Summary

• The found footage possession movie Late Night With the Devil is presented as an archived 1970s television broadcast.
• While it may seem like it is based on a true story, it is purely fictional.
• The movie draws inspiration from 1970s pop culture including The Exorcist and The Don Lane Show.

Despite its 1970s period trappings, Late Night With the Devil is clearly a horror movie and not a documentary. One major clue is the fact that character actor David Dastmalchian is playing the character of 1970s talk show host Jack Delroy. Dastmalchian is recognizable for his fair share of horror movies, including The Boogeyman, The Last Voyage of the Demeter, and Bird Box, in addition to other roles including Polka-Dot Man in The Suicide Squad and Piter de Vries in Dune.

However, the Late Night With the Devil trailer would seem to indicate that, despite clearly faking being a recording of a 1970s television broadcast, it could still be inspired by true events. The onscreen text at the beginning of the trailer reads "On Halloween night 1977, one live television event shocked a nation." This seems to imply that the events onscreen are a dramatization of a television broadcast that actually happened.

Late Night with the Devil Is Not Based On A True Story

The movie is an exercise in found footage realism

Despite the implication of its trailer, the upcoming horror movie Late Night with the Devil is not based on a true story. Instead, it is a found footage movie that uses the 1970s period setting to enhance the reality of the narrative being depicted onscreen. Jack Delroy is a fictional character, and there is no direct connection between the movie's plot and any late-night broadcast that was aired on American television throughout the 1970s.

In an attempt to promote realism, some movies, like 2013's WNUF Halloween Special, have wholly recreated old television broadcasts.

The technique that Late Night With the Devil uses is particularly well-rendered, but it is following in the footsteps of quite a few found footage horror movies before it. In an attempt to promote realism, some movies, like 2013's WNUF Halloween Special, have wholly recreated old television broadcasts. Others use old-fashioned or degraded filmmaking formats, especially VHS, to make them seem less like polished Hollywood productions, including The Blair Witch Project and the V/H/S franchise.

Late Night with the Devil Was Inspired by 1970s Pop Culture

The horror movie draws inspiration from many places

While Late Night With the Devil is not based on any true story, it does draw inspiration from a wealth of real pop culture from throughout the 1970s. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, directors Cameron and Colin Cairnes revealed that their movie is a pastiche of a wide variety of titles including the talk show The Don Lane Show and the movies The Exorcist, Network, and The King of Comedy. The fact that the filmmakers have put so much thought into bringing the period to life explains why the trailer for the movie is so effectively misleading.

Source: THR