What can we do when a good indie genre movie makes the poor choice to utilize AI-generated imagery? It’s a tough one. Because, genuinely, Late Night with the Devil is a good movie and now the entire online conversation about it has become a moral question: do you support “AI” driven work or do you want to go support something else? It’s the devil’s bargain. We want good indie horror to succeed. We do not want to set any bad precedents for not paying artists any more than we are already not paying artists. It’s a dilemma because Late Night with the Devil is so structurally sound, is such a novel twist on “found footage,” although you may strain to call it something else, it’s The Larry Sanders Show corrupted by the devil. It’s truly so much fun and would have made for an easy recommendation. So what do we do now?
The problem is also that the use of the interstitial bumpers for the talk show does not add anything to the movie. You could say that using computer-generated art must detract from the themes and not add to it. The premise, after all, is that we’re stuck inside this 1970s talk show, the early peak of late night, and there’s all this supernatural stuff going on. But we didn’t have computers back then, not personal ones, not ones that generated anything, we just fed them our information. So it is, at best, an anachronism and an unforced error to produce a few slides that very obviously look like redesigned so-called “AI art”. It sucks.
But the movie is fun and good. The lede should be: David Dastmalchian has emerged as a convincing lead actor after a career doing great work in smaller parts — a wonderful moment for him. The next note would be: the team of Cameron and Colin Cairnes are rising directors in indie horror. Watch them work. Like Danny and Michael Philippou of last year’s equally fun Talk to Me, these are also Australian siblings who are due for good things. It’s a fair bet that their next movie will be good, like this one, and not have any ethical dilemmas about how it’s being made.
This brings us to the crux of the problem about the discourse: this movie was shot two years ago and is now releasing right after the creative strike in Hollywood. So, it was shot when there were not conversations about the terminal creative death that hangs on the precipice of adopting AI, and yet releases into a world where that has been the hot-button issue of the day for at least a year. It makes the viewer think though, why not cut these few seconds of the movie? Then this review could just be about how bright everyone in the movie is and why you ought to see it, but now, we must litigate whether you want to support it, what happened, and if this succeeds or fails, what does that mean for other indie movies embracing these new technologies?
So, let’s focus on the good stuff for a moment. David Dastmalchian does, in fact, emerge as an actor worthy of setting up a whole movie around. The tension lies on his shoulders and he executes his role so beautifully, with so much menace. Dastmalchian plays ’70s late night host Jack Delroy, whose show is falling apart due to demonic events, but must keep the cameras rolling and broadcast into America’s homes, this absolute nightmare of a variety program. He does several things at once, playing this smarmy host, giving space to the weird events of the evening, and withholding a certain tension about wanting to capitalize on the bizarre evening. Meanwhile, we still can credit Cameron and Colin Cairnes despite their admission that they chose to utilize “AI” and edit it for their movie, because those are a few seconds of the picture, and all their other choices are right — maybe that’s also what makes it sting, and detours the conversation from what it ought to be about, that they’re onto something.
Cameron and Colin Cairnes have made a good horror movie that reaches back into the cinema and television of the ’70s and comes out with something modern, a specialized found footage movie that makes us care about the events in front of the camera. The setup is so well-conceived that we begin to accept the events because it’s so much fun to exist in these television spaces. It’s peculiar and engaging filmmaking, something like a precursor to one of the predicted cinematic events of the year, Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow. These are unique projects that show our shifting relationship to television, no longer as the center of entertainment, but as this portal to a twisted past, now very much past tense, as though the programmed transmissions from way back then might be recaptured and the airwaves of today might hold some psychic power to reconnect us to our digital pasts. It’s a fascinating thematic direction for indie horror to go. And despite the reasons you might not want to see Late Night with the Devil, there are perhaps more reasons why you should, for most of the runtime, it is crafted by real artists making a real movie, it’s too cool to be computer-generated. And maybe that’s the point. Let’s not let this stuff run into our most hallowed ground: our beloved indie movies that can flex their independence and make uniquely human works. This one is so close and if you want to know if you should watch it because it’s good, then absolutely you should — and about the use of a few computer-generated slides, we’ve given you the information, do with it what you will.