Presented as a "recovered broadcast" of a fictional 1977 talk show, the film spends its first half doing something rarer than scares: real formal craft. The band stings, the studio-audience laughter, the awkward pauses between segments all feel like an actual period broadcast, and tension builds through the mounting sense that the hosts are performing normalcy over something increasingly wrong backstage. David Dastmalchian, playing host Jack Delroy, carries the film's emotional weight: a man whose ambition and grief over his dead wife have made him easy to manipulate, smiling through a broadcast that's visibly falling apart around him.
The back half drops the talk-show conceit for full supernatural chaos once the possessed teenager's segment goes wrong, and the shift in register is jarring by design; the cutting to black-and-white behind-the-scenes footage to reveal what the cameras missed is one of the film's cleverer structural ideas. Some of the practical creature and possession effects are startling, staged with the confidence of directors who clearly grew up on 1970s and '80s horror. The satanic-panic-era setting also gives the film a sharp undercurrent about media exploitation; Delroy's crew is willing to risk a girl's safety for a ratings spike, and the film doesn't let that go unpunished.
A haunted-broadcast horror movie where the real monster is a ratings deadline.
Recommend this to fans of slow-building mockumentary horror in the vein of Ghostwatch, or anyone who likes supernatural horror filtered through a specific, well-researched period setting rather than a generic haunted house. It's a strong pick for a group watch, since the fake-broadcast format naturally builds toward communal jump-scares rather than isolated dread. Purists should know about a brief, controversial use of AI-generated stills for a few transition cards, which drew backlash disproportionate to their actual screen time but is worth knowing about going in.
Late Night with the Devil was written and directed by Australian filmmaking brothers Colin and Cameron Cairnes, previously known for the horror-comedy 100 Bloody Acres. It was financed as an Australia-US-UAE co-production between Spooky Pictures, Image Nation Abu Dhabi, and Australia's VicScreen, and filmed on a studio set built in Melbourne designed to replicate a 1970s American television studio down to period-accurate cameras and set dressing. The screenplay drew on real talk-show history, including the format of programs like The Tonight Show, and on satanic-panic-era news coverage from the late 1970s for its plot about an occult-themed ratings stunt.
The film premiered at Fantastic Fest in September 2023 before a wider theatrical and Shudder streaming release in March 2024, quickly becoming one of the platform's most talked-about original horror releases. It earned strong reviews for its structural conceit and Dastmalchian's performance, alongside a notable controversy over its brief use of AI-generated title-card imagery, which the directors said covered only three still images out of the finished film. Despite that dispute, it's widely regarded as one of the strongest found-footage-adjacent horror films of the mid-2020s and helped raise Dastmalchian's profile as a leading man.
