There is a moment in Late Night with the Devil — somewhere in the second act, during a commercial break — where the camera stays on Jack Delroy’s face a beat longer than it should. The studio lights are still up. The audience is still there. And something in his expression tells you that what is about to happen on live television is not going to go the way anyone planned.
That moment is why this film works.
Directed by Australian brothers Colin and Cameron Cairnes and premiered at SXSW in 2023, Late Night with the Devil is one of the most formally inventive found footage films in years — a movie that doesn’t just use the format as a stylistic choice but builds its entire architecture around it. The result is something genuinely rare: a horror film that earns its scares through craft rather than volume.
One note before we go further — the film generated some controversy around its use of AI-generated art in three briefly featured still images during transitions. It’s a legitimate conversation. It doesn’t affect the film’s quality, and I find it a distraction from what is otherwise an exceptional piece of genre filmmaking.
Where to Stream Late Night with the Devil?
What Late Night with the Devil Is About
It is Halloween night, 1977. Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian) is the host of Night Owls — a late night talk show that has spent six seasons running a distant second to Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. Ratings are down. His wife Madeleine died of cancer the previous year. His career is slipping.
Tonight, he has planned something special. A Halloween episode built around the occult — a psychic, a sceptic, a parapsychologist, and her subject: a young girl named Lilly, the sole survivor of a Satanic cult, who may or may not be demonically possessed.
What we are watching, framed as recovered footage from that broadcast alongside behind-the-scenes material shot during commercial breaks, is the night that Night Owls made television history — for all the wrong reasons.
The Late Night with the Devil Trailer
Review: Late Night with the Devil (Spoiler-Free)
The first thing Late Night with the Devil gets absolutely right is its world. The grainy multi-camera broadcast aesthetic, the period costuming, the studio lighting that feels like it belongs to a different era of television — every detail is considered. Within the first ten minutes you are not watching a horror film set in 1977. You are watching a 1977 television broadcast. That distinction matters enormously, because the horror that follows depends entirely on you believing in the world before it starts to fall apart.
David Dastmalchian is the reason it works as well as it does. Jack Delroy is a specific and difficult character to play — charming enough that you root for him, desperate enough that you worry about him, and ambiguous enough that you’re never entirely sure how much of what you’re watching is performance and how much is genuine. Dastmalchian holds all of that simultaneously without ever tipping his hand. It is the kind of performance that carries a film and makes it look effortless.
The supporting cast is strong across the board. Ian Bliss as Carmichael Haig — a sceptic in the mould of James Randi, brought in to debunk the evening’s supernatural claims — provides the film’s sharpest dramatic tension. His scenes with the psychic Christou (Fayssal Bazzi) have a wit and energy that the film is smart enough to lean into before pulling the rug. And Ingrid Torelli as Lilly — the possessed girl at the centre of the evening’s main event — is quietly unsettling in a way that builds slowly and then, in the film’s third act, stops being quiet at all.
Did You Know?
- On its opening Sunday in the US, Late Night with the Devil grossed exactly $666,666 at the box office. Whether that was engineered by the distributor or a genuine coincidence has never been confirmed — but it’s hard to imagine a better opening weekend number for a film about a deal with the devil.
- The film was made in Australia by two Australian brothers — Colin and Cameron Cairnes — but is set entirely in 1970s America. Every detail of the period, from the studio lighting to the costumes to the broadcast aesthetic, was constructed from scratch.
- The sceptic character Carmichael Haig is a direct nod to James Randi, the real-life paranormal debunker and magician who spent decades exposing fraudulent psychics and faith healers.
- Stephen King publicly praised the film, saying it was a movie he couldn’t take his eyes off. For a found footage horror film made on a modest budget, that kind of endorsement doesn’t happen often.
- The film premiered at SXSW in March 2023 but didn’t receive a wide US theatrical release until March 2024 — over a year later. It was added to Shudder just weeks after its cinema release.
- Three briefly featured still images in the film were generated using AI, which sparked a significant debate in the film community. The Cairnes brothers acknowledged the use and stated they had experimented with only those three images.
What I find most impressive about Late Night with the Devil is its patience. The film knows that horror landing in a familiar, comfortable setting hits harder than horror arriving in an already frightening one. So it spends its first half being genuinely entertaining — the talk show format is used with real wit, the guests are interesting, the dynamic between Delroy and his producer Leo (Josh Quong Tart) adds texture without slowing things down. By the time the evening starts to go wrong, you are invested in the show itself. You want it to succeed. That investment is precisely what the film uses against you.
The practical effects, when they arrive, are effective and deliberately of-their-era — there is a sequence involving worms that I will not describe further, except to say that it committed fully to what it was doing and I respected it enormously for that. The film earns its R rating without wallowing in it.
If there is a weakness, it is that the framing device — a documentary prologue that contextualises the broadcast before we watch it — tells us more than it perhaps should. We know going in that something terrible happened. The suspense is therefore not about whether things go wrong but about how, and how badly. For some viewers that will blunt the impact. I find it a defensible creative choice — the film is less interested in surprise than in dread, and dread requires knowing something is coming.
Verdict
Late Night with the Devil is the rare horror film that trusts its audience enough to take its time. It builds a world, populates it with characters worth watching, and then dismantles everything with precision and genuine menace.
It is also, I’d argue, one of the most intelligent uses of the found footage format since The Taking of Deborah Logan — a film that understood, as this one does, that the camera doesn’t just record what happens. Sometimes it is the reason it happens at all.
If you think found footage has run out of ideas, Late Night with the Devil will change your mind — and probably keep you away from late night television for a while.
Is Late Night with the Devil Found Footage?
Strictly speaking — it depends on your definition.
The film uses a professional multi-camera live broadcast rather than a single handheld camera. But the foundational conceit is pure found footage: we are watching material that was never supposed to be seen this way. A broadcast that went wrong. Behind-the-scenes footage that was never meant to air. Recovered evidence of something terrible.
I’d place it alongside Ghostwatch (1992) — a BBC broadcast that used television grammar to achieve the same effect found footage achieves with a shaky cam. Different aesthetic, same logic.
So yes — it belongs here. Just don’t expect Blair Witch.
Where to Watch Late Night With The Devil
Similar Films to Late Night with the Devil
The Taking of Deborah Logan (2014) — The closest comparison on this list. A documentary crew filming an Alzheimer’s patient slowly realises something else entirely is taking hold. The same slow build, the same use of a camera crew as witness, and a final act that goes to places you won’t see coming. The gold standard of possession found footage.
Ghostwatch (1992) — The film Late Night with the Devil owes the most to, whether it acknowledges it or not. A BBC live Halloween broadcast investigates a haunted house — and goes catastrophically wrong. Made for television, presented as real, and so convincing that it caused genuine public panic in the UK. Essential viewing as a genre artifact and still deeply unsettling today.
[REC] (2007) — A different format but the same core idea: a camera that was supposed to document something routine instead captures something that should never have been seen. Relentless where Late Night is patient, but the DNA is shared.
Videodrome (1983) — David Cronenberg’s body horror masterpiece about a television executive who discovers a broadcast signal that begins to alter reality. No found footage, no talk show — but the same obsession with what television does to the people who make it and the people who watch it. Darker, stranger, and completely essential.
The Eyes of Tammy Faye (2021) — Not horror, but hear me out. A true story about the performance of sincerity on television, the hunger for ratings, and what people sacrifice for the camera. Watching it after Late Night with the Devil reframes both films considerably.
