Late Night with the Devil premiered in select cities this past weekend, allegedly raking in $666,666 on Sunday. This indie gem by Cameron and Colin Caernes is a “found footage” horror film, purporting to be a lost episode of a late-night talk show called Night Owls that aired on Halloween 1977. Faced with faltering ratings and imminent cancellation, host Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian) takes a chance by bringing on a series of spooky guests, including “Lilly,” a girl who was rescued from a Satanic cult and is allegedly possessed. The story is a bizarre mashup of The Exorcist (1973) and Network (1976)—with a touch of the Faust legend thrown in—that perfectly captures the mood and style that surrounded media depictions of the occult in the 1970s.
Despite its supernatural premise, Late Night with the Devil is a work of realism. Most of the characters and events in the film are references to actual figures from 1970s occulture. It also reflects on the way that talk shows became a vector through which rumors of Satanic cults spread, fueling the Satanic Panic of the 1980s. As described in my book The Exorcist Effect, filming a live exorcism was a goal of network news media for two decades.
Beginning in the 1960s, the secularization narrative—the belief that science will soon render religion obsolete—coincided with surging interest in the occult. In 1966, Time ran its famous “Is God Dead?” cover, which can be spotted in Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and the combination of red font on a black background continued to be used in The Exorcist (1973) and The Omen (1976). Sociologist Peter Berger, in his 1974 essay on The Exorcist, suggested that fascination with the occult was a reaction to secularism: “Let me, then, state a simple hypothesis: The current occult wave (including its devil component) is to be understood as resulting from the repression of transcendence in modern consciousness.” The networks also noticed public fascination with the demonic and otherworldly and they scrambled to cash in.
In April 1971, NBC Chicago aired an exorcism on live television. Camera crews arrived to film William Derl-Davis, a reverend from the Independent Spiritualist Church in Chicago, and medium Joseph DeLouise exorcise the home of two newlyweds who claimed to be experiencing strange disturbances after moving into their new apartment. The crew were given crosses to wear for protection. DeLouise entered a trance and assumed the persona of an old woman whose spirit could not rest. Derl-Davis administered communion to the spirit and the exorcism was declared a success.