TV hell: "Late Night with the Devil"

In the 2024 horror-premise stakes, doomed chatshow sure bests haunted swimming pool. Late Night with the Devil, a fair US calling card for Aussie siblings Colin and Cameron Cairnes (100 Bloody Acres), offers an American variant on the BBC's Ghostwatch or certain episodes of Inside No. 9, a series that has already given us cursed daytime quiz shows and a Satanic director's commentary. What we're looking at here is notionally the mastertape of one especially fateful edition of "Night Owls with Jack Delroy", a nightly gabfest broadcast out of New York with suave yet personally troubled Chicagoan Delroy (David Dastmalchian, not so far from Peter Serafinowicz's Wogan impersonation), perennial runner-up to ratings king Johnny Carson, at the helm. On Hallowe'en 1977, with viewing figures bottoming out altogether, "Night Owls" generated what the narrator in a scene-setting prologue describes as "the live TV event that shocked a nation", though it's a miracle anyone was still tuned in, given the laboured bits of comic business between Delroy and his bald sidekick Gus (Rhys Auteri), the hacky, date-specific monologue gags about President Carter's brother and baseball star Reggie Jackson, and the conveyor belt of bargain-basement guests, cranks and goofs to a man, where Carson presumably had Burt Reynolds and Carol Burnett the very same night. Frankly, it's a format that invites rejigging if not diabolical goosing - and it gets it, after Delroy makes the mid-show executive call that communing with the dark side will be a Nielsen winner.

It is, all in all, a very 21st century attempt to magick up the look and feel of downmarket 1970s broadcast television, assembled not with period tech but digital cameras, relatively sophisticated computer effects and controversial AI-generated show interstitials. The hair and wardrobe departments excel themselves - the sideburns and pantsuits are among the most convincing elements in play - and it's evident the Cairnes have studied hours of YouTube clips of Carson, Dick Cavett, Letterman et al., which is one way to get yourself on the radar of American horror studios. (The film was shot in Melbourne, with a mostly Antipodean cast; a lengthy pre-credit sequence of independent funding agency logos provides an early clue as to how the film was cobbled together.) What Late Night lacks is that nasty element of surprise its British predecessors had in spades. The episode of "Night Owls" we're watching goes downhill in more or less the way seasoned horror viewers will expect, and towards a writhing, taunting possessed-girl setpiece familiar not just from The Exorcist (whose Captain Howdy has an echo here in one "Mr. Wiggles") but from such recent knockoffs as The Pope's Exorcist. The glitzier context doesn't entirely help the Cairnes's cause, if unsettling us was among their ambitions. Unlike the domestic spaces and abandoned properties of other genre fare, the brightly lit chatshow set, with its fancy-dressed audience, cuts to adbreaks and words from the show's sponsors, proves too artificial (and, as viewed through the "Night Owls" cameras, too distancing) a location for anything unduly disconcerting to creep in. Very obviously a construct - though far from an unclever or wholly artless one - Late Night struck this viewer as a vessel primarily for the worst fears of showbiz people that the show might go wrong. A useful positioning role, nevertheless, for newly crowned supporting actor's supporting actor Dastmalchian, who demonstrates he can carry a film while playing slick and upright or rattled and chastened - only in the coda does he get to cut properly loose in the manner of his more effective, brooding-to-malevolent impact-sub roles.

Late Night with the Devil is now playing in selected cinemas.