The directors have fun sending up TV conventions, as a failing host attempts to revive his career by communing with a demon, supposedly possessing a teenage girl
The likes of The Orphanage and The Conjuring have shown that the recent past is not just a foreign country, but a downright scary one. This horror, also set in the 1970s, lies on the same kitsch-uncanny continuum, with a fine ambassador in the shape of sickly faced David Dastmalchian, playing on-the-wane US late-night variety show host Jack Delroy. Seen creeping it up everywhere in character roles over the last few years – from a Harkonnen mentat in Dune to one of Oppenheimer’s detractors, as well as Suicide Squad’s Polka-Dot Man – Dastmalchian gets a well-deserved lead role here.
An initial corporate promo fills us in on Delroy’s résumé: perennial second fiddle in the ratings war to Johnny Carson; sometime member of an Illuminati-style lodge; widowered when his wife, Madeleine, is struck down by lung cancer. Making a shaky comeback from this tragedy, everything seems to rest on his 1977 Halloween special, whose master tapes, we are told, make up what we see in Late Night With the Devil. His first guest, Christou the psychic (Fayssal Bazzi), is forced off after a bout of Exorcist-style vomiting – allowing his second guest, twirly tached paranormal debunker Carmichael (Ian Bliss), to spoil the party. So “Mr Midnight” is keen to make up ground in his third item: parapsychologist June (Laura Gordon) and her teenage ward Lilly (Ingrid Torelli), a former cult hostage who is supposedly host to a minor demon.
