Please don’t strive for documentary realism in a film (spoiler alert) where a giant worm bursts out of a man’s eye socket

I’m not going to look this up, but I’m assuming there have been far fewer found-footage-style films in the romantic comedy genre than there have been in the horror film genre. We could fix that, by God. Heaven knows there are enough content mills for moving images. We could hire Rachel McAdams and Matthew McConaughey and stitch together sufficiently convincing handheld clips of the two meeting at a wedding in Belize — sweet. She’s the outsider and career-driven maid of honor, and he’s, I don’t know, a local expat scuba instructor and a cynical, heartbroken divorcee; first they hate each other, and then — here’s the twist that will be seen in trailers —she heroically saves him from being eaten by sharks (of course within filming distance of the chartered boat). A bond develops between them, which is captured for posterity by persistent wedding photographers and various mobile phone tourists. We would call him Doyle and call the film Doyle’s Joy, which is also the name of the highest mountain in Belize. Nobody can steal this idea!

None of the challenges that make found footage, at best, a kind of storytelling gimmick for the powerhouse Doyle’s Joy Project in particular, and for this otherwise shrinking genre in general, are no less true when applied to horror films, where found footage is now something of a standard framework. Perhaps once, the found footage format was about leaning into the subjective camera and giving viewers an intense first-person experience. Nowadays, what you do in place of thoughtful cinematography is the cheapest toy in the overpopulated and highly unsanitary sandbox of a direct-to-streaming genre. It’s been 17 years since Paranormal activity accelerated the shift from a stressful subjective view to a voyeuristic objective view, coinciding with a resurgence of horror cinema that unreservedly delights in the sadistic thrill of watching other people being terrorized, if not brutalized. This is no longer necessary for found footage Blair Witch Projects tricky jumping back and forth to incorporate the psychology of the person still holding the camera, let alone a particularly well thought out narrative justification. Audiences accept it and forget it, and the filmmakers understand that.

The point is that found footage (and its associated gimmicks, screenlife, and pseudo-documentaries) has become something of the antithesis of creative filmmaking, at least in horror. If you hope that your film will be received as something new, fresh and interesting, the worst signal you can send by not hiring JJ Abrams to direct is to force it into a found footage presentation. This choice demonstrates a real lack of inspiration; the work your actors and crew must do to make up for this deficit largely exceeds the modest abilities of the effects-crazy goofballs and vaguely recognizable character actors who turn up for low-budget horror films. The savings this creates in terms of budget or storytelling comes with a lot of crushing, bleak creative debt.

Horror streaming service Shudder is currently pushing for a film titled Late Night with the Devilwhich was filmed in 2023 and features Weird Little Guy’s reliable character actor David Dastmalchian in a rare lead role. Set in the 1970s, Dastmalchian plays entertainer Jack Delroy, the down-on-his-luck host of Night Owls with Jack Delroyan underdog among late-night competitors The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Delroy, in need of something like a professional miracle, opens the fall of 1977 with an over-the-top Halloween show that, as the film dimly suggests, has a real chance of a ratings boom. The highlight of the evening’s program is said to be an interview with a controversial parapsychologist, who is accompanied by an adolescent girl who is allegedly possessed by a demon. It’s not going well.

There’s a lot to be said for that catchy description, but I stand here today to passionately defend the idea of ​​a film set at the height of the Satanic Panic, featuring a desperate, smarmy entertainer led by a very entertaining character actor from the category ” Weird Little Guy,” which chronicles a single night of crazy television in the early hours of the 1970s. The boldly colored and strangely angled aesthetic decadence of the post-hippie disco era; the fabulously flimsy deceptive ingenuity of even mid-range pre-cable television productions; the titillating madness of American satanic panic; and the fidgety airs of David Dastmalchian, an underrated but reliable scene-stealer who is tasked here with forming the narrative center of the film. For me it’s a combination of things that almost inevitably works.

Almost! Imagine the pained sound a person makes when they look out the car window and see the pancaked carcass of their beloved pet on the side of the road, then turn the volume down just slightly to account for a sleeping toddler in the back seat, and you’ll hear roughly the groan that bubbled out of me when I realized during the film’s too-long pre-title introduction that this is Late Night with the Devil is presented as archival material. Here we have a solution in search of a problem: a presentation that incorrectly assumes that the question is being asked but what if it was real will facilitate rather than distract from the audience’s suspension of disbelief.

The artistic limitation resulting from this decision weighs heavily on the film. How could it be otherwise! What a film like this should be above all else is strange. The disco era was a weird time, man! Satanic Panic was weird; occultists are weird. The star of the film is weird; acting weird is something very much like his job. I can’t stress enough how surreal and (yes) weird it was to sit in front of a crappy TV, even in the 1980s, after certain channels had simply turned off for the night. It’s worth capturing all of that weirdness in a film, zooming it in and shooting it a little more frantically, and allowing it to spit out something even weirder. The task deserves cinematic choices of appropriate weirdness: weird timing, odd angles, shifting and unreliable perspectives, Dario Argento-esque lighting, an extremely crappy original score. Movie stuff, basically as much of it as the film can accommodate. Instead, opt to limit your choices to those that stay true to the standard talk show fare. Staging and backstage hand documentation is damn criminal! As I write this, I’m issuing an arrest warrant!

Not everything in Late Night with the Devil fails. Dastmalchian is great, even in cases where the script requires him to portray emotions that are completely out of place in a film with this basic premise And in a live late-night talk show. Night owls It’s fun to look and feel authentic otherwise, especially during an early montage sequence of some of the series’ historical highlights. I would have seen that show – hell, I would have seen it today. You should be able to do it Night Owls with David Dastmalchian and simply let him make mistakes in his role on stage with third-category guests; there were brief moments in the first half of Late Night with the Devil where the idea of ​​watching Dastmalchian charm a studio audience as Delroy for a few hours seemed like a nice way to pass the time after bedtime on Saturday night.

But far too much of the film is told in handheld documentary-style black-and-white backstage footage, with a subjective camera that frankly makes no sense at all, especially given the content of the conversations it captures. The parts of the film that are told in color via the live television broadcast are much more vivid, although they are also marred by the same general lack of original ideas that led to the use of the found footage format in the first place. Just before the film’s gritty, effects-laden action climax, there’s a very clever sequence in which the film actively undermines certain elements of the plot that, quite frankly, it tried way too hard to sell. An insufferable asshole skeptic invited to Delroy’s Halloween show for no earthly reason uses hypnosis to break the climactic spectacle of a previous live encounter with a demon. He uses stagecraft and a pocket watch to gain mind control over not only his half-willing studio participant, but also the live audience and viewers at home, including you sitting there on your couch.

The execution of this move is more explicit than it should have been, and hints at a better, different direction the film could have taken. As it is, the moment is ultimately used for a completely predictable plot development, but it at least expresses a rare moment of divine inspiration in a film that otherwise immediately stopped thinking for itself after landing in the late-night setting.

That’s what found footage does to a motherfucker: instead of enjoying the full range of style and storytelling possibilities that this art form allows, the makers of Late Night with the Devil were limited to what seemed plausible in the context of archived television recordings. What if this were real? OK, yeah, sure, but I have a better question, paraphrased from a Jack Nicholson quote in Vivian Kubrick’s The creation of “Shining”: Wouldn’t it be better to be interesting?