Late Night With The Devil Review

I didn't know anything this movie. It randomly arrived in theater with no fanfare, trailers, not even a poster. It is going away really fast too. Turns out the horror streaming service Shudder put it out for a limited time in theaters before making it exclusive online. The only other thing I knew about the movie was that they use AI art in part of the movie. I will get to that.

What's The Movie About?

The movie is essentially a found footage of the final episode of a fictional late night sketch show as well as behind the scenes footage detailing what went down to make it the final episode.

What I Like.

To start with, I liked all the characters. Most of them are selfish or jerks, but I still empathized with a good chunk, liked their motivations, and was invested with their role in the plot. A highlight for me was the stage magician skeptic character, if someone makes me play Call of Cthulhu ever again I want to play that guy. I quite like the set up and staging of the story, it built tension wonderfully. I also really liked the back drop of seventies cultural revolution, and more specifically, the satanic panic. It does telegraph some of the reveals but there isn't a huge mystery to the story so I didn't mind.

But my favorite thing is thus: Late Night With the Devil is an analogue horror story higher budget. (Or at least a higher budget than the typical YouTube videos that employ this style of horror.) What that means is that the movie emulates older forms of media, complete with glitched visuals and audio, and the movie uses it to find a subtler narrative underneath the upfront story. I really like analogue horror when it is done well. It can create some of the most disturbing ideas and presentations in horror. Some analogue horror can be too vague, where it's just weird shit with no context because the creators figure the fans will piece together anything and that justifies them barely writing a story. It works best when there is a complete narrative with creepier hints sprinkled throughout that imply a darker story. Which is what Late Night With The Devil does. I will say the secondary story might be a bit too obvious, I picked it up on my first time watching and most people I talked to figured it out as well. But I vastly prefer that to seemingly random bullshit that we'll just let the internet figure out what it means. 

What I Didn't Like.

Three things. One, there is a coda at the beginning of the movie setting up the movie itself as lost footage being shown as the movie you are watching. But there is no coda at the end. The movie just kinda stops after the finale. It just feels like a loose end that could have easily been tied, and hell, even set up a sequel or connected movie. I'd watch more of these kinds of movies.

Two, while the gore effects are good, the rest are not. Honestly, they are so bad it takes away from the horror of the movie. There was only one scene I thought was scary, and it was because of those great gore effects. But there is a part where a character vomits themselves to death and I wasn't scared at all because of the clearly fake puke.

And three, the AI art. Here we fucking go. When I first heard about it, I assumed it was abstract art. So I just rolled my eyes and said "You really couldn't just splash some paint on a poster board and film it or something? Hell, give a production member's toddler 5 bucks to scribble all over some paper." But watching the movie, the AI artwork is actually supposed to resemble objects, such as a television, owl, and skeleton. Imagine me rubbing my face with both hands when I say Jesus H Fucking Christ. To start with, it looks bad. AI art does not do details properly at all, giving it any amount of scrutiny reveals how bad it is. Also, you couldn't just take ten minutes in photoshop to put an owl on an old tv? Pay a fucking artist to make art, don't use AI! It's objectively not that bad of an addition to the movie, but we can give no quarter on this issue. The moment that corporations replacing job with AI becomes normalized is the moment that we lose.

Final Summation.

I thought Late Night With The Devil was incredibly interesting and quite good. I wasn't being facetious when I said I would watch more of these kinds of movies. Analogue horror is a extremely fun method of story telling, if you do it right. And I think this particular setting could be expanded in quite a number of directions. Or if the Shudder studios want to keep making this kind of horror with different ideas, I would be down for that as well.