When it comes to slow burns (no Hades pun intended), few films of recent memory have been as deft at it as Late Night With the Devil. Directed by Colin and Cameron Cairnes, an Australian brother duo that just might end up replacing the recently disbanded Safdie brothers, the film’s premise is unlike anything viewers have seen before. While, sure, a few narratives of the past have been structured in such a way as to make people believe they’re “real” (e.g., the first radio broadcast of Orson Welles’ acting out H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds or Stephen Volk’s Ghostwatch), the Cairnes brothers go well beyond merely sticking within the confines of a stylistic conceit (in this case, the late-night talk show). Instead, they employ numerous forms of “viewership” to ensure as many aspects of the story can be absorbed. And it is one doozy of a story.
Commencing with a documentary-like collage of images that establish the mood of the U.S. in the 1970s—which was one of rebellion, disappointment and increasing mistrust in governmental institutions—the Cairnes provide all the context necessary to understand 1) why more people might turn to “dark forces” in dark times and 2) why there was a sudden conservative spike in terms of moral panic. Amid all this was a seemingly inevitable wave of satanic panic, spurred by not only an ostensible lack of “goodness” in a post-1960s world, but also by films like 1973’s The Exorcist. In some ways, perhaps the only thing people could come up with to explain the absurdity, the total “godlessness” of modern existence at that time was demonic possession. Thus, no wonder that, at one point during the “archival footage” of this “documentary” intro to the “episode” of the “late-night show” itself, we hear a booming voice pronounce, “We are entering a satanic age, anyone who can’t see that is blind!”
Fittingly, the founder of the Church of Satan, Anton LaVey, founded said church in 1966, declaring that year as the kickoff for the “Age of Satan” (which is surely still ongoing). As for the documentary model implemented to give viewers an understanding of the fraught period, 70s horror movies themselves are no stranger to using news footage and sound bites to set the dreary, macabre tone of the day (the most obvious film to do that being The Texas Chain Saw Massacre).
As the invisible narrator puts it in Late Night With the Devil, “Television documents the chaos. Beams the horror into our living room…but it also offers comfort.” And, on that note, there is a lead-in to how one such “comfort” was a late-night show called Night Owls with Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian). Meant to be a competing show with late-night institution The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. And yes, the late-night show during this particular decade had started to hit its stride, both in terms of model and influence. In discussing their inspiration behind using late-night TV as storytelling conduit, the Cairnes brothers’ acknowledged their own fascination with the odd, hypnotic power of late-night shows at that time, remarking, “Talk shows in particular were a window into some strange adult world. We thought combining that charged, live-to-air atmosphere with the supernatural could make for a uniquely frightening film experience.” Indeed it does—in addition to continuing a theme in their work established by Scare Campaign (also centered on a premise involving things going horribly wrong on a TV show).
Night Owls arrives onto the late-night landscape at the outset of the decade—April 4, 1971—just as the wave of spooks and kooks begins to crescendo off the Manson murders of 1969, which ended up tying back into 1968’s Rosemary’s Baby, what with the most famous Manson murder victim, Sharon Tate, being married to the film’s director, Roman Polanski. Inciting increased interest in cults, as well as the demonic and paranormal, real-life talk shows like The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson would invite “psychics” and “telekinetics” on to showcase their “powers.” There was no better example of that than Uri Geller, who first appeared on The Tonight Show in 1973. In Late Night With the Devil, the Geller foil is clearly Christou (Fayssal Bazzi), a “medium” and “spiritualist” who serves as the first guest for Jack’s Halloween special on October 31, 1977. In tapping “otherworldly” beings or those in touch with them to appear on the special, Jack’s determination to ensure a ratings spike for sweeps week is evident. And all part of his general desperation upon returning to late-night TV after a year-long hiatus in the wake of his wife Madeleine’s (Georgina Haig) death from lung cancer (as the narrator of the initial “documentary” portion is sure to mention, Madeleine wasn’t even a smoker).
By the end of Christou’s performance, he’s managed to genuinely commune with “the other side,” briefly possessed by the spirit of “Minnie,” a moniker that Jack later admits was his nickname for Madeleine. The next guest on the show, Carmichael Haig (Ian Bliss), a “conjurer”-turned-leading force in the skeptics movement seems to be another foil for a real-life skeptic who was dead-set on debunking Geller’s charlatanism: James Randi. A former magician himself, Randi was also a leading voice in the “skeptics movement,” as well as a co-founder of The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP). Carmichael, too, is a co-founder of a similar organization called IFSIP—International Federation of Scientific Investigation into the Paranormal. And he’s willing to pay $500,000 to anyone who can genuinely prove that their “paranormal activity” isn’t mere trickery.
This ties in seamlessly to the next guest, Lilly (Ingrid Torelli), and her therapist/guardian, June Ross-Mitchell (Laura Gordon). Having taken Lilly on as a client after she was the sole survivor among the members of an Abraxas-worshiping Satanic church (in California, of course) that commits a mass suicide while in a standoff with police, June quickly learns that her new charge is possessed. She manages to control that possession through various therapeutic techniques including hypnosis. When Jack strong-arms June into bringing out the demon Lilly calls “Mr. Wriggles,” we see through “backstage archival footage” that she is extremely against it…and also that it’s obvious the two are “dating.” Or perhaps Jack is just using her as “good TV ratings material.” Either way, she concedes to “unleash the beast” within Lilly, much to the detriment of Jack as “Mr. Wriggles” seems to know a lot about his personal life.
His relationship to this demon was presaged by a very blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment at the outset of Late Night With the Devil, during which Jack tells his audience in the first episode, “Thank you for allowing me into your living rooms for the first of what I hope will be many, many shows.” He then throws his hands up into prayer pose. But it isn’t God who will respond to that prayer. No, no—instead, a Faustian pact is made (further sealed by whatever nefarious activities Jack gets up to in “The Grove,” a well-known “summer retreat” among the Redwoods of Marin and Sonoma for prominent men in politics, business and the arts). That much is all the more confirmed when Lilly, still “unpossessed,” creepily tells Jack during their interview, “And you needn’t worry about your TV show. I think you’re gonna be very famous soon.”
By the time the Halloween special is over, Lilly’s prophecy will become quite true. Just not in the way Jack had hoped. But such is the risk of making a deal with the devil—you never know what’s really in the fine print. And as the credits roll to the tune of Flo & Eddie’s “Keep It Warm,” viewers will hear a pointed message (just as satanic panickers were convinced teenages could hear such pointed messages in music from the likes of Black Sabbath and Judas Priest) in the opening lines, “Write another song for the money/Something they can sing, not so funny/Money in the bank to keep us warm.” The implication being not only the emphasis America puts on money (and fame) as a “value” (to such an extent that it’s supposed to “replace” or “substitute” actual love), but also the idea that money is a source of eternal hellfire (it ain’t called “the root of all evil” for nothin’), with the flames keeping the men who obsess over it very warm indeed. Until it ends up burning them entirely. Not to mention the rest of the world along with them.
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