A snippet of the theatrical release poster for the movie "Late Night with the Devil." A man stands dressed in a retro-style suit with a tie, one hand in his pocket and the other gesturing as if making a point. His head is engulfed in flames. Image courtesy of google creative commons.
BY SARAH BERGER ’27
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT EDITOR
The horror genre has grown stale in recent years, but “Late Night with the Devil” is fun, refreshing and creepy. It packs in several tropes but offers an original spin on each one. It’s mysterious without being incoherent, scary without being gratuitous and a genuinely good watch.
“Late Night With the Devil” stars David Dastmalchian as Jack Delroy, a late-night television host creating a memorable Halloween special to boost his ratings. Set in the 1970s, Delroy invites a medium, a skeptic, a parapsychologist and a purported victim of satanic abuse onto his show, all of whom have varying opinions on the supernatural, and allows them to perform and converse with each other. Throughout the recording, Delroy oscillates between priggish and charming. Although he seemingly wants to avoid conflict, the constant desire for ratings causes him to instigate it at inopportune times, often at the expense of others. Interpersonal conflict soon mixes with supernatural occurrences, culminating in a gory finish.
Given that Delroy’s wife Madeline had recently died of cancer, the film suffers a bit from the “dead wife” trope. Viewers are told repeatedly how much they cared for each other, but not shown anything that supports the reality of their relationship. She isn’t a character so much as a backdrop for him to project his darkness onto. As a result, it is harder to empathize with his grief, and some of his actions come off as more grating than they are meant to be.
Frequent cuts away from the show, while perhaps necessary, sometimes break the tension that has been building throughout the film. The movie would have been much more effective if it was confined to the show and if we, as viewers, experienced the events in the studio with the same degree of knowledge as your average in-movie audience member. The chaos behind the set reminds us that the show’s events do not extend to the rest of the world, reducing the abject misery they might otherwise create. Although, granted, abject misery isn’t exactly the movie’s vibe so much as camp is.
Thankfully, Dastmalchian easily rises above the movie’s flaws. He puts on a performance absolutely worthy of a leading man. The cast as a whole does an excellent job of elevating their characters to realism. Ingrid Torelli as the satanic abuse victim brings at least 50% of the movie’s creepiness on her own with a few well-placed stares. Rhys Auteri makes a genuine, believable assistant to Delroy, and his likeability helps to make some of the movie’s events all the more devastating. Ian Bliss plays a skeptic so well that you’ll begin to wish the devil would appear just to prove him wrong. The set is genuinely interesting, and in a genre where plot tends to take precedence over aesthetics, it makes for an immersive and fresh watch. It captures the ’70s without being boring or stereotypical.