It’s funny how rapidly streaming has taken over our lives. Only ten years ago I remember noticing that I was no longer relying primarily on DVDs, and now my remaining DVDs feel like impossibly antique objects (they’re all covered in dust). Likewise, we’ve reached a point where conventional television has started to feel like a thing of the past, ripe for gothic appropriation. In particular, late night television feels uncanny from the perspective of the present. We live in a time when television has been untethered from all temporality, especially nocturnal temporality – the whole point of streaming is to create a world where we can watch television all night. It’s strange, then, to recall that there was once a time when television stopped, leaving nothing but static, or an empty signal, as a placeholder for the medium. It’s a bit like that mythical space envisaged and fantasised by film noir – where the sidewalk ends. The idea of late night television has become especially uncanny; that feeling of watching the last show of the evening before the schedule comes to an end. I can still remember the strange liminality of these shows, the feeling that they were on the verge of crumbling into static.

Two films in 2024 have tackled late night television, but in different decades. Whereas I Saw The TV Glow examines late night television in the 90s, Late Night With The Devil turns its attention to the 70s, and the emergence of late night itself as a distinct genre. Written and directed by Colin and Cameron Cairnes, the film revolves around a fictional host, Jack Delroy, played by David Dastmalchian, and his talk show, Night Owls. By the late 70s, Night Owls is unable to hold its own against The Late Show With Johnny Carson, forcing Jack to resort to extreme strategies to maintain his audience’s attention. This culminates on Halloween Eve 1977, when he introduces an esoteric lineup in a last-ditch effort to restore his ratings – former magician turned skeptic Carmichael Haig (Ian Bliss), psychic Christou (Fayssal Bazzi), parapsychologist June Ross-Mitchell (Laura Gordon) and Lilly D’Abo, the child survivor of a mass shooting, and the object of a study by June, who claims that she possesses paranormal powers. Jack may also be drawing upon the paranormal directly, due to his association with a shadowy Californian fraternity (possibly a cult) known as “The Grove.” This is apparently based on the Bohemian Grove, a Californian gentlemen’s club that has included George H.W. Bush, Newt Gingrich, William Randolph Hearst, Henry Kissinger, Jack London, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger amongst its members. I thought this was one of the more underdeveloped parts of the film – I would have liked more on the mythology of this strange society.

That said, I do understand why the Cairnes brothers couldn’t focus too much on the Grove, since the film is necessarily bounded by the space and time of the Halloween broadcast. This is presented as a single piece of found footage – the recording plus the incidental material captured behind the scenes, or during cuts to commercial breaks. It’s funny to think that live television, or classical television, has now become uncanny enough to qualify for the found footage treatment. We seem to be at a point with television that we were at with cinema about twenty years ago, in which the analog dimensions of the medium have ceased to be a recognisable part of our world. I wonder whether the shift to streaming will produce a new wave of found footage features revolving around television in this way. One of the main traits of found footage cinema was glitch, static and distortion, and the same is true here. Streaming hasn’t just made television available all the time, but has improved image quality at an exponential rate. Watching the crystalline vistas of Apple TV Plus, it’s hard to believe that we once thought Netflix was the pinnacle of image resolution. I’m sure we’ll feel the same way about Apple TV Plus too when the next platform comes along. There’s no doubt that the majority of us now experience exquisitely rendered images more on small screens than on big screens, meaning that the comparative paucity of traditional television is a real shock to the system. Late Night With the Devil leans deep into that shock, introducing more frequent and subliminal distortions to its images as the narrative proceeds.

The film also traffics more in static as it moves later into the night. Late night television becomes the harbinger of the static that takes over when the final program ends, an unthinkable prospect in our own time. Jack realises that the later the night gets, the more important it is that he retain the viewers who might be tempted to turn to Carson, so he sets out to harness the impending glitch that comes with the end of the television schedule. In that sense, Jack is a bit ahead of his time. He seems to realise that late night television’s proximity to empty static will come to be seen as one of its most distinctive traits. As a result, he aims to identify his show with the genre as it will come to be preserved for posterity, and to turn the proximity of this static into the subject matter and raison d’etre for late night television in the first place.This is quite an abstract task and hard to fully conceptualise in a televisual milieu where this late night experience is largely normalised. That’s why Jack seeks out the paranormal, using his guests to introduce more static into his image, or else reveal the static that is already there. Christou, the psychic, describes himself as a human antenna, collecting information but also experiencing disruptions from the lights, sound devices and recording equipment of the television studio. June, the parapsychologist, compares her experiences to glitches in the normal fabric of life and television. As these guests (and others) share their views, the Cairnes brothers clutter their mise-en-scenes with more and more analog recording objects, creating an awkwardness and ungainliness that itself becomes a different kind of static. The segues between these paranormal happenings and the syntax of late night television (fade-ins, fade-outs, title cards) also become more awkward. This creates a kind of affective static in the otherwise seamless feel-good vibe of the late night mode.

These static interruptions also create an interesting fissure between daytime and late night television. During the film’s prologue, a speaker notes that there were two types of television in the 70s. First, there was daytime television, which includes the nightly news. This television, according to the speaker, concerned itself with all the chaos, bloodshed and countercultural unrest of the decade – what what Jarrett Kobek, in his book on the Zodiac killer, describes as the “motor spirit” of the 70s. By contrast, the speaker tells us, late night television operated as a balm for the day that was, lulling viewers into a comforting illusion of a feel-good world. I like this reading of television, partly because it reframes soap operas, the pinnacle of daytime television, as a direct and visceral engagement with the world in which they unfolded, rather than a trivial or throwaway text. For the purpose of this discussion, however, it’s notable that late night television has a repressive function in two directions – it has to repress the chaos of the day that preceded it and repress the blankness of the empty static that succeeds it. As Delroy’s show moves further into the night, it gathers all the atavistic energy of the 70s in its wake even as it sets its sights on absorbing the static and dead signal to come. It is a return of the repressed kernel of late night television – everyday life.

At the level of horror, this plays out as a gradual denaturing of the live audience’s gaze. For the first part of the film, they seem like a group of normal people, ciphers for the viewers watching on their couches at home. However, a series of more alien gazes soon start to disrupt them. A number of audience members are wearing masks, and remain oddly immobile when the camera, or Gilroy turns to them. This strange stasis is then mirrored on the stage and mediated through the camera, most eerily when Lilly, the young girl, continues to stare at the lens after Gilroy has signalled an ad break. It feels like the televisual contract has been broken, or perhaps just exposed, and that we are seeing the medium being used as a mechanism for mass control. Alternatively, these immobile, inhuman gazes seem to look beyond late night television altogether to a streaming future (the place where we are watching the film) in which the small screen presupposes a continuous gaze. Rather than being live, the Cairnes seem to suggest, streaming is undead, and it is that undead quality that Gilroy inchoately glimpses and attempts to grasp in order to restore his program to the cutting edge. Similarly, the Cairnes generate a great deal of horror from late-night glitch. In another presaging of our digital present, Gilroy winds back footage of this same night’s show, and discovers that what initially looked like a random clump of static is actually an apparition of his dead wife. Likewise, Lilly eventually become an emanation of pure glitch – her head breaks open and spews out a livestream of demonic power, a torrent of satanic static that destroys anyone who gets in her way. This new stream of televisual information briefly coalesces into a demonic figure before the image cuts to a Night Owls “technical difficulty” card.

The rest of the film isn’t quite as scary, even if it is conceptually resonant. Gilroy finds himself trapped in the place where television ends, surrounded by alien gazes that gather around him, and eventually break down all distinction between diegetic and non-diegetic space, between his life as a host and his actual life, and between what is happening on stage and how it is received by the audience. These final moments anticipate a streaming future where television is both always on and never “on” – it is a vision of network television dreaming of streaming that defamiliarises both; an eerie ending, if not downright terrifying, especially if you watch it across a number of different streaming devices, television included.