'Late Night with the Devil' is a film about how fear is exploited

The period piece horror should resonate in our era of misinformation and anxiety.

David Dastmalchian as Jack Delroy. IFC Films

I was lucky enough to see Late Night with the Devil last year at Whānau Mārama New Zealand International Film Festival. The film gets a theatrical release in New Zealand on April 11 (it’s already in theatres in several other countries) before it starts streaming on AMC’s horror streaming service Shudder. It’s worth getting along to a cinema, but this is also a movie that works well on the small screen, with the premise that we’re watching lost master tape of a 1977 late night talk show. ‘Night Owls’ is doing a halloween night special to draw in viewers for ‘sweeps week’ the time when annual advertising rates are determined, giving TV networks an incentive to maximise viewership.

That the fictional talk show would air a spooky special during this week, promising the audience that they will attempt to commune with the devil on air in a live television first, is perhaps the most obvious example of one of the films key themes- the exploitation of fear for personal gain (usually profit), but it doesn’t end there. Among the guests appearing on this episode are Lilly, the sole survivor of a Satanic cult whose members committed mass suicide, and her legal guardian via adoption, parapsychologist Dr. June Ross-Mitchell, who doesn’t appear to see a problem with putting this traumatised child on late night television. These characters are likely inspired by the Canadian psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder and his psychiatric patient Michelle Smith, who later became his wife. 

Pazder wrote the best selling ‘Michelle Remembers’ based on recordings from his therapy sessions with Smith, which relied on the discredited practice of recovered-memory therapy. The book made claims that Smith was subjected to ‘Satanic ritual abuse’. The success of ‘Michelle Remembers’ was a significant contributor to the rise of the ‘Satanic panic’ in the 1980s. During that period, early childhood educators in North America were accused of abusing children in their care in satanic rituals. Some were convicted, and later had their convictions overturned.

The panic was not just about ‘Satanism’ but also about the social changes that were taking place. As middle and upper class women were entering the workforce in greater numbers and placing their children into daycare, conservatives feared what this was doing to the traditional American family.