Late Night With The Devil is a sort-of found found-footage horror film about a late-night talk show that goes horribly wrong one Halloween night. Other than a short intro setting things up the entirety of the film takes place in real-time as we are watching tapes of the show from 1977. During what would be the commercial breaks we see behind-the-scenes footage as the host, guests, and crew relax, prep, and talk about the show without the cameras sending images to the world.

Night Owls with Jack Delroy is a typical late-night show from the 1970s. Think The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson a show the movie references several times as Night Owls is never able to gain the same ratings Carson does.

It is hosted by Jack Delroy (a terrific David Dastmalchian). The film’s introduction lets us know he’s incredibly ambitious and constantly let down that his show doesn’t get better ratings. After his wife dies of cancer (the episode in which she appears, clearly very sick and telling stories of their relationship gives the show its highest ratings to date) he is a changed man. The show never recovers and is on the verge of cancellation.

The Halloween Episode that we watch is a last-ditch effort to get the ratings they desperately need. Guests for the night include a hokey medium called Christou (Fayssal Bazzi), Carmichael Haig (Ian Bliss) a former magician turned skeptic, and June Ross-Mitchell (Laura Gordon) a parapsychologist who has brought with her Lily D’abo (Ingrid Torelli) a teenaged girl who survived a Church of Satan-esque cult and now is believed to be possed by a demon.

It is well made. The sets and costumes look very much like how a talk show circa the 1970s looks. They have the feel of everything exactly right. There are some nice jump scares but mostly it creates an increasingly creepy mood that eventually blows up into holy-crap territory.

I liked a lot of it, but I gotta admit I just don’t love this type of found-footage horror movie. I saw The Blair Witch Project in the theaters and absolutely loved it. But that film showed us edited versions of the found footage. Or at least they periodically stopped the cameras allowing us to jump forward in time, skipping the boring bits.

Films like this, which exist in real time become tedious to me. We see the opening credits to Night Owls and then we watch it unfold just as a real audience might have watched it from home. The behind-the-scenes footage during the commercial breaks is shot in black-and-white and breaks things up a bit, but it still unfolds in real-time.

There is an opening monologue filled with the types of dumb jokes all these shows have. There is a sidekick who riffs along with Jack. Cristou, the first guest talks like any of those so-called psychics you can find on late-night television and morning Zoo radio programs.

Obviously, any horror movie had to build towards the scares. You don’t start things immediately off with the horror or you have nowhere to go. But making me sit through a late-night talk show, something I have come to loathe in real life, just isn’t the way to go to win my heart.

It does get there in the end. It gets terrifically scary as the tension revs up and the demon possession seems more and more real. It is definitely worth watching, especially if you are a fan of found footage films. For me I can’t help but feel a little disappointed, even while recognizing the skill by which is it made.