Late Night with the Devil · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Wood-paneled desk. Band riser. A couch where guests sit and are charming. The applause comes in on cue, the way it has every weeknight for years. Then, for half a second, the picture tears.

You have been trained your whole life to ignore that. A dropout is weather. In Late Night with the Devil it is the first thing in the room telling the truth.

Deleuze has a pair of words for this, from the Hitchcock chapter of Cinema 1. A mark is an object that means something because of the habit it sits inside: the host leans back, the band stings, you know a commercial is coming. Habit does the reading for you, and you barely notice you were reading. A demark is that same object gone wrong, an anomaly that snaps the habit and forces you to interpret instead of anticipate. Hitchcock's are small and famous. Windmill sails turning against the wind. A crop duster where there are no crops.

Colin and Cameron Cairnes (this is a two-brother authorship, whatever the single directing credit says) build an entire feature out of that one move. Their studio is nothing but marks. The desk, the sidekick's chair, the audience wide, the plunge to break, the operator reframing a touch late because a live camera always does: the 1977 network grammar is reconstructed — in Melbourne, of all places — with such fidelity that when the switching stumbles, or a guest holds a beat past what the format allows, you feel the transgression before you can name it. The dread is not added to television here. It is extracted from it.

This is also why Deleuze filed Hitchcock under the relation-image: the image whose sense lives in a relation the viewer holds, which quietly makes the viewer a third party inside the film. Late Night with the Devil takes that structural fact and makes it the plot. The show is playing to living rooms. The disaster is being transmitted. Every ratings point Jack Delroy is chasing is one of us, sitting down, tuning in for exactly the catastrophe the prologue has already promised.

That prologue is the second thing worth stopping on. A documentary voice (Michael Ironside, by the durable record) tells us the legend of Jack Delroy and the night that ended him, and then the film says: here is the tape. Deleuze calls this kind of voice a speech-act, not dialogue between characters but a voice that legends, that hands you a document and tells you what it is. And the moment the tape rolls, the film enters what Deleuze names the crystal-image: an image that is present and past at once, still happening and already finished. The broadcast unspools in real switching time, with all the forward lean of something not yet decided. It is also a relic. We know how it ends. Those two times don't take turns. They run together for ninety minutes, and every ingratiating beat of Jack's monologue is doubled by its own obituary.

The brothers' specific invention is what they do with that doubling on the surface of the picture. The aired show is color video, flat and boxy and lit for broadcast. The "surviving" behind-the-scenes footage is black-and-white and handheld, with a documentary's freedom to move. Two capture formats, one night, split at the level of grain. The horror lives in the seam.

What this does to narrative is easy to miss because it feels so natural. The suspense engine is not causality. It's a rundown. Monologue, first guest, second guest, the act built for spectacle. You know the shape of a talk show, so you know how much show is left, and that knowledge does the work a ticking clock usually does. The plot is a schedule. The climax is the format failing.

Meanwhile the format has quietly stripped everyone of the ability to act. Deleuze's seer is his name for the figure who replaces the hero: someone who can only look and endure, because no available action would meet the situation. A talk show is a machine for producing seers. Guests sit. The audience applauds on cue. The one power the host holds is to go to commercial. When Lilly is on that couch and something is clearly, medically wrong, the correct professional response is to keep the segment alive. That paralysis isn't a failure of nerve in the characters. It's the furniture.

Which is what turns the image into a lectosign, Deleuze's word for a picture that has lost its self-evidence and has to be deciphered. You don't watch this film so much as examine it. Was that a tape fault or a presence? Was that stumble in the switching an operator, or something in the studio? You are doing forensics on grain.

Forensics assumes a contract: film doesn't lie. The contract is roughly Bazin's, his argument that a photograph persuades because a machine made it and not a hand. Found footage has run on that credit line since Cannibal Holocaust (1980) invented the recovered-artifact frame and passed off degraded media as evidence. The Cairnes brothers spend the credit deliberately. Deleuze would call this the powers of the false: not lying, but making true and false undecidable and then building with the undecidability. The film sets the debunker Carmichael Haig against the parapsychologist June Ross-Mitchell and declines to award the round. And Jack is Deleuze's forger, the figure who doesn't find truth but manufactures it, trading authenticity for numbers until the fake he booked turns out to be real. Dastmalchian plays him as two faces on one man: on-air Jack, all teeth and timing, and between-takes Jack, frightened and complicit. That on-air smile is what Deleuze calls a gest, a posture that exposes the whole machine holding it in place.

Then 2024 handed the film one more turn of its own screw. A few AI-generated stills in the interstitials, acknowledged by the filmmakers, tiny in screen time, enormous in the argument that followed. A movie whose entire wager is this footage is authentic got audited for images no hand had made. How it happened stays thin in the record, and it's no verdict on the film. It's the wager coming back around.

The debts are specific and honorable. Ghostwatch (1992) supplies the architecture: a feature-length live studio hoax, presenters anchored at a desk while the escalation arrives through the feeds and the calls. The Stone Tape (1972) supplies the metaphysics, Nigel Kneale's idea that recording media can catch and replay the dead, which is why a master tape can be the monster rather than the container. Network (1976) supplies the on-air breakdown and the ratings rot that makes Jack's bargain legible as tragedy instead of stupidity. The Exorcist (1973) supplies the restraint-and-guttural-voice grammar the séance quotes almost verbatim. Rosemary's Baby (1968) supplies The Grove: ordinary faces, unremarkable rooms, a coven that looks like a club.

Forward, the ledger is still open. What the film has proved is that the cursed-broadcast conceit can carry a whole feature without once breaking character, and that analog texture is an instrument rather than a nostalgia filter. It also demonstrated something meaner about audiences raised on screens: the most frightening thing you can show them is a screen behaving almost correctly.

Watch it again with the studio sound in your ears, and try to catch the moment you stopped watching a program and started examining a document. Wherever that line falls for you, it will be something small and technical. That is the scariest part.