalchian as Jack Delroy hits the target perfectly: he’s personable, urbane, and just slightly desperate. He delivers enough charisma we buy that people tune in for his company, but with that slightly self-conscious edge of a man who knows ‘history only remembers kings’ and doesn’t quite feel his butt fills the throne. He’s an almost-man, and Dastmalchian threads that needle with unerring precision.
Let’s also talk about the use of format.
This is a period piece and that’s not an easy balance to get right: you want a film that feels authentic, but not one that gets so enchanted by the shiny trinkets of times past that it loses focus on the narrative. (That, by the way, is why I didn’t include WNUF Halloween Special in the honourable mentions above. The conceit of a show taped off the air with ads included is a fun gimmick, but I swear it felt like half the run time was eaten by repetitions of the same ‘lol, 80s ads!’ joke, and that was all time that could have been spent developing more of a plot.)
Late Night With The Devil, on the other hand,
doesn’t mess around. We begin with a short mockumentary introduction, sketching out the historical background with a pitch-perfect imitation of that weighty, sententious delivery you get on strange-but-true features. From the first seconds we know we’re in safe hands, and not only because it’s Michael Ironside, no less, who’s setting out that stall. The writing is punchy and clear: everything it sketches in is stuff we need to know. It’s a time of social unrest, TV hosts are a comfort, Jack Delroy is scrabbling for the top slot, but even his associations with ‘The Grove’ – a sinister quasi-Masonic club for powerful men – don’t seem to be helping. Then there was that last broadcast, which we’re about to see … and we’re dropped straight into the broadcast and we’re off to the races. During ‘commercial breaks’ we see behind-the-scenes disputes between Jack, his crew and his guests. Would we strictly see the arguments between crew with cameras following them so neatly in the 70s? Possibly not, but it’s a decision worth that question because it all keeps the plot clicking.
And finally – well, I won’t spoil it, but I will say it benefits from the fact that this is not the first time someone has tried this. We are, by the end, in something more like a conventional movie than a found-footage one, and in a movie that was really trying to trick you into thinking you were watching a haunted broadcast, the shift into nightmarescape we witness would be a great big klaxon breaking the illusion. But since that’s not a trick that works any more … well, it’s less purist than it might be, but it’s jolly effective at making you feel things. A more strict adherence to only-what-the-audience-sees would have made for a less touching and memorable ending; there’s an emotional reality to it that makes it the right decision for this particular movie. Late Night With The Devil gave itself a challenging format that required choices, and it chooses well every time.
Fake broadcast horror is a tricky beast; it wants to get inside your head by unexpected means. And Late Night With The Devil really does succeed. It’s not groundbreaking in its device, but it is notable because it doesn’t expect the device to be the whole point. Lesser imitators can sometimes assume that ‘this is happening live on TV’ is so creepy an idea that it’s all the movie needs. Welles and the BBC wouldn’t have made such an impact if they’d assumed that bakc in the day, and Late Night With The Devil doesn’t assume it either: this is a well-thought-out horror tragedy that uses the broadcast format as a form, not a gimmick.
And because of that, it lingers. It’s the best use of this format I’ve seen since the groundbreakers. I don’t believe I saw Jack Delroy meet a real fate on my screen, but I do believe in the character of Jack Delroy. Under all the flash there’s a human story there that’s grave and moving, and you may find you remember it for a long time.
In the Heart of Hidden Things (The Gyrford series) by Kit Whitfield
Jedediah’s father walked out of his life forty years ago. Now he’s back. He won’t apologise, he doesn’t explain – and, impossibly, he hasn’t aged a day.
If you asked the folks of Gyrford, they’d tell you Jedediah Smith looked up to his father. After all, Corbie Mackem was the Sarsen Shepherd: the man who saved the Smith clan from Ab, the terrifyingly well-meaning fey who blighted a whole generation with unwanted gifts.
Corbie was a good fairy-smith. And if he wasn’t a good father, well, that isn’t something Jedediah likes to talk about. Especially since no one knows where Corbie’s body lies: the day of his son’s wedding, forty-odd years ago, he set off to travel and was never seen again.
These days Jedediah is a respectable elder, more concerned with his wayward grandson John than with his long-buried past, and he has other problems on his mind. There’s the preparations for Saint Clement’s Day, and the odd fact that birds all over the county have taken to hiding themselves, and the misbehaviour of Left-Lop the pig – which has grown vegetation all over its back, escaped its farm and taken to making personal remarks at folks in alarmingly alliterative verse.
But then disaster strikes. Ab is back. And Corbie, thought long dead, returns to Gyrford – younger than his son . . .