Ending, Symbols & The Grove — Late Night with the Devil Explained

Man, this film stays with you.

I watched Late Night with the Devil expecting a solid found footage horror. What I got instead was a puzzle — one that kept revealing new layers the more I thought about it. The ending alone sent me down a two-hour research spiral. The Grove. The deal. Madeleine hidden in the frames. The skeleton. What Jack actually stabbed.

This article is everything I found. The full breakdown — with an original infographic mapping Jack’s deal and its consequences — of every symbol, every hidden detail, and every question the film leaves deliberately unanswered.

Let’s start where it all begins.

⚠️ Full spoilers from here. If you haven’t watched Late Night with the Devil yet — stop, watch it, come back. It’s worth going in blind. Our spoiler-free review is [here].

The Grove — Jack’s Deal With the Devil

Before anything else makes sense, you need to understand The Grove.

The Grove is an elite secret society — the kind that has existed in American folklore and conspiracy theory for decades, modelled loosely on real organisations like the Bohemian Club. In Late Night with the Devil, it’s a gathering of the rich, the famous, and the ambitious, meeting in the woods to perform occult rituals whose true nature is never fully revealed.

Jack Delroy joins The Grove before the events of the broadcast. The film never shows us the moment — no signing of a contract, no explicit exchange. And that’s deliberate. As David Dastmalchian confirmed in a Variety interview: “There’s no way Jack would have participated in that if he knew what would happen. It’s never overt. It’s a nudge on the shoulder, a whisper in the ear.”

Jack never made a deal with the devil in any conscious sense. He sat in the woods with powerful people, performed rituals he didn’t fully understand, and wanted success badly enough not to ask too many questions. That’s the horror of it — the deal doesn’t require your signature. It only requires your willingness to look away.closed loop taken to its absolute logical extreme. Watch it after Caddo Lake while the feeling is still fresh.

Madeleine — The Price of Fame

Madeleine Delroy never smoked a day in her life. She died of lung cancer.

The film plants this detail early and lets it sit there, unexplained. By the time you understand what it means, it’s already too late for everyone on stage.

The Grove’s price is never stated in advance. That’s the mechanism — you get what you want, and the cost is extracted from somewhere you weren’t looking. Jack wanted success. Night Owls climbed the ratings. And Madeleine, who had nothing to do with any of it, paid the price he never agreed to pay.

What makes this genuinely devastating is the question of guilt. Jack grieved. He took a hiatus. He came back to television carrying what appeared to be genuine sorrow. But somewhere underneath all of it was a knowledge he couldn’t fully look at — that his career and his wife’s death were connected, and that he had chosen one without knowing he was choosing both.

Dastmalchian addressed this directly: “I’m sure there were times he got lost in the moment and said things you might not otherwise say — that you would sacrifice anything to get what you want. But you have to be careful.”

The Grove heard him. The Grove always hears you.

Mr. Wriggles and the Demon Hierarchy

The demon possessing Lilly calls itself Mr. Wriggles — a name derived, as the film explains, from the way it “wriggles” into its host’s body during possession.

Mr. Wriggles is not the top of the hierarchy. He is a subordinate — specifically, a demon connected to Abraxas, the malignant entity that Szandor D’Abo and his cult worshipped. When the cult committed mass suicide by burning down their place of worship, Lilly was the sole survivor. Mr. Wriggles’ possession is implied to be the reason she lived — the demon protected its vessel.

What the film establishes, crucially, is that Mr. Wriggles has encountered Jack before. He tells Jack this during the broadcast — a detail that confirms the demon’s presence in Jack’s life predates Halloween night. The Grove didn’t just take Madeleine. It invited something in.

The Skeleton in the Audience

One of the film’s most discussed details — and one of its most unsettling.

A figure dressed as a skeleton sits in the studio audience throughout the broadcast. Most viewers assume it’s a Halloween costume. It isn’t.

Dastmalchian confirmed in interviews that the skeleton is a Grove member — sent to the studio to observe, and to collect. The Grove’s representative ensuring that the debt is paid. When the demon finally unleashes on Halloween night, the skeleton watches without intervening. Its job is not to stop what’s happening. Its job is to witness it.

I find this one of the film’s most quietly horrifying details precisely because it’s so easy to miss. The monster in the audience isn’t the possessed girl. It’s the figure in the skeleton costume who already knew what was coming.

The Ending Explained — What Really Happened

The demon’s final act is to give Jack exactly what he deserves — and nothing he wanted.

After Mr. Wriggles kills Gus, burns Carmichael, and strangles June, the studio descends into chaos. The audience flees. Jack is left alone on the stage — surrounded by the carnage of the evening that was supposed to save his career.

Then the hallucination begins.

From Jack’s point of view, he is transported back to the forest — The Grove’s meeting place. He is brought to a bedroom. Madeleine is there, alive but dying. She hands him the ceremonial knife recovered from Lilly’s cult. She begs him to end her suffering.

He stabs her.

He wakes on stage. It’s Lilly. She’s dead.

The demon gave Jack a vision in which killing felt like mercy — in which murder felt like love. And Jack, in his grief and his guilt and his desperation, did exactly what was asked of him. He became, in the end, the sacrifice he never consciously agreed to make.

“Dreamer. Here. Awake!” — What Does the Final Line Mean?

As Jack kneels in the wreckage of the studio, he repeats a phrase over and over:

“Dreamer. Here. Awake.”

This is Carmichael’s hypnosis mantra — the phrase he used throughout the broadcast to snap his subjects out of their trance. Jack, surrounded by death and unable to process what he has done, is trying to use it on himself. He wants to wake up. He wants this to be the dream and reality to be somewhere else.

Nothing happens.

The camera cuts to black. Jack doesn’t wake up because there is no waking up from this. Reality has already delivered its verdict. The hypnosis phrase works on suggestion and theatre — it cannot undo what the Grove’s bargain has set in motion.

It is perhaps the most desperate moment in the film. A man reaching for the tools of illusion and finding them useless against the truth.

Did Jack Know He Was Sacrificing His Wife?

This is the question the film is most careful not to answer directly — and the question Dastmalchian’s interview comes closest to resolving.

The short answer: no. Not consciously.

The longer answer: Jack knew enough not to look too closely. He joined The Grove. He performed rituals. He wanted success badly enough to sit in the woods with powerful people and not ask what any of it meant. When Madeleine got sick — when a woman who never smoked developed lung cancer — some part of him must have connected the dots. But connecting dots and accepting their conclusion are two different things.

“If someone had come up to Jack with a contract that said ‘For Night Owls to be number one, you’re going to have to kill Millie’ — there’s no way Jack would have participated in that,” Dastmalchian said. “There’s no way.”

The Grove doesn’t work that way. It never does.

Hidden in Plain Sight — The Symbols & Easter Eggs You Missed

This is the section that rewards a second viewing.

Madeleine in the frames. The most significant hidden detail in the film — and the one that went viral after eagle-eyed viewers on social media began pausing at key moments. Madeleine’s ghost is hidden in multiple frames throughout the broadcast. The first confirmed appearance: around the 8-minute mark, visible in a TV monitor behind Jack as he leans on a doorstep. She is present throughout the episode — watching, warning, unable to intervene. Similar to what Mike Flanagan did in The Haunting of Hill House, the Cairnes brothers hid her in plain sight, trusting that most viewers wouldn’t notice on a first watch.

The number 13. Appears repeatedly throughout the film in set details, background elements, and arrangements. A classic supernatural signifier — and in this film, a quiet marker of how long The Grove’s influence has been present in Jack’s life.

Occult props on the set. The studio dressing contains real occult symbols and imagery — books, objects, arrangements that hint at The Grove’s presence in Jack’s professional life from the very beginning. The set was never neutral. It was already consecrated.

The skeleton’s positioning. On a careful rewatch, the skeleton figure’s position in the audience shifts slightly between cuts — a detail the Cairnes brothers confirmed was deliberate. It is not static. It is watching.

Tarot imagery. The Devil card and associated tarot references are woven into the set design and background details throughout the broadcast — quietly foreshadowing the film’s conclusion for anyone paying close enough attention.

The Irony — The Show Was a Success

The final detail the film reveals — delivered almost as an afterthought, in the framing documentary that opens the broadcast — is perhaps its darkest.

The Halloween episode of Night Owls became the highest-rated episode in the show’s history.

The demon kept its end of the bargain. Jack wanted ratings. Jack got ratings. The cost was everyone on the stage, his own sanity, and Lilly D’Abo’s life.

The Grove always delivers. It simply never specifies how.

So…. What is the Movie Really About?

Strip away the demons, the possessions, the occult rituals, and Late Night with the Devil is a film about one thing: what people are willing not to know in pursuit of what they want.

Jack didn’t sell his soul. He simply never asked what he was buying. He sat in the woods, he performed the rituals, he wanted success badly enough to look away from the cost — and when the cost arrived, he carried it as grief rather than guilt, because grief is survivable and guilt is not.

The camera, in this film, doesn’t just record what happens. It bears witness to what Jack refused to see coming. And in the end, it captures the only truth The Grove ever offered: the deal always delivers. The price is always higher than anyone expected. And the show, God help us, must go on.

You’ve just read every spoiler in the film. You might as well read our full review of Late Night with the Devil too!