‘Late Night with the Devil’: Don’t Adjust Your Set For David Dastmalchian’s Halloween Special - Trailer

Mar 18

From Ryan Cordaro

I love a good high-concept horror movie. Even if the movie itself ends up being a little disappointing, I think an idea for a movie would be enough for me to give it a shot. The most recent example of this is Skinamarink, directed by Kyle Edward Ball. I had no idea what I was getting into when I was in the theater. All I knew was that there were kids as main characters and that all the windows and doors in their home had vanished. What I ended up getting was a terrifying experience that really only my first watch of The Exorcist ended up matching. IFC ended up releasing that film, so I decided that I’d keep an eye on whatever they release in the future. Late Night with The Devil is the latest horror movie in their catalog.

Late Night with The Devil is partially a found footage movie framed as a rediscovered master tape of an episode of a late night show, Night Owls with Jack Delroy. This is the variety show’s Halloween episode, where all hell breaks loose as Delroy interviews a parapsychologist promoting her new book and its subject, a teenager who was the sole survivor of a Satanic church’s mass suicide. I think IFC has been on a roll with their movies, at least with the ones I’ve heard of. Some of their recent movies, which includes the aforementioned Skinamarink, the BlackBerry biopic with Jay Baruchel and Glenn Howerton, and When Evil Lurks, an ultraviolent possession movie, are either some of my favorite movies of 2023 or haven’t left my mind since I’ve seen them. Committing to such a concept just makes me excited. On top of that, it’s nice to see such a wonderful actor like David Dastmalchian take a lead role.

The film stars David Dastmalchian (Oppenheimer, The Dark Knight), Laura Gordon (Foe, Saw V), Ian Bliss (the Matrix franchise, Stealth), Fayssal Bazzi (Shantaram, Peter Rabbit), Ingrid Torelli (Five Bedrooms, Bloom), Rhys Auteri, Georgina Hagi (Once Upon a Time, Snowpiercer), and Josh Quong Tart (Underbelly, All Saints).