I was talking with a colleague the other day about horror movies and asked, as you do, if they had any particular favourites. And they said – I must confess this is slightly surprising – the first one that came to mind was The Blair Witch Project. Now, I saw Blair Witch when it came out in 1999, found it pretty scary, if memory serves, and then. . . well, I've never revisited it, just in case it turns out not to be the film I remember it being. (Or in case it does.)

Perhaps there's no need to revisit The Blair Witch Project, as in many ways the film is still with us. I talk a lot about the importance of 28 Days Later in kicking off the boom in zombie and zombie-adjacent films which has been rolling now ever since 2002, but the found footage horror subgenre which Blair Witch revived has been at least as successful, spilling over into other genres like monster movies (Cloverfield) and superhero films (Chronicle).

Making its own contribution to the form is Late Night with the Devil, directed by Cameron and Colin Cairns. This is an Australian film, not that you'd know it at first glance, front and centre throughout is David Dastmalchian, who in the last few years has carved out a respectable niche for himself as a Slightly Odd Looking Man in Dune, The Suicide Squad, the Ant-Man films and others (it has been suggested Christopher Nolan gave him a part in The Dark Knight mainly because of his slight resemblance to Maggie Gyllenhaal).

Here he plays Jack Dalton, host of a late night chat show which is struggling to attract enough viewers to stay on the air. It is Halloween 1977 and an appropriately spooky set of guests has been lined up for the occasion, including a psychic (Fayssal Bazzi), a stage magician turned semi-professional debunker (Ian Bliss channels the essence of the late James Randi quite engagingly), a parapsychologist (Laura Gordon), and a troubled young woman (Ingrid Torelli) who is the sole survivor of an incident at a coven of devil-worshippers. Things get under way jovially enough, although the psychic's bit goes a bit awry – Carmichael the sceptic is, however, as dismissive as you might expect. Jack's second banana (Rhys Auteri) starts to express alarm about the direction things are taking, but his producer insists this is all ratings gold, and so they proceed to the evening's main stunt – attempting to summon up the demonic presence which sporadically manifests inside the young survivor. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, I leave that to your imagination, obviously, but there is obviously scope here for some engagingly devilish shenanigans. I have to say that I enjoyed Late Night with the Devil a great deal while I was watching it, but in retrospect I would say that most of the fun of the movie comes from its loving recreation of a 70s TV chat show and the incremental build-up of horror elements as the story progresses. But it's not the most subtle or surprising tale – prior to the film proper getting underway (the actual found footage part) there's a relatively lengthy prologue describing Jack's career up to that point (this part is narrated by the great cult actor Michael Ironside), and the detail with which some apparently trivial details are described basically tips the audience off that future plot points are being laid in before their very eyes. It's possibly also a mistake to abandon the found footage conceit for a section towards the end of the film; this bit feels less effective than the rest of the film.

On the whole, though, this is an engaging spin on some old ideas, with a nicely pitched performance from Dastmalchian – a cocktail of smarm and neediness – and a fine set of supporting turns around him. It's not quite a full-fledged comedy horror, but the contrast between the conventions of the late-night chat show format and the gathering sense of demonic oppression provide some amusing moments.

Then again, I may be pre-inclined to like Late Night with the Devil as a basic description of the film – a live TV investigation into the supernatural on Halloween night goes progressively awry, culminating in what could accurately be described as carnage – certainly inclines one to suspect it owes a very significant debt to Lesley Manning and Stephen Volk's 1992 hoax documentary Ghostwatch, in which a live TV investigation into the supernatural on Halloween night goes progressively awry, etc etc. I like Ghostwatch a lot (I'm aware there are problematic elements surrounding it, primarily the fact that one viewer with a history of psychiatric problems was so traumatised by it that they eventually took their own life) and if Late Night with the Devil doesn't quite hit the same heights then that's mainly an issue of presentation.

No-one would mistake the events of Late Night with the Devil as actual old footage of a TV chat show; they are too extreme, and Dastmalchian has been in some very high-profile films. So there's a sense in which the audience is in on the joke from the start – the whole film operates to some extent on the level of 'wouldn't it be funny if...?', not that it doesn't attempt to be properly scary in places. This is the difference between doing a fake TV show as a film, and doing a fake TV show as a TV show – in fact, one might say that the key thing is that one is a pastiche and the other is a hoax (or at least has the potential to fool unsuspecting viewers, regardless of the makers' intent).

So the very nature of how people are going to encounter Late Night with the Devil acts as a limiting factor on exactly how successful it can be as a piece of horror – though I should say that the overt use of CGI in places and the makers' desire to give Dalton some depth as a character (this entails some of the clumsier foreshadowing I mentioned earlier) also breaks the illusion somewhat. It's never especially unsettling or indeed particularly frightening – at least I did not find it so. But its inventiveness and energy were charming and fun. A good showcase for David Dastmalchian and an impressive calling card for the Cairns.

Also Showing...

. . . another horror comedy about the dead returning to bother the living – I don't know, hardly appropriate for Easter is, it? Or then again. . . Anyway, Gil Kenan's Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is the third, or possibly fourth (depending on your politics), sequel to the 1984 original. Now the rule here is: original Ghostbusters: brilliant, everything since then: not so much. To be fair, the last one, Afterlife, was the best of the bunch, which is why this follows on closely. The descendants of original ghostbuster Egon Spengler have moved back to New York and restarted the business with the help of the rest of the original team, with the minor, ho ho, problem that one of them is under-age to be carrying a proton pack in public. The appearance of Kumail Nanjiani as the guardian of an ancient sphere filled with unspeakable evil doesn't help much either.

And it. . . passes the time inoffensively enough, I suppose. The only people in it who manage to be consistently funny are Nanjiani and Bill Murray (I doubt Murray spent more than a handful of days on set), though the movie's cause is not helped by a bloated script that has to accommodate various call-backs to previous films and also find things to do for a frankly excessive number of characters – at one point I counted eleven different ghostbusters. There's the original guys, then there's the cast introduced in Afterlife, and then there's a bunch of new characters who primarily seem to be there to stop potential complaints about this being a non-diverse film full of old people – which I suppose makes sense from a business point of view. Narratively, though, it's a problem. I was put in mind of the last Jurassic World film, which had a similar issue. But these big-name franchises will probably keep trading on nostalgia for a good while yet. This particular outbreak of bustin' didn't make me feel particularly good, though.

Awix

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