The Ending of Late Night With the Devil Flubs the Punch Line

Photo: IFC Films and Shudder

This article was originally published on April 18, 2024. We are recirculating it now that Late Night With the Devil is streaming on Hulu.

Quick, what do horror movies have in common with the monologues of late-night talk-show hosts? Someone tends to get eviscerated in both, via blade, claw, or zinger. But seriously, what links these two forms of after-dark entertainment is the importance of setup and payoff — two elements crucial to landing a joke or a scare. And it’s the second part of that equation, the punch line of sorts, that falls flat in Late Night With the Devil, an otherwise inventive indie chiller that combines the cheap thrills of a midnight movie with the cheap tricks of a midnight ’70s talk show.

The payoff probably wouldn’t look so vaguely disappointing were it not for how effective the setup proves. Aussie filmmakers Cameron and Colin Cairnes commune with the ghosts of TV Land, building a convincing Nixon-era talk show from scratch (and, alas, AI prompt) before unleashing demonic hell upon its host, crew, and guests. The fun of the movie lies in its lost-broadcast gimmick — how the brothers present their showbiz horror story as the uncensored final episode of that fake show, complete with hacky opening monologue, band-leader banter, and cuts to commercials.

We know from the faux-documentary framing device that this will be no normal installment of Night Owls, the fictitious, ratings-challenged ​vehicle for haunted Carson competitor Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian). The premise of the movie is the rarely fulfilled promise of live TV: that those rolling cameras might catch something truly shocking and unprecedented, beaming a nightmare into households everywhere. And so like Jack’s spiking audience watching from home, we stay glued to the unfolding sensationalism, waiting for the combative conversation — a Halloween-night discussion with a phony psychic, a reformed Vegas hypnotist, a parapsychologist, and the latter’s supposedly possessed adolescent patient — to erupt into genuine supernatural madness. Anyone who’s white-knuckled through the Gordy scenes of Jordan Peele’s Nope knows there’s something uniquely unsettling in the spectacle of harmless retro-TV kitsch suddenly perverted by violence.

After an hour-plus of lively debate and live-studio-audience crowdwork, of huckster theater unfolding in something like real time, Late Night With the Devil finally delivers the goods as the mounting suspense gives way to mayhem. As it turns out, the teen girl really is possessed, and the evil she’s harboring has come to make good on the Faustian pact Jack made with the forces of darkness — to grant him the fame he was promised for sacrificing his beloved wife to cancer. In classic monkey’s-paw fashion, however, that fame just happens to come in the form of an orgy of on-the-air carnage, the hellish live-TV event for which he’ll be forever remembered.

On paper, it’s a satisfying climax. But after all that ominous build, there’s something underwhelming about this brief crescendo of head-twisting, throat-slashing, and face-melting. The effects have a nifty, lo-fi charm, evoking an older era of Hollywood scare fare as affectionately as the set design evokes an older era of TV; when the teen girl, played by Ingrid Torelli, becomes a conduit of malevolent energy — her body pulsing with flashes of electricity — it’s hard not to think of Poltergeist. But the fun-house, throwback chintziness of the violence almost puts the sequence in quotation marks. It’s fun but not particularly scary, and certainly not convincing in the way that the film’s approximation of ’70s late-show aesthetics is. The irony is that the very moment the danger becomes real for Jack — when his seemingly harmless trifling with the darkness stops being just for show — is also the fakest moment of the film, a mere parlor trick itself.

What really breaks the spell, though, is what happens next. After the demon makes short work of the supporting cast, Jack stumbles through a surreal, dream-logic version of Night Owls, jolting from comedy sketches to stupid pet tricks, all of his formulaic late-night segments suddenly taking on a sinister undertone. This coda serves both a dramatic and an expositional function: The Cairneses use it to show us things — like the unholy woodland ceremony where Jack makes his deal with the devil and his last moments with his wife — that we wouldn’t see on TV, while also subjecting the host to a hell worse than mere death, a psychodramatic reckoning for his sins.

But to go inside Jack’s head, the filmmakers have to break format. No longer are events strictly staged through the shooting style of a ’70s TV show. The camera, sliding into exaggerated close-ups, now films from a more subjective vantage. Jump cuts rupture time and space, shattering the real-time illusion. You could generously argue that this is the demon corrupting the very language of the program it’s infiltrated, possessing the show’s style. But it plays more like a failure of imagination, as though the Cairneses couldn’t figure out how to end their movie without cheating the live-TV angle.

You can count on one hand the found-footage horror movies that anyone could confuse for the real thing. In that department, there’s basically The Blair Witch Project — a true home video from hell, so believable in its jagged rhythm and strategic artlessness — and then there’s everything else. Of course, you don’t actually have to be fooled by the framework of a mock-doc thriller to get spooked by its gimmick. For most of its running time, Late Night With the Devil successfully commits to the bit, allowing us to suspend our disbelief and become immersed in its approximation of old TV, a cursed transmission from the network airwaves of yesterday. But in ditching that format at the end, the filmmakers effectively change the channel. And it’s the audience that winds up reaching for the remote, wondering if something better is on.