There’s a new horror hitting cinemas that’s caused a huge stir for using AI images – I went to see it anyway.
That movie is Late Night with the Devil. Starring David Dastmalchian, Laura Gordon and Ingrid Torelli, the movie styles itself as a mockumentary based around a 1970s late night talk show, with a host desperate to pull in bigger ratings with a Halloween special. The aesthetic is immediately pleasing – we have the classic 70s retro colour scheme, the fuzzy cam, a whole swathe of brown.
What I enjoyed most about the film was how it felt like a genuine TV show. Rather than tipping its audience full tilt into the possession horror, we’re first introduced to a medium who claims he can speak to the dead. Then comes a magician-turned-sceptic, who is desperate to prove the paranormal doesn’t exist.
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The last guests introduced on Jack Delroy’s live TV episode are Dr Ross-Mitchell and her patient Lilly. June Ross-Mitchell is a parapsychologist who has been studying the so-called demonic possession of cult survivor Lilly, who has an entity called Mr Wriggles living inside her.
(Image: SHUDDER/IFC FILMS)
What unfolds from there is a culty conspiracy, a whole load of devil sacrifice, worms crawling out of a man’s stomach and heads splitting in two and exploding. It’s a gory, B-movie mess, and I loved every second.
By far the best bit required a little bit of audience participation. While it wouldn’t be the first film to attempt to ‘hypnotise’ studio audiences (Horrors of the Black Mountain attempted to put viewers in a trance back in 1959), the hypnotic sequence in LNWTD was mesmerising, and a little eerie – and made you feel as though you had unwittingly become a player in the overarching story.
(Image: SHUDDER/IFC FILMS)
But what some fans haven’t been loving is the use of three images generated by artificial intelligence, used as title cards for the 70s TV show. Directors Cameron and Colin Cairnes claimed these images only worked to improve the film’s aesthetic – but one does wonder why they couldn’t have simply hired a human graphic designer to make the simple images.
The Cairnes told Variety: “In conjunction with our amazing graphics and production design team, all of whom worked tirelessly to give this film the ’70s aesthetic we had always imagined, we experimented with AI for three still images which we edited further and ultimately appear as very brief interstitials in the film.
“We feel incredibly fortunate to have had such a talented and passionate cast, crew and producing team go above and beyond to help bring this film to life. We can’t wait for everyone to see it for themselves this weekend.”
(Image: SHUDDER/IFC FILMS)
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Fans haven’t been happy, with journalist Rendy Jones tweeting: “There’s no excuse for LATE NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL to be using AI art especially since it had all this time between sxsw 2023 to now to hire a graphic artist. However going ham boycotting an indie over it seems harsh. Like where was this vitriol hate when Marvel did it last year?”
Other critics pointed out that the film, made in 2022, came before AI was a central issue in the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes – while others said boycotting an indie film wasn’t achieving anything over Hollywood tycoons.
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