Late Night with the Devil (2023)

Director: Colin Cairnes, Cameron Cairnes

Cast: David Dastmaclchian, Laura Gordon, Ian Bliss, Fayssal Bazzi

Have I Seen it Before: No.

Did I Like It: And yet, I worry I might have been ever-so-slightly overhyped on the film before going in. There’s nothing especially new on display in the film. It will not completely change the way you look at horror films. As much as people were talking the film up, I might have been secretly hoping for something at that level. Everything about the possession of Lilly (Ingrid Torelli) has all been done in movies since The Exorcist (1973). The unravelling which inevitably follows after trying to harness the occult for success paints every inch of Rosemary’s Baby (1968). Your mileage with found footage might vary, but at best there’s not a lot of unexplored potential after The Blair Witch Project (1999) and Paranormal Activity (2007).  Filmmakers continue to try to set their stories in the 1970s, because… I don’t know. The decade is scarier than all the others?

What happens here, is that all of those elements are fused together into something that may not be entirely new, but is refreshing. Much more importantly? All of those elements are executed near flawlessly.

Trying to make a period setting believable is an almost guaranteed recipe for failure in a movie. I see the 2020s in a moment. Not here. The filming styles (alternating between film and video) makes everything seem like it is of the era, and that’s coming from the guy who spent large portions of the pandemic watching network newsfeeds from the Watergate era in order to self-soothe.

The possessed little girl feels familiar, but after dozens, if not hundreds of rehashes of the form—including quite recently—this girl feels unnerving from the first moment she appears on screen. She has a stare that Linda Blair would envy.

Adding a twist onto the found footage, the film rather ingeniously harnesses its unreality to introduce the doubt—even now, several days after seeing it—about just what I saw? Was I just as hypnotized as the characters in the film? Probably not, but can I say with 100% certainty I am aware of what happened both to the characters, or myself. If that’s not great horror, I don’t know what is.

If this isn’t the best—or at least most finely crafted—horror film this year, then we are truly in for a great year.

Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023)

Director: André Øvredal

Cast: Corey Hawkins, Aisling Franciosi, Liam Cunningham, David Dastmalchian

Have I Seen it Before: Nope. Brand new.

Did I Like It: This may in fact be the first film to feature Count Dracula, where Dracula himself (Javier Botet, who you might remember as the Hobo manifestation of It from both It - Chapter One (2017) and It - Chapter Two (2019), but I didn’t) is easily, far and away, the least interesting thing happening in the film.

Before you take that as particularly special praise for a film, let’s all calm down. Demeter is a mostly competently made thriller at sea which is destined to enjoy a long happy life of endless cable re-airings. Assuming movies are still shown on cable far enough in the future for something released in 2023 to one day enjoy that long life. The characters are stock, but sturdy in that stockiness. The performances are good, especially a moment where young Toby (Woody Norman) is overwhelmed by his fear in disappointing his uncle, the Captain (Cunningham, who I consistently get confused with Bernard Hill, and in that confusion worried the character was a bit too stock, as I kept thinking of the Captain from Titanic (1997). Any movie that manages to get a decent to good performance out of a kid is at least worth one look.

Where the film falters is in the elements which likely made it seem like good business for the studio. The movie bends over backwards to set up a sequel that might happen, but in which I’m only interested so far as I like to go to the movies. Universal, we’ve struggled with you guys trying hard to set up franchises with your stable of classic monsters. I beg you to drop it and just get weird with it. The really canonical classic Universal Monster films were the weakest—if still delightfully watchable—offerings. Don’t be DC or Marvel. Remember that it was James Whale who irretrievably planted your characters in the collective consciousness.

But that’s a disappointment in the final moments, not a fatal flaw of the preceding film. The big flaw stands in front of us on the poster as we walk into the theater. Here, Dracula is a effect, but not a special one. He hisses and jumpscares through the movie, but he has no personality. He barely has a command of any human language out of some light mimicry. The movie is pitched as Alien (1979) on a boat in the nineteenth century, but had they bothered to just pitch it as Dracula meets Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003), they might have remembered the movie they were trying to make.