I tried but I couldn’t roll with the premise, especially when the final guest appearance for the show was just The Exorcist.
Most watched movie ever on Shudder or AMC+.
https://screenrant.com/late-night-with-the-devil-shudder-streaming-record/
Unless I missed it, that claim appears to be unsourced. Instead, the writers (it took two of them!) claim “according to Shudder…Late Night With The Devil broke the record for the streamer’s biggest opening weekend ever”. Which I can accept, even if they don’t see fit to quote the press release. It was fresh off its theatrical run where it got really good buzz. I don’t doubt lots of folks were eager to check it out as soon as it was available. I sure was. Those theatrical marketing dollars go a long way!
But then, in the next sentence – written in bold face for good measure – the writers say “the movie has become the most-watched release on both Shudder and AMC”, which isn’t the same thing as opening weekend figures. If there is data to that effect, it isn’t mentioned in the article, which goes on to speculate that maybe it did well because Stephen King tweeted about it and, whoa!, there might be a sequel one day. You don’t say! Breaking news!
Blogs are such garbage.
Anyway, good on Dastmalchian, because I know people didn’t show up for the Cairnes brothers.
As I said in the general horror thread - broadly liked this. Honestly didn’t have particularly high expectations between knowing little about it, there being a fair amount of hype (some of the really hugely popular horror franchises do basically nothing for me, e.g. Paranormal Activity, or are pretty rote, e.g. The Conjuring), and Tom being down on it. But was pleasantly surprised.
I buy that this isn’t what a 70s late night show would have really looked like, that Dastmalchian isn’t the sort of dude who can hang with Johnny Carson in his prime, and that the camera stuff breaks immersion if you know what it should look like. So I can understand that taking people out of it. But you know what? I didn’t exist in the 70s, let alone watch TV back then, and I’ve never seen Carson or any meaningful amount of late night TV from the 70s. And they do stuff that is in keeping with what I’ve seen of like, David Letterman, so it was close enough for my purposes. Kinda like how I have no idea how well Ti West captured Vice reports for his unaccountable “what if we had Vice News cover a fictional version of Jonestown” movie, having never watched Vice, but I got the idea and fair enough. And if there’s one thing I really dislike about found footage as a gimmick, or even more so the found audio version in audio dramas, it’s going out of their way to pretend all of what we’re seeing or hearing was diegetically filmed/recorded because it so rarely makes any actual sense, so I’m not the guy to care about the camera stuff.
All of which said, I liked the premise of bringing a possessed girl onto the show as a way to boost flagging ratings, and the goofy Halloween stuff surrounding that main event. I also appreciated that while it starts out hitting some demonic possession tropes, it veers pretty sharply away from the typical when things really go off the rails, and I really dug the surreal sequences after Delroy leaves the set, as well as the demon’s weird psychedelic light show visualization.
My quibbles are more 1) the special effects for a lot of the horror bits are extremely unconvincing and cheesy, particularly the hypnotic suggestions w/ the worms and the demon’s murders towards the end - they feel like they would have been 70s era FX, but since it’s not meant to be a 70s movie, but a real event filmed live, this is a problem for me. and 2) our asshole skeptic has plenty of quibbles about “Christou” but never lays out what the dude was actually doing there, which is cold reading. Surely he’d be very familiar with it because it’s the bread and butter of “mediums” worldwide.