An original and surprising occult found footage horror that will mislead you, just like the Devil.

• Scare factor: ★★★★☆
• Originality factor: ★★★★★
• Gore factor: ★★★☆☆
• Occult factor: ★★★★★
• Entertainment factor: ★★★★★

Late Night with the Devil is a found footage film set on Halloween 1977. A late night show has invited guests that deal with the supernatural and host Jack Delroy has a special surprise: a girl possessed by a demon. It stars David Dastmalchian, Laura Gordon, Ian Bliss, Fayssal Bazzi, Ingrid Torellli, Rhys Auteri. It was directed and written by Cameron Cairnes and Colin Cairness. 

Duration 93 minutes.

More Halloween horror films? Check out this list.

Plot

The mockumentary starts by introducing host and presenter Jack Delroy. He became the host of the successful late night show Night Owls. He was married with actress Madeleine Piper, but she died  a year ago from cancer. He was also supposedly involved in the group or cult The Grove which held arcade ceremonies and could make or break a career. But the ratings were low and he had to compete with Carson who has another late night show. 

So he came up with a controversial idea for the broadcast on Halloween. He invited Christou, a medium and spiritualist, Carmichael Haig the Conjurer but now a sceptic who wants to expose the so-called mediums and finally Dr. June Ross-Mitchell with her ward Lilly. Lily survived a cult after the FBI raided the cult’s house which was set on fire by the cult. The cult was called The First Church of Abraxas. It was said that they bred children to be sacrificed. When Lilly survived the fire she showed some weird and strange behavior. Dr June Ross-Mitchell a parapsychologist was called in to examine her. She’s convinced that Lilly is possessed by a lower demon. Lilly calls him Mr. Wriggles. She became her guardian and wrote a book about Lilly that was called Conversations with the Devil.

First up is Christou who clearly is a fake. And then Carmichael joins them and wants to expose him. Christuo doesn’t feel very well and spuws a black goo vomit. He is taken to the hospital and the show goes on. 

Other strange things start to happen, with the screen, glitches, the sound, the electricity and even the Teremin plays all by itself. Things not completely unexplainable, but strange nonetheless.

Things really get out of control when Lilly wants to summon the demon inside of her, Mr. Wriggles. And Carmichael wants to debunk it by hypnotizing Gus, Jack’s sidekick. It gets worse and worse until it’s all out of Jack’s control. Jack craves a big audience but so does Mr. Wriggles. 

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Short Review

The set up is a mockumentary about the unexplained happenings on Halloween night 1977. It shows a recently discovered master tape of the show and unreleased tapes with behind the scenes. The master tape is in full color, grainy and with a seventies coloring and filter and the behind the scenes are in black-and-white. Which makes it easy to distinguish between the two different tapes. 

The show feels very campy and so do the guests, but the glitches, and small weird happenings and the appearance of Lilly that comes with a big glitch, immediately give off a vibe that something is off. June even tells Jack that behind the scenes, but he’s all about making life changing tv and scoring ratings. 

The seventies vibe is very well captured with the square screen, the cinematography, the decor, the clothing, the music and audio and how the people behave. It really does feel if you are watching something that was recorded more than forty years ago. The film builds up the tension, first with a fraud, then a sceptic and then the real thing. It relies on a disturbing atmosphere, not on scares, although there are some good scares and gore, but it remains questionable if it was real or not. That is until they rewind the tapes. 

The film is all about footage. It’s is found footage, but it’s also about footage that can be misleading the audience even at home but the real footage doesn’t lie. And it’s about perception, what is real and what’s not. 

The ending is very surreal and now we understand why the documentary started by telling and showing us who Jack Delroy is. With some disturbing images, and a climactic frightening scene, the ending is confusing. Not just for Jack, but also for the viewers. What did really happen? What was real and what wasn’t?

It’s a fun and sometimes scary found footage with a big campy vibe that doesn’t take itself too seriously. It also a big nod to the film Ghostwatch (1992) that was a tv-movie and pretended to be an actual tv-show that was broadcasted “live” and was watched by a lot of people on tv at the same time who didn’t know it was a fake. 

While Late Night with the Devil was not presented as an actual live broadcast or real footage, it does come close to an actual mockumentary about the ill fate of Jack Delroy who wanted it all, at a too great a cost.