The indie horror project Late Night with the Devil has been making a lot of headlines for a little movie, and for a variety of reasons: For its impressively high Rotten Tomatoes score as it opened in wider-than-usual release for an IFC Films production; for setting a record in the specialized but still interesting category of biggest opening weekend for an IFC Films release, including a suspiciously gimmicky Sunday gross; and, most notoriously, for its filmmakers admitting that some artificial intelligence was used on a small portion of the film.
The debate about AI in the film raged on Twitter, where some users felt a zero-tolerance boycott was in order (which obviously didn’t materialize in great numbers, given the box office), while others felt this would serve as an outsized punishment for a movie that supposedly used AI only sparingly, and in conjunction with actual, human graphic designers.
Though the specifics of the movie’s use of AI are somewhat baffling – the filmmakers admit to using them to create still images used for interstitial cards on the fake talk show that drives the movie’s narrative, and the retro images seem like something any halfway-decent graphic designer should have been able to come up with (or, at bare minimum, imitate without anyone knowing) – perhaps more interesting is how they were spotted. As previously reported, a Letterboxd user caught the suspicious-looking images, the accusations spread online, and the filmmakers were forced to address it. In doing so, they downplayed the use of AI, which others have suggested is perhaps more widespread than their statement suggests. Indeed, the logo for Night Owls, the fake late-night talk show, looks similar to those interstitials, and appears throughout the movie, not just momentarily.
Of course, using AI in any generative capacity is such a hot-button issue that it will only become more difficult to get anyone to admit to it in the future – which will feed further suspicion about when it was used. Calling out a movie’s screenplay as sounding ChatGPT-generated is already a critical cliché, nearly as ubiquitous (and hacky) as using some kind of pun to indicate that an actor is phoning it in. Saying that Late Night with the Devil feels like an AI movie, then, will sound like a combination of that hackwork plus a healthy dose of confirmation bias.
And yet: There is something unnervingly phony about Late Night with the Devil, and not just because Night Owls isn’t a real show. The movie attempts to put a novel twist on the found-footage subgenre of horror. Rather than someone’s shaky camcorder footage “recovered” and repurposed, the movie unfolds as a faux-documentary, complete with steady stream of exposition at the top, supplying backstory for Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian), a comedian whose ’70s-era late-night chat show has long trailed The Tonight Show in the ratings. Seeking a Halloween ratings boost, he invites a parapsychologist and a girl who was supposedly possessed by a demon on his show – alongside a skeptic who offers $100,000 to anyone who can prove him wrong.
Much of the movie, then, is this episode of Night Owls. But that wouldn’t fill a 95-minute movie, so filmmakers Cameron and Colin Cairnes add an extra gimmick, claiming to have behind-the-scenes footage that can be spliced into the episode seamlessly. When the live broadcast cuts to commercial, we see what’s happening on set, rather than retro ads from 1977.
Fair enough; clever found-footage cheats are part of the genre. At the same time, there’s something off-putting about the way that Late Night with the Devil sets up its own parameters, then immediately disregards them with documentary-style exposition and a bunch of black-and-white behind-the-scenes footage that’s conveniently shot a lot like a regular movie, not like a documentarian is actually underfoot during these suspiciously frequent and lengthy ad breaks. Even the on-air footage of Night Owls has close-ups, odd angles, and reaction shots that a 1977 broadcast would be unlikely to capture. Throughout the movie, the Cairnes brothers seem vaguely annoyed by their own premise. At the film’s showy climax, they break further from the conceit by incorporating hallucinations that, of course, would not be captured by Night Owls cameras. If this were the first time the movie bent its rules, it might be a thrilling, creepy defiance of the form. Instead, it just feels like the movie is getting tired of itself. Staying fixed within the episode (even if this meant pausing for fake ads) and worked any exposition into that framework might have built tension; instead, the movie essentially tells the audience what it’s about to do, and then does it – with the behind-the-scenes cutaways essentially functioning as periodic reminders of what it’s about to do.
Sloppy filmmaking is not the same thing as using AI; presumably the production came by most of its weaknesses just as honestly as its moments of tension and cleverness, which are not insubstantial. But it’s hard to ignore that the broader problems with Late Night with the Devil are pretty compatible with the use of AI. A fake ’70s-style logo for a late-night show is a simple concept, and one that apparently no one working on the movie was willing or allowed to take first crack at. That the filmmakers started with AI, even as a jumping-off point (and judging from the quality of the images, there wasn’t that much jumping off), suggests that maybe verisimilitude was treated more as a cool concept, maybe even a burden, rather than something the production felt confident and excited about when it came time to actually fill out the details. That’s where the devil lives, of course – and that’s where AI lurks, too, feeding on the same impulse that says ideas are great, and having to execute them is a drag.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.
