Can ‘Late Night With The Devil’ Overcome Controversy?
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Right now the Late Night With the Devil conversation online is being dominated by AI art controversy. If you don’t know, there are two shots of title cards in this movie that use AI-generated art and the internet has some very strong opinions about it.
But controversy aside, does Late Night with the Devil live up to the previous hype surrounding the film?
This movie is the story of Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian), a late-night talk show host who seems willing to do almost anything for ratings. During a Halloween broadcast, he invites on several supernatural-themed guests: a psychic medium (Fayssal Bazzi), a skeptic (Ian Bliss), a parapsychologist (Laura Gordon), and a girl who claims to be possessed by a demon (Ingrid Torelli). And things get wild.
This movie is done in found-footage style with the “master recordings” of Jack’s show serving as the bulk of what we see.
It’s great at capturing that 1970s television feel, from the sets to the costumes, to the performances from the actors. It feels vintage in a way that adds to the creepiness because TV of that era had a weird, underlying corniness that felt like it could be masking something darker.
The story is engaging because we already know things are going to go very, very wrong with this show and we’re waiting for everything to erupt. And it definitely does.
I’m not much of a horror movie kind of gal, mostly because I’m a scary cat, but I was super impressed with this. It’s not overly gory and most of the tension comes from an uneasiness as characters keep pushing things just a little bit farther in each scene.
So I will say, outside of the AI controversy, I think this is a great movie, but I also completely understand people who want to draw the line on the use of AI in film and who are really let down that such a great film was brought down a few notches by the use of AI art.
