“I couldn’t take my eyes off it”: the controversial horror movie Stephen King called “absolutely brilliant”
Horror has never been a stranger to controversy, even if it can end up taking many shapes and forms. Stephen King was ahead of the curve in praising an acclaimed independent terror, so much so that his hearty recommendation predated the bizarre storm that was to follow.
In addition to being one of horror’s leading lights on the printed page and a regular source of inspiration for countless film and television productions, King also enjoys devouring as much scary content as he possibly can during his downtime, and his reputation and standing ensures he’s typically among the first to find out about a potential hit-in-waiting.
On this occasion, the downside was that he was utterly oblivious to the controversy that would greet the movie when it was finally released months after he’d seen it, and it was a very modern uproar. Horror flicks have been criticised for excessive gore, grisly violence, depraved actions, profanity, mimicry of real-world events and much more, but incorporating artificial intelligence is a new one.
Writers and directors Colin and Cameron Cairnes premiered their period-set supernatural story Late Night with the Devil at the South by Southwest Festival in March 2023, but it would be more than a year before the film was made widely available. King caught it shortly after the first screening, and he couldn’t speak highly enough of the story.
“It’s absolutely brilliant,” he wrote on social media. “I couldn’t take my eyes off it. Your results may vary, as they say, but I urge you to watch it when you can.” Set almost entirely in a single location, David Dastmalchian is on stellar form as Jack Delroy, a late-night talk show host who welcomes a young girl onto the airwaves as his guest who claims to have survived a demonic possession.
Dastmalchain has always been one of the more underrated and unsung character actors the business has at its disposal, and he seized a rare opportunity to lead the line with relish. Projecting the outward confidence required to be a television personality and captivating with his charisma, behind the scenes, Delroy remains crippled by not only personal tragedy but dangerous secrets he thought buried forever.
As would be expected from a horror flick where the aim of the game is unsettling and disorientating the audience, any disbelievers in the studio audience are quickly converted when the demon that lurks within Ingrid Torelli’s Lilly D’Abo is gradually coaxed out in front of the watching world.
Needless to say, things get a lot spookier from there, especially when it’s intimated that Delroy has a pre-existing connection with the malevolent spirit that suspiciously coincided with his career resurgence. Late Night with the Devil was worth the wait and received rapturous acclaim, but between its SXSW debut and eventual theatrical release that yielded almost $13million in ticket sales, a couple of small alterations were made that opened a huge can of worms.
Three still images used for seconds that served as intertitles within the fictional Nite Owls series fronted by Dastmalchian’s character were created using AI, and it didn’t go unnoticed. In typically modern form, that was enough to lead to calls for a boycott of Late Night with the Devil, even though it comprises a tiny fraction of the movie’s 95-minute running time.
People rebelling against AI being used in movies is entirely justified and warranted when it either undoes or replaces the hard work put in by flesh-and-blood professionals. Still, at the end of the day, Late Night with the Devil was a modestly budgeted indie feature that used contentious technology for a handful of frames. Still, the blowback was so fierce it almost overshadowed its release entirely.
