‘Late Night with the Devil’ Ending Explained: What’s Happening on that Final, Fateful Episode of ‘Night Owls’?

In a year where new horror movies seem to be appearing in theaters and on streaming on a weekly basis, an unexpected breakout success in the indie realm has been IFC’s Late Night with the Devil, a riff on both found-footage horror and possession movies that has weathered an A.I. controversy to become the biggest-grossing horror movie in the company’s history. As its theatrical run finishes up, Late Night with the Devil has premiered on Shudder, the horror streaming service, making it more accessible than ever. Which means plenty of viewers will have the inevitable question: What the hell is happening at the end of this movie?

Late Night With The Devil movie plot summary:

First, a quick catch-up on Late Night with the Devil’s set-up: It’s presented as a documentary, composed primarily of found footage, concerning a broadcast of Night Owls with Jack Delroy, a (fictional) late-night talk show in the Tonight Show vein, airing in the late 1970s. In fact, Night Owls is said to compete with Johnny Carson’s extremely popular Tonight Show, and Jack Delroy (character actor and horror mainstay David Dastmalchian) has become increasingly desperate to make headway in the ratings. One of his ratings ploys involves the show’s Halloween broadcast, where he invites a psychic, a skeptic, a parapsychologist, and one of her patients, who has supposedly experienced demonic possession, onto the program.

After a documentary-style prologue explaining more context – Jack has connections to “The Grove,” a California retreat for the rich and powerful, and lost his wife Madeleine to cancer not long before the Halloween 1977 broadcast – the movie proceeds more or less as an episode of Night Owls. At the times when the show cuts to commercial, the movie stays on-set via documentary footage showing what’s happening behind the scenes. (Who was filming extensive behind-the-scenes footage of this episode is not explained.) Jack does a little monologue, goofs around with his announcer, and goes through the business of chatting with his various guests. That’s where things start to go wrong: the psychic gets sick and must be carted off-set to a hospital (and later dies, off-camera), and Jack goads June (Laura Gordon), the parapsychologist, into conjuring the demon who supposedly possessed young Lilly (Ingrid Torelli).

As you might expect, the whole demon-conjuring thing does NOT go well. Undergoing a series of possessions, Lilly (or rather the demon inside of her) runs amok in the studio, killing the skeptic, June, and Jack’s on-air sidekick/announcer. After a series of hallucinations taking Jack through altered versions of his memories, a vision of Madeleine in her hospital bed describes her pain, and begs Jack to end it, goading him into stabbing her to death. The movie then cuts back to the now-empty studio, where it turns out that Jack has stabbed Lilly, and is surrounded by the demon’s other victims as police audibly approach from a distance.

Late Night With The Devil Ending Explained:

So what does all of this mean? First, the movie all but demands that you accept a certain amount of format flexibility in its documentary-style framework. Towards the end, about 80 minutes into the movie, after Lilly has killed several people, the picture descends into static, followed a “Station Difficulties” card with the obligatory easy-listening music. But then the movie cuts back to Night Owls footage, with a visibly disoriented Jack stumbling through the routines of a normal episode, skipping forward with blips of static: His entrance onstage, bantering with his sidekick, doing a comedy sketch, and chatting with a guest are all shot with tilting camera angles, using a wider aspect ratio that no longer signals the format of 1977 TV. Jack then flashes to his on-air interview with Madeleine, glimpsed earlier in the film, which quickly turns sinister here.

Jack’s experiences grow increasingly distorted and menacing, with images of the masked figures previously glimpsed in footage of The Grove, the shadowy, woodsy organization that he’s tangled with. Much of this has been telegraphed in the early exposition dump, and becomes more explicit as Jack converses with a vision of Madeleine in her hospital bed: The Grove agreed to boost Jack’s career, and his (unwitting?) sacrifice – alongside his own soul – was Madeleine, whose lung cancer has previously (and ominously) been described as unexplained considering her lack of smoking (a somewhat nonsensical bit of foreshadowing, as it is far from impossible for a nonsmoker to get lung cancer, especially in the days where secondhand smoke was likely unavoidable).

It’s a little unclear whether Jack’s hallucination of Madeleine is an intentional trick from the demon, hoping that he delivers that final stab to poor Lilly, or if that’s just an unfortunate side effect. Broadly, it makes sense for the demon to be manipulating him, but on the other hand, can’t the demon kill Lilly pretty easily, and isn’t Jack damned both eternally and in the physical world already? That ambiguity is welcome, though, in a movie that doesn’t have a lot of surprises in store during this final 10 minutes – beyond the shift that seemingly abandons found-footage and faux-documentary for a more subjective point of view, showing us Jack’s experiences rather than what an audience at home could reasonably be expected to see.

This break in the movie’s reality is certainly unsettling, and has some thematic potential: Late-night television as we know it tends to be a rigorously formatted enterprise, where even the surprises are contained in familiar parameters, with recurring segments, regular escapes to ad breaks, and a clockwork-consistent runtime. It might have more impact, though, if the rest of the movie was more stringent about the format. By contriving a half-assed way for the film’s audience to “stay” in-studio during ad breaks via the documentary footage, the movie nixes some of its mystery upfront, leaving less to the imagination (and also creating a distraction: even for network TV, the show takes a lot of commercial breaks). Why not create the sensation that when the show cuts away to commercial, some pieces of this puzzle are lost forever to the viewing audience? In the end, Late Night with the Devil is perhaps even more like a regular late-night show than it lets on: In its opening minutes, it tells you what’s coming up on the program, and then in the movie, it all comes to pass.

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.