What if the scariest thing about possession isn't the demon — it's the guy who invited it in?
That's the question sitting right at the cold, flickering heart of Late Night with the Devil (2023), and it's one hell of a question to build a horror movie around. The Cairnes brothers — Cameron and Colin — took a concept so simple it almost sounds like a joke: a 1970s late-night talk show goes catastrophically wrong on Halloween night. But what they actually made is something much stranger and much sadder than a gimmick. It's a tragedy dressed up as a monster movie, and it uses the warm, cheesy glow of retro television to make you feel safe right before it pulls the floor out from under you.
What's the Setup?
The film presents itself as a recently unearthed "master tape" of a real 1977 broadcast — a Halloween Sweeps Week special for a syndicated late-night show called Night Owls, hosted by the charming and deeply desperate Jack Delroy. A brief documentary prologue (narrated by the great Michael Ironside) sets the stage: Jack is perpetually second place to Johnny Carson, his beloved wife Madeleine just died of a mysterious lung cancer, his ratings are in freefall, and he's running out of time to save his show.
So Jack does what any reasonable man would do. He books a psychic, a professional skeptic, a parapsychologist, and a teenager who may or may not be possessed by a demon. You know. For ratings.
The film cuts between the broadcast footage — glossy, multi-camera, with that flat 1970s TV lighting — and black-and-white behind-the-scenes footage shot backstage during commercial breaks. It's a brilliant structural move because it puts you in two places at once. You're watching the show, but you're also watching the people making the show sweat through their shirts.
The Story — A Night That Goes Very, Very Wrong
Late Night with the Devil unfolds in something close to real time, and it earns every minute of its 95-minute runtime.
The first guest is Christou, a theatrical psychic in flowing robes who does the standard cold-reading stuff until — and this is where it stops being fun — he genuinely connects with something in the room. Something dark. He identifies it only as "Minnie," which the audience comes to understand is a nickname for Jack's dead wife. Christou's segment ends with him vomiting thick black tar across the stage and collapsing. He's rushed out in an ambulance. The crowd is stunned. Jack keeps smiling, because that's what Jack does.
Next up is Carmichael Haig, a former stage magician turned professional skeptic, who immediately dismisses the whole thing as cheap theater. He offers a giant novelty check to anyone who can prove the supernatural under controlled conditions. Carmichael is smug, condescending, and absolutely certain he's the smartest person in the room. He's also, as the night goes on, absolutely wrong.
Then comes the centerpiece: Dr. June Ross-Mitchell, a parapsychologist, and her teenage patient Lilly D'Abo — the sole survivor of a Satanic cult called the Church of Abraxas. Lilly, June explains, is periodically possessed by an entity she calls "Mr. Wriggles." Jack pushes June to conjure the demon live on air. June, despite her better judgment, agrees. Because fame is a hell of a drug.
The possession that follows is terrifying in a way that doesn't lean on jump scares. The demon — speaking through Lilly — knows things. It knows about Jack's involvement with "The Grove," a secretive men's club in the California redwoods. It knows about his affair with June. And it seems to know about a deal Jack made a long time ago, under some very tall trees, that cost him something he can never get back.
When Carmichael tries to debunk the possession with a mass hypnosis demonstration — making the whole studio audience believe they're watching worms pour out of the sidekick Gus's body — the film does something genuinely clever. The tape playback confirms it was all a hallucination. The worms weren't real. But during the tape review, something else appears: the ghostly figure of Jack's dead wife, standing right behind him on stage. That one's real. And Carmichael can't explain it.
From there, the show collapses completely. A second, far more violent possession tears the studio apart. Lilly's head splits open with a lava-like glow from inside. The demon kills Gus, snaps June's neck with her own necklace, and burns Carmichael alive — alongside his skeptic's check, which is honestly a nice touch.
Then the film shifts into Jack's fractured mind, and the truth comes out. Jack made a deal. He traded his wife's soul for television success. He knew. And now, tricked by the demon's illusions, he plunges an occult dagger into what he thinks is Madeleine's suffering body — and snaps back to reality to find Lilly dead at his feet. Surrounded by corpses. Police sirens in the distance.
The last thing we hear him say, over and over, is the hypnotic trigger phrase from Carmichael's act earlier in the night: "Dreamer, here, awake."
He's hoping it's all been a dream. It hasn't.
Behind the Screams — How They Built a 1977 TV Show in 2022
The production of Late Night with the Devil is a story worth telling on its own, because it's genuinely impressive what they pulled off for under $2 million.
First, the set. Instead of building a fake TV studio on a soundstage, the Cairnes brothers rented Stage 5 at Docklands Studios in Melbourne — an actual, functioning television broadcast studio. That meant real lighting grids, real broadcast floors, real audience seating. The cast and crew were literally inside a working TV studio, and it shows in every frame.
Then there's the look of the film. Cinematographer Matthew Temple didn't use vintage tube cameras — that would have sacrificed too much image quality. Instead, he shot on Sony Venice cameras in 4K. But here's the clever part: he mounted them on heavy, period-accurate studio pedestal bases and specifically hired operators who had spent years working with that equipment. The result is that the camera movement has the right weight and rhythm. The zooms feel slightly clunky in exactly the right way.
The color grade is where things get really interesting. The post-production team at Post Lab IO didn't just slap a film grain filter on the footage and call it a day. They actually ran a rough cut of the movie through a real, physical vintage U-matic tape deck to see what authentic analog degradation looked like. When that turned out to be too glitchy for narrative clarity, they recorded thousands of color patches onto physical U-matic tape, fed the data into software, and built a custom Look-Up Table that accurately mimicked the specific color shifts and phosphor blooming of 1970s NTSC broadcasting — without sacrificing the ability to actually follow the story. They verified the final grade on a vintage CRT monitor. The whole process took 12 months.
Three hundred visual effects shots are in the film, and most viewers can't spot them. That's because the directors pushed practical effects hard whenever possible. The head split, the blood, the puppetry for Mr. Wriggles — all physical, on-camera work. The tactile quality of those moments is a big part of why they hit as hard as they do.
And the 20-day shoot? That's not a typo. They made this whole thing in 20 days.
What It's Really About — Fame, Guilt, and the Devil You Feed
On the surface, Late Night with the Devil is a possession movie. Underneath, it's a story about what people are willing to sacrifice for success — and who ends up paying the price.
Jack Delroy isn't a villain in the traditional sense. He's a deeply broken man who made a terrible choice and has been running from it ever since. The film draws a line from his deal with The Grove (a thinly veiled stand-in for the real Bohemian Grove, the secretive California retreat for powerful men that's been the subject of conspiracy theories for decades) all the way to Madeleine's death, seven years later. Seven years — exactly the length of a classic demonic pact in folklore. Jack got his ratings. He got his fame. And his wife died for it.
The film is also a sharp piece of media satire. Dr. Ross-Mitchell and Lilly are directly modeled on the real-life case behind the 1980 book Michelle Remembers, which helped spark the Satanic Panic by publishing wildly debunked claims of recovered memories of ritual abuse. The film points out, pretty clearly, that the media didn't just report on the Satanic Panic — it fed it, amplified it, and made money off it. Putting a traumatized cult survivor on live television for Sweeps Week isn't just exploitation. It's the whole business model.
And then there's Carmichael's hypnosis demonstration — the moment where the film makes its most interesting argument. Television, it suggests, is already a machine for making people believe things that aren't there. The demon isn't that different from the camera. Both of them are broadcasting directly into your living room, asking you to trust what you're seeing.
The demon stares straight into the lens during Lilly's possessions. It's looking at you.
The Verdict — Critical Love, Box Office Records, and One Cursed Number
Late Night with the Devil premiered at SXSW in March 2023 and landed a 97% Certified Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes upon its theatrical release in March 2024. Critics praised its period accuracy, its control of tone, and David Dastmalchian's performance. Stephen King called it "brilliant" and said he couldn't look away. That's not a bad endorsement.
At the box office, the film opened in 1,034 theaters and pulled in $2.8 million its opening weekend — the highest opening weekend in IFC Films history at that point. It went on to gross roughly $10 million domestically and another $6.8 million internationally, all on a budget of under $2 million.
But the number everyone talked about was $666,666 — the amount the film reportedly earned on Sunday of its opening weekend. Whether that's a genuine statistical coincidence or a very clever bit of distributor math, nobody's quite confirmed. Either way, it was perfect marketing for a movie about a deal with the devil.
The AI art controversy briefly threatened to overshadow the release. Sharp-eyed viewers noticed that a few of the interstitial graphics — the "We'll Be Right Back" bumper cards — appeared to be AI-generated. Given the timing (right after the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, where AI was a major flashpoint), the backlash was fast and loud. The directors confirmed they'd used AI for three brief still images, clarified they'd been further edited by hand, and emphasized the enormous human labor that went into everything else. The boycott didn't materialize into any real box office damage. The film made its money and moved to Shudder.
Horror Fan Corner — Trivia, Easter Eggs, and Hidden Ghosts
Here's where it gets fun.
The seven-year pact. Demonic folklore says a deal with the devil comes due in seven years. Jack mentions visiting The Grove in 1969. Madeleine dies in 1976. Seven years. Right on time.
Calendar accuracy. The directors chose 1977 specifically because it's the only year in the entire 1970s decade where Halloween fell on a Monday — a realistic night for a Sweeps Week late-night special. They cared that much.
The foreshadowing is brutal. Carmichael promises early in the show to make the sidekick Gus's "head spin." The demon later twists Gus's head 180 degrees. Jack calls Carmichael "all wax, no wick." Carmichael dies by fire. The script is littered with this stuff.
The hidden ghost sightings. Long before Madeleine's ghost makes her unmistakable appearance during the tape playback, she's been hiding in the background the whole time. She's on a studio monitor behind Jack's desk at the 8-minute mark. She's visible near Jack while Christou is in agony at 19 minutes. She's in a stage mirror at 24 minutes. During Lilly's first possession, her face briefly manifests on the back of Lilly's head. These aren't easter eggs you stumble on — they're the whole emotional architecture of the film. Jack is literally surrounded by his guilt from the first minute, and he can't see any of it.
Ian Bliss as Carmichael. He stepped into the role with four days of prep after the original actor dropped out. Four days. And he delivered one of the film's most memorable performances, modeled closely on real-life skeptic James Randi.
Final Thoughts
Late Night with the Devil works because it never forgets that Jack Delroy is a real person who did something terrible and has to live with it. The horror elements are great — genuinely unsettling, well-executed, and built on a solid practical-effects foundation. But the reason the ending lands as hard as it does is because you understand, by the time you get there, exactly what Jack traded away and why. The demon didn't make him do it. The demon just collected.
It's also one of the best arguments in recent memory for what independent horror can do with a tight budget, a smart concept, and complete commitment to the bit. The 1970s aesthetic isn't just window dressing. It's the whole point. The warm, familiar glow of late-night television is exactly what makes the darkness feel so cold when it finally shows up.
We covered Late Night with the Devil on the podcast — go check out the episode for the full breakdown, the Critic's Crypt rating, and a lot of tangents about Satanic Panic we probably should have trimmed.