While horror films often struggle to find an original storyline to stir their audiences into a frenzy, there’s no question that actor-producer David Dastmalchian’s new demonic thriller Late Night with the Devil casts a whole new spell on the genre with its 1970s talk show setting.
In short, Dastmalchian told me recently that Late Night with the Devil could be classified in a descriptor as Johnny Carson meets Jerry Springer meets The Exorcist. A filmmaker pal of the actor, however, has a slightly different take.
“Kevin Smith, who is a dear friend of mine, watched the movie and he said that it was Rosemary’s Baby meets Network and I took that as such an amazing, brilliant, perfect complement,” Dastmalchian enthused. “I feel for me, [the movie was partly about]
growing up with Jerry Springer and Morton Downey, who, by the way, was another one of these guys that had a late-night show that was so shocking. Then, when you mash that up with the energy of a guy like Johnny Carson, [America-born Australian talk show host] Don Lane and David Letterman, that’s the tone that we were aiming for with the film.”
Opening in theaters on March 22 before it moves to streaming on Shudder on April 19, Late Night with the Devil is staged as a re-airing of the final live broadcast of the late-night talk show Night Owls with Jack Delroy on Halloween night in 1977. The movie — written and directed by Australian filmmaker brothers Cameron and Colin Cairnes — begins with a short documentary-like segment chronicling the rise and eventual fall of Jack Delroy (Dastmalchian) in the TV talker space. Once a fierce competitor of late-night legend Johnny Carson, Delroy’s ratings are on a steep downslide and his standards are slipping, too, as the show becomes more of a sideshow act defined by outrageous guests and stunts.
In a bid to regain the success he enjoyed at the beginning of the talk show host’s career, Night Owls with Jack Delroy schedules an All Hallows’ Eve show featuring a psychic (Fayssal Bazzi), a paranormal skeptic (Ian Bliss), a parapsychologist (June Ross-Mitchell) and her patient (Ingrid Torelli) — a damaged 13-year-old girl who gives every indication that she’s possessed by a demon. Complicating matters is Delroy’s rumored involvement with a mysterious group associated with the occult, as well as his torment over the tragic loss of his wife (Georgina Haig).
‘Late Night With The Devil’ Makes Movie Viewers Part Of ‘Night Owls’ TV Viewing Audience
After its faux-documentary introduction, Late Night with the Devil plays like a found-footage videotape, making it the only visual record of the horrific final broadcast of Night Owls with Jack Delroy. To enhance the experience, the Cairnes brothers shot the film like a studio crew taping a late-night talk show, but with cameras still rolling between commercial breaks to intensify the supernatural occurrences that are unfolding during the fateful episode. As a result, Late Night with the Devil creates a mind-bending effect since it makes its audience members feel like television viewers at home watching the Night Owls episode in real time.
“Late-night television had a musicality. It still does, it has a tenor and a tone all of its own,” David Dastmalchian explained. “The way that Colin and Cameron approached shooting this was, ‘We’re going to do one episode from beginning to end and we’re going to recapture what happened that night, October 31st, 1977.’ So, when people are watching this, I really needed them to feel they were watching that original broadcast — like they were actually seeing what happened to Jack that night. And for that to feel believable, exciting and captivating, it really had to feel like the real deal.”
To prepare for his role, Dastmalchian said he devoured ample amounts of late-night television footage to capture the energy and tone of TV’s most famous hosts. When it came time to step onto a late-night TV set for Late Night with the Devil, however, the Kansas native admitted that he found the idea of emulating a legendary talk show host frightening.
“I’ve never been an emcee, I’ve never been a host and I’ve never been somebody that is a comedian,” said Dastmalchian, who has played serious roles in such films as Denis Villeneuve’s Dune and Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight and Oppenheimer, as well as non-comedic turns in lighter fare including Peyton Reed’s Ant-Man trilogy for Marvel and James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad for DC. “All of those challenges definitely made this one of the scariest roles I’ve ever taken on.”
Thankfully, Dastmalchian said, the Cairnes brothers created a late-night television setting that made him feel like he was an experienced TV talker.
“They did such an excellent job recreating the spirit of 1977 late-night television with the set design, with the pacing, with the way that the music and the live band worked, with all of the magic that came from the art department and the way the production design worked,” Dastmalchian said. “I really feel they created such a lavish and lush world for me to step into that it made my job so much fun.”
‘Late Night With The Devil’ Continues Dastmalchian’s Fascination With The Horror Genre
While discovering what makes a late-night talk show host tick in Late Night with the Devil, Dastmalchian on the flip side had no trouble adjusting to the film’s horror scenarios. In addition to starring roles in a pair of horror thrillers in the past year including the big-screen adaptation of Stephen King’s The Boogeyman and The Last Voyage of the Demeter — which chronicles a chapter from Bram Stoker’s Dracula — Dastmalchian is creator and writer of Dark Horse Comics’ Count Crowley: Reluctant Monster Hunter comic book series.
On top of that, Late Night with the Devil marks the release of Dastmalchian’s first film under his Good Fiend Films production banner, which gives the actor-producer the ability to tell the stories that excite him in the horror, science fiction and fantasy realm in film, TV, audio and publishing.
“Dave has been a massive fan of horror his entire life,” Dastmalchian’s longtime friend, actor Dana DeLorenzo, told me. “So, anytime someone gets to perform in the genre that they are fans of most, or make the type of films they seek out to watch as an audience member, that brings the project some extra magic.”
A fellow horror luminary thanks to her scorching turn as Deadite slayer Kelly Maxwell opposite Bruce Campbell in filmmaker Sam Raimi’s Ash vs. Evil Dead TV series, DeLorenzo said Dastmalchian’s stamp on the genre stems from the charismatic presence he has both off-screen and on.
“The magnetism he has on-screen always pulls you in, and he brings an authenticity and intensity to every role he plays,” DeLorenzo observed. “Because Dave genuinely is a fan of the horror genre, when he gets to stretch that muscle to play these layered, darker and creepier characters — especially in horror — you can see how much he enjoys it. That enjoyment, combined with his abilities as an actor, elevates the experience for the audience.”
In the case of Late Night with the Devil, that elevation included the levitation of a character who is said to be demonically possessed — raising some deadly stakes for everyone on the Night Owls with Jack Delroy set.
Demonic Possession Is A Complex Subject To Confront, Dastmalchian Says
The horror sub-genre of demonic possession, of course, most famously rattled audiences en masse with the release of The Exorcist in 1972 and it hasn’t loosened its grip since. David Dastmalchian believes demonic possession movies are engrained in our psyches not just because of traumatic images in The Exorcist, but perhaps because of the struggles everyone deals with in their personal lives and their abilities — or inabilities, sometimes — to deal with them.
“I was somebody raised in an extremely religious environment where the ideas of demons, demonology, evil and possession were very real and were spoken about in a way that was literal,” Dastmalchian recalled. “Now, as I’ve grown up, my beliefs have definitely shifted and changed, and I don’t necessarily ascribe to the beliefs that there are free-floating entities that just happen to take control of people’s bodies who are not living pious religious lives or whatever the mythology is there. But I do believe deeply that within each of us, as Walt Whitman said, are ‘multitudes.’ That is a beautiful thing but that is also a terrifying thing.”
With that, Dastmalchian offered up the multitudes that were established within his impressionable mind growing up in Kansas.
“Within the multitudes that exist inside of myself, there is the scared 6-year-old that really never got over his fear of certain things. There is the insecure 16-year-old who still never really healed from a bullying incident. There is the heartbroken 21-year-old who still never really fully processed that wound,” the actor explained. “There are all these different spirits that live inside of ourselves and versions of ourselves, and I think what’s scary is the thought that the wrong thing could trigger that one aspect of ourselves that we would then lose control, be unable to regulate ourselves, be unable to stop ourselves from doing the things that we know we shouldn’t be doing.”
As such, there is much more to the demonically possessed character in Late Night with the Devil than meets the eye, Dastmalchian noted.
“I think the possession narrative in an extreme way takes that idea and just ramps it up the way good storytelling should, and it scares the crap out of us because I think we all know that lurking within us, there is always something that could definitely harm us or those we love,” Dastmalchian explained. “That, to me, is really powerful.”
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