There are moments, that are unfortunately becoming increasingly few and far between, when a film catches you off guard, twists itself around your cerebellum, and leaves a lingering terror deep in your soul. The Cairnes brothers’ dark and disturbing reimaging of what has become a staple of genre cinema, the “found footage” movie, Late Night With The Devil, is one of those moments and it will haunt your dreams long after the final credits have rolled. 

Revolving around a late-night seventies talk show host’s feverish and all-consuming desire to become a number-one ratings smash, despite being beset by personal tragedy and a dramatic plunge in viewers, Late Night With The Devil embraces the social, political, and civil unrest of the decade in which its set and capitalises on the more morbid obsessions of the era that fashion forgot, the supernatural and the occult. It thrives thanks to the gradual slow-burn tension that builds to a dramatic climax, as Jack Delroy, the aforementioned host played by David Dastmalchian, fences with a psychic who is more than he seems, a skeptic, a parapsychologist and the only survivor of a Satanic cult whose members committed mass suicide. 

As the show, shown through found footage of the events that shaped the most terrifying night in television history, gathers momentum, Jack finds himself, and his audience, becoming the unwitting players in a horrifying production directed by an evil far older than humanity. Dastmalchian delivers a tour de force performance as the host whose ambition has brought him, and everyone else caught in his wake to ruin, in this incredible, intelligent exploration of the price that ultimately has to be paid for fame and the sacrifices that otherwise decent people are willing to make to taste the dizzying heights of fortune. Frighteningly good fun… Tim Cundle 

Late Night With The Devil hits cinema screens in the UK on March 22nd