Horror hasn’t been a primary go-to genre for me as I’ve aged, but I’ll check out a given work in just about any genre if it can sink a hook into the elusive target that is my set of aesthetic peculiarities. (And by “hook” I do not mean I award imaginary brownie points for use of the empty “elevated horror” label.) In the wake of the Hollywood-wide restart after last year’s dual WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, some 7,000 new, quick-bake horror flicks will be coming to theaters over the next several months as studios catch up on their precious blockbuster assembly-line schedules. Amid the flood of recent blood-soaked trailers — from high-concept to lowbrow to “the plot is a spoiler!” — one pitch spoke to me from the fray: “Starring David Dastmalchian!”

Ever since his pasty visage caught my eye as a tight-lipped minion in The Dark Knight and belied enough potential depths to make me ask, “So that guy’s the real Joker hiding in plain sight, right?” Dastmalchian has reliably heightened my interest whenever his suspicious, off-kilter characters are invited into the same room as more famous, traditionally bankable actors. This one-man rogues’ gallery stood out in at least three Denis Villeneuve films, the best Suicide Squad film, the two best Ant-Man films, Christopher Nolan’s only film to win Best Picture, and two fun episodes of The Flash before they killed him off and got canceled. Coincidence? Well, yeah, but I enjoy pretending otherwise. Perhaps “good luck charm” is too strong a label for him, but at the very least he’s a walking talisman that wards off ordinary-movie vibes.

He’s probably already starred in much smaller films that I should go track down, but I’d never heard the surefire selling point “Starring David Dastmalchian!” until I was alerted to his latest gig, a largely Australian bit of retro bedlam called Late Night with the Devil. Written and directed by brothers Cameron and Colin Cairnes, it’s a sort of return to ye old “found footage” subgenre that I’ve mostly avoided in recent times. (Chronicle was my favorite film of 2012, but I’ve sat through nary a Paranormal Activity.)

As the faux history goes, once upon a time in the ’70s there was a late-night talk show called Night Owls with Jack Delroy, a wannabe competitor with the juggernaut that was Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show in his prime. Dastmalchian is our man Jack, a contender for the after-hours crown till life got in the way and he lost his onscreen mojo. Whatever persona he’d once kept up for The Viewers at Home, his shtick would become a perpetual fear of failure and irrelevance — much like today’s “influencers”, but obsessed with overnight Nielsen ratings rather than instant clicks. Sometimes he’s still like any other stand-up comic whose writing staff is ordered to feed him topical jokes (Reggie Jackson! Billy Carter!) and sometimes he sinks to new lows as he helplessly watches belligerent guests trade punches, which wasn’t really a thing back then. His little Night Owls program threatened to devolve into a Jerry Springer precursor decades too soon and disrupt the very fabric of the unscripted-programming timeline.

That dire point in his career is where Late Night with the Devil joins his life in progress. A stage-setting documentary prologue recaps the hot-button mood of the era — civil unrest, antiwar protests, disillusionment with authority, and, germane to the incident at hand, America’s fascination with the paranormal. UFOs! ESP! Mass hypnosis! Staged telekinesis! All things scary and spooky and possibly real but more likely frauds! Some of which would be covered in the future in Time-Life’s Mysteries of the Unknown! Not to mention creepy cults, wicked obsessions, and assorted crimes that would one day be filed collectively under the retroactively nicknamed “Satanic panic”. (Dungeons & Dragons was only a few years old at this point and hadn’t yet been swept into the parental paranoia wave.)

Having little left to lose, Delroy ventured into that bizarre minefield on Halloween 1977 with a very special episode that would dance on the fine line between taste and trauma. With the blessing of his money-minded producer (Josh Quong Tart, who was in the Cairnes’ previous film Scare Campaign) and his network bosses at UBC, Delroy invited good friend Dr. June Ross-Mitchell (Laura Gordon from last year’s Foe, faintly echoing talk-show mainstay Dr. Joyce Brothers) to come on the show with a patient named Lilly (Ingrid Torelli) who survived an evil cult’s mass suicide but was feeling slightly better now except for the alleged demon inside her. After a round of the usual polite chitchat, Delroy envisioned this gathering as the perfect opportunity to summon forth the demon and interview a genuine Hell-spawn on live TV. What’s the worst that could happen?

The core of Late Night with the Devil is that “lost” episode in its available entirety as well as behind-the-scenes archival footage taken that night offstage and during commercial breaks. In addition to the good doctor and her charge — an awkward teen who’s uncannily skilled at finding every camera and staring down its glassy abyss — two more guests are billed for the evening and for value-added nostalgic homages, each apropos of unexplained phenomena of the times. Representing the fantastical is Fayssal Bazzi (Apple TV+’s Shantaram) as the mentalist Christou, a send-up of every “psychic” like the Amazing Kreskin or John Edwards who came to your town and kept repeating random syllables until some rube in the back row was vaguely reminded of one phoneme in a dead loved one’s name. From the opposite end of the fact-or-fiction spectrum charges Ian Bliss (the Matrix series) perfectly cranky as the crusading Carmichael Haig, who’s basically world-famous paranormal skeptic James Randi. (I read two of his books back in college, the classic Flim-Flam! and his illuminating prophecy-by-prophecy rebuttal The Mask of Nostradamus.) One purported seer into the spirit world versus one vitriolic debunker, both present for the ostensible summoning — whoever’s right or wrong, Delroy wins. He hopes.

The Cairnes know the subject is hardly groundbreaking and wisely avoid the rookie mistake of pretending this all happens in a vacuum apart from pop culture. (At least one fleeting quip confirms The Exorcist exists in their world.) The novelty format is over half the fun, a faithful recreation that channels interviewers high and low, renowned or short-lived, reminding me of everything from Mike Douglas to David Brenner’s Nightlife and reliving all the hallmarks of such programs. (A belittled sidekick! Cheesy repartee! A totally hep house band! Silly sketches! Smoking on camera! Zookeepers bringing exotic fauna! Musical guests bumped from the end of the show at the last minute!) Though the course of events is easily predictable from its benign inception through the inevitably disastrous outcome (except maybe the final ten minutes, when any lingering formalist trappings dissolve into so much sanguinary psychedelia), the meta conceit helps distinguish this riff from the past 5-10 years’ worth of demonic-possession flicks and series.

Anchoring it all is Dastmalchian, exactly as waaaaay-out-there as one would expect. Jack Delroy nearly drowns in his own flop sweat and knows no shame as he misfires his every attempt at human connection with the sort of graceless prefab charm that can only be acquired by a true showbiz failure. Going from shifty-eyed to wide-eyed and back again, he lurches through the motions from one segment to the next, thriving only on the promise of overseeing A Television First that might buy him a comeback, though he’ll soon regret not looking far enough ahead to glimpse the price tag. At times he’s so out of sync with his guests that I wondered, “How could anyone of sound mind give this man his own talk show?” Then I remembered the same could be said of Tom Green, Chevy Chase, or Jimmy Fallon. Who knows how many guys got their gigs by making deals with the Devil, without even repaying the favor by inviting him on the show?

…

Meanwhile in the customary MCC film breakdowns:

Hey, look, it’s that one actor!: Georgina Haig (Fringe, Once Upon a Time) appears in flashbacks as Jack’s wife, whose death from cancer was the pivotal moment in Jack’s life that still haunts him throughout. Steve Mouzakis (Where the Wild Things Are) is the now-deceased head of Lilly’s now-extinct cult. Other Night Owls crew members include Christopher Kirby, who showed up twice in the Matrix series and was slightly in Revenge of the Sith, though poor Senator Giddean Danu has yet to get his own action figure.

The narrator of the documentary prologue is none other than special guest Michael Ironside!

How about those end credits? No, there’s no scene after the Late Night with the Devil end credits, but they do lead off with an indigenous land acknowledgment (Australian-style), plead briefly for organ donation, and name-check the “improvisational” theremin player, whose eerie anti-tunes would handily win a “Top Ten ’70s Things About Late Night with the Devil” list.