[COLUMN] Late Night with the Devil Imagines Late Night as a Liminal Space | by Darren Mooney  (Patreon)

NOTE: This piece contains spoilers for Last Night with the Devil. If you want to watch, you can bookmark this article and come back. This is a pretty solid week for new releases, but Last Night with the Devil is especially great.

Late Night with the Devil is a horror set in the liminal space of late night television.

The film purports to be a recording of a long-lost episode of the fictional late night chat show Night Owls, hosted by “Mr. Midnight” himself, Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian). An introductory montage and voiceover (curtesy of Michael Ironside) provides the necessary historical and social context for the recording, laying out the path to the broadcast. It positions Delroy, still grieving the loss of his wife Madeliene (Georgina Haig), as a rival of chat show icon Johnny Carson.

Floundering in the ratings and desperately grasping at relevance, Delroy concocts an ambitious scheme. On Halloween night 1977, Delroy conspires with pop psychiatrist June Ross-Mitchell (Laura Gordon) to stage and broadcast a demonic summoning as part of the show, using child abuse survivor Lilly D’Abo (Ingrid Torelli). The evening’s other guests include the successful psychic Christou (Fayssal Bazzi) and magician-turned-professional-skeptic Carmichael Haig (Ian Bliss).

Naturally, things go very wrong. Late Night with the Devil is very obviously a love letter to 1970s American pop culture. The film takes its cues from classics like Rosemary’s Baby and Network. “The Exorcist was obviously at the forefront of our minds making this film, and I feel like it’s at the forefront of our characters’ minds as well,” acknowledged Cameron Cairnes, who directed the movie with his brother Colin. The pair also alluded to The King of Comedy and The Parallax View.

The film’s influences extend beyond horror cinema into a broader cultural milieu. Delroy is revealed to be a member of a secret society known as “the Grove”, an obvious allusion to the real-life Bohemian Grove, to the point that the film is saturated with conspiratorial owl imagery. It is revealed that Lilly was the survivor of a cult that committed mass suicide when confronted by law enforcement, an invocation of both the satanic panic of the era and the fate of various real-life cults.

However, Late Night with the Devil is a movie that is fundamentally about television as a medium. The movie’s basic concept is an allusion to various live broadcasts gone awry, such as Christine Chubbuck’s on-air suicide in 1974. The fact that the tape presented as a piece of lost media recently recovered evokes the reality that so much of television’s history is ephemeral. If the audience wasn’t watching the right channel at the right time, a moment could be lost to history.

Late Night with the Devil opens by screening footage from the late 1960s: civil unrest, the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement. It’s visceral and unsettling, a real-life horror that informs so much of what would follow. Indeed, it’s possible to understand so much actual 1970s horror, including movies like The Exorcist, as a visceral and emotional reaction to those traumas captured in that news footage. However, it isn’t just that those things were happening, it was that they were televised.

It is one thing to read about this chaos and instability, to understand these events academically or abstractly. It is something completely different to witness them firsthand, broadcast into homes around America. In 1950, fewer than 10% of American homes had televisions. By 1960, that number had climbed to 90%. Marshall McLuhan would argue in 1964 that “the medium is the message”, that information or content is less important than how it is being conveyed.

As early as 1967, Vietnam was being discussed as “television’s war.” The conflict wasn’t just happening half-the-world away, it was being transmitted into the living rooms of the majority of the American population. President Lyndon B. Johnson admitted concern about how “television [brought] the war into the American home.” There’s an urban legend that Johnson responded to Walter Cronkite’s cynicism of the war by lamenting, “If I’ve lost Conkrite, I’ve lost Middle America.”

There was also a broader concern about the impact of television on the American consciousness. In 1961, Newton N. Minow infamously described television as “a vast wasteland.” Even before Delroy introduces June and Lilly, Late Night with the Devil understands that television is something of a conjuring ritual. It makes things real. It warps time and space. Like most media, it can be a window or a mirror – but it can also be a portal. What travels through that portal?

There are late night television shows around the globe. Indeed, the longest running live chat show in the world is The Late Late Show in Ireland. However, the late night show is still a particularly American concept. Discussing his docu-series The Story of Late-Night, producer John Ealer argued that the history of the late night chat show is “the story of America.” Writing for CNN, Jacqui Polumbo described these late night talk shows as “part of Americans’ nightly rituals.”

There’s an inherent unreality to the format, manifesting itself in various uncanny ways. There’s the awkward banter, the carefully controlled studio audience, the painfully rehearsed “bits.” There is something unnatural about all this, no matter how hard the hosts might try to put the viewer at ease, evident in something as basic as the set design. These shows often unfold against a model backdrop of a skyline, a simulacrum of a city in miniature, a wall styled like a window.

The late show is itself a fascinating concept. These shows can often feel like they are designed to guide the audience to sleep. Indeed, according to an LG Electronics Survey, 61% of Americans fall asleep with the television on. Given that other studies suggest that people falling asleep to television tend to be older, it seems likely that they are watching the broadcast networks, and so are likely drifting in and out of consciousness while watching these late night broadcasts.

These shows occupy a liminal space between waking and dreaming. The idea of hypnosis and trance comes up repeatedly in Late Night with the Devil, particularly as Carmichael attempts to debunk June’s work with Lilly. In 1978, advertising executive Jerry Mander wrote Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, drawing on McLuhan’s observations to argue that television itself – with its images conjured from rapidly-flashing patterns of lights and dots – was quite literally hypnotic.

The format is also inherently intimate. A television personality is different from a movie star. A movie star is defined by their unattainability, their distance between them and the audience. In contrast, a television personality has a much stronger emotional connection to their audience, as weekly (or even nightly) guests in viewers’ homes. Despite working for decades and winning an Academy Award as a movie star, Robin Williams would still be greeted as his television character, Mork from Ork, because “it’s just what people remember.”

This is particularly true in late night television, with hosts speaking directly to the camera, addressing their audience through monologues. It is possible to forge a real connection through such a broadcast. Johnny Carson was a famously private individual, but through his talk show became “one of the most trusted and famous men in America.” Despite his unknowability, audiences felt close to him. As critic John Doyle put it, there was a sense that “what you saw on TV is what you got.”

Jack Delroy adopts a similar approach. He speaks very openly and candidly to his viewers. He begins every broadcast by greeting his audience, “Good evening, night owls. And thank you for allowing me into your living rooms, once again.” Delroy flatters his audience, “We all know how important it is to keep our sponsors and affiliates happy, but – in my humble opinion – there is only one person who really matters in this whole darn crazy business: and that is you, our viewer.”

Indeed, Delroy fosters this sense of connection by pouring himself into the show, for the audience’s consumption. When his wife Madeliene is diagnosed with a terminal illness, he turns it into fodder for an interview that becomes his highest-rated episode ever. When Madeliene passes, Delroy seems to channel his remaining energy into the show, trying to will it to success as a means of healing himself. He talks openly to the audience about how much he is thankful for their support.

As such, even before anything supernatural starts happening, there is a sense of television as a conduit. It is a point of connection, a signal tying a nation together, broadcast into the homes of an audience slipping between dreams and reality. Lilly instinctively stares into the right camera, following each cut. There is a lingering question about who is feeding on whom. The relationship between Delroy and his audience is something close to mutual dependence. It is certainly unhealthy.

“I really hope you love it,” Delroy begs the audience at the top of the show. “Gosh, I hope you love it. Please love it.” When June is reluctant to conjure the demonic entity inside Lilly, Delroy prompts the audience to goad her into pressing ahead. Delroy is desperate for ratings that will grant him autonomy from the network and sponsors, but the audience is eager to consume whatever he has to offer. At the movie’s climax, as reality unspools, Delroy begs the viewer to stop watching. We don’t.

It takes a while for things to come completely undone in Late Night with the Devil. One of the film’s darker jokes is the sense that even a demonic force is no match for the rigid format of late night television production. “Ladies and gentlemen, please stay tuned for a live television first, as we attempt to commune with the devil,” Delroy promises his audience, right before cutting to commercials. It seems that American television must adhere to its own rituals.

The subtext underpinning Late Night with the Devil is not subtle. In a very literal sense, it is a horror movie built around the notion that the unreal intimacy of television broke America’s sense of reality, that insanity of the 1960s and 1970s might have been rooted in real events happening across the country, but it spread into American homes through this young medium. Central to the belief of the cultists who abused Lilly is the idea that even witnessing one of their macabre rituals can stain a soul.

More metaphorically, Late Night with the Devil resonates in an era defined by America’s “first true reality TV President.” If anything, the internet and smartphones have only served to make media even more unreal and even more intimate. If Mander was correct to argue that television was hypnotic, it’s almost impossible to imagine how profoundly social media might have warped the perceptions and reality of the audience using it. What demons travel through it?

Late Night with the Devil isn’t the only recent horror film unsettled by the power of television. Jane Schoenbrun's I Saw the TV Glow recently premiered at Sundance, another movie about how the medium warps reality. It is possible these films are tapping into anxieties about the shifting media landscape, just as 1950s cinema worried about television eating into theatrical audiences. They might also speak to a moment when viewers can no longer trust what they see on their screens.

At the climax of Late Night with the Devil, as Delroy loses control of the show, the screen cuts to static. In that visual noise, the audience eventually discerns a monstrous face staring out at them. Perhaps the devil’s been there all along, just buried in the signal.