Television host Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian) juggles many mystical balls in the Hallowe’en episode of his fictional chat-show Night Owls, which forms the heart of Colin and Cameron Cairnes’s found-footage freak-out Late Night with the Devil. With ratings falling and his career at stake, a grieving Jack gambles on the bet that absolutely nothing can go wrong in bringing a psychic medium, a possessed teenager and a magician-turned-skeptic together for a seance on live TV. Satanic panic ensues, and Jack’s side-kick Gus McConnell (Rhys Auteri) becomes heavily disturbed about the price his friend may have paid for fame. 

Speaking of the cost of success: Late Night with the Devil is the third low-budget feature from the Cairnes brothers—after 2012’s 100 Bloody Acres and 2016’s Scare Campaign—and, to date, their most successful. US distributor IFC Films certainly had fun with a spooky opening weekend US box-office result of $666,666, going on to earn their highest-grossing opening week ever. In a pandemic-affected theatrical landscape, that’s only good news for the Australian brothers, and for horror lovers who like their scares in cinemas. (“It was certainly a decision to watch this alone in a theater after midnight. What a fucking trip,” writes Rudydontstop.)

But, much like Jack Delroy’s live television gamble, the Cairnes’s creative choices opened a giant can of wriggly worms.

In some ways, this timeline explains how and why two experienced filmmakers would have dared to dabble in the A.I. occult. So what have they learned since, and what happens next? The Cairnes brothers set aside jetlag and howling dogs to talk to Letterboxd on Zoom from Australia, while I hustled myself to a quiet room away from a screen industry conference at which A.I., coincidentally, was dominating much of the conversation.

Massive, massive congrats on your theatrical result. The devil must have been fiddling those numbers to land on the very headline-grabbing $666K opening. How does that feel?
Colin Cairnes: Yes. He works in mysterious ways.

Cameron Cairnes: That was a surprise. That was a genuine shock. I don’t know if things were slightly rounded up or down, but nevertheless we’ll go with that. We’ll run with that line.

Colin: Praise the dark lord. 

Okay, a classic “less of a question, more of a comment”: You’re super-smart filmmakers. This is your third feature and even with that experience, your plan was still to have a single location, a small cast, a tight shoot and use your skills from television to get more daily coverage than your average low-budget film. I feel like other filmmakers can learn so much from these choices and the subsequent box office activity.
Colin: Yes, but it’s not always the case that constraining yourself to a single location and a small cast is gonna equate to a good film. At the end of the day, you still have to come up with the goods. You’ve still got to write a great script and cast it well and execute. I think for anyone starting out who wants to get their first feature made quickly, then it is the smart way to go. But, you know, whether the film is successful or not is another story. But it does mean you can limit your costs, which is not to say that we made this film for nothing. We had a budget. 

But look, yeah, the concept was a product of a time where we’d just finished our first feature. It was very well received critically, but because of piracy and various other things, it unfortunately didn’t get to make much money. So we thought, yeah, to get something else made quickly, we had to keep it contained and pretty low-budget, hence the decision to pursue the concept of Late Night with the Devil. 

There’s ambition, a lot of ambition with the project. in of trying to pull off that concept and make it convincing, making it authentic. That still requires time, money, talent, hard work, all those things. I would say to emerging filmmakers, people setting out to make their first film, it’s a smart way to go about things, and to impress upon producers and potential investors that you’re kind of savvy enough to see that.

Laura [Gordon], playing Dr. June, and Ingrid [Torelli], playing Lilly, were both so into it and gave it so much. It was kind of breathtaking to behold. And it was amazing for us as directors, it’s like, you know you’ve got something special here. It’s just great because that feeling ripples through the rest of the cast and crew. So there was enough going on that felt moving and powerful and a little bit spiritual almost without us trying to invoke the devil itself.

What’s the most frightened you’ve ever been watching a movie?
Cameron: For me, and I know this is an experience shared by many people my age who went and saw An American Werewolf in London way back when, in the early ’80s, as a very young boy, but there’s one particular scene in that. It’s the dream sequence where David Naughton is running through the forest and he sees a vision of himself flying in a hospital bed in the forest and then he sees this vampire version of himself who just suddenly sort of wakes up and bares his fangs and I never jumped out of my seat higher. Yeah, that was a pretty seminal scare for me. I’ve been chasing that thrill ever since.

Colin: One of the great jolts. I don’t know if I can top that. In the same film, there’s another nightmare sequence where the same character is at home in his comfy, middle-class house in the Midwest or wherever it is. And there’s this extreme, graphically violent home invasion where I think, is it him, Cam? Or his mum gets her throat slit and he wakes up and it’s all a dream, except he wakes up into another nightmare. Like Cam says, that’s what we’ve been trying to make ever since. And we’re getting there, we’re nearly there.

People have suggested, “oh, you should swap out the images,” but I don’t know. Who knows where this conversation’s going in six months, in two years? It’s changed that much in the twelve months-plus since we finished the film. You just don’t know. A.I. is being used every day on every big show or film in some form. Every time someone does a visual effect now, A.I. is playing a part. So it’s out there, it’s getting used and it can be a force for good. 

It can definitely be a force for bad as well. We’re totally on board with what happened with the strikes last year, as removed as we were from all of that down under. But for anyone to suggest that this film marks the beginning of the rise of the machines in deciding what content gets made, then that’s kind of crazy and we need to be looking elsewhere, because the algorithms are at work deciding what gets made and how it gets shaped, on things of a much, much bigger scale.

I’ve just come from a talk by Kimball Thurston, the CTO of Wētā FX, where there was discussion of things like machine-learning poverty—who owns A.I. tools and which filmmakers can afford to use them. He also talked about the insane amount of hours he put into trying to get ChatGPT to produce a picture of “a middle-aged man holding up a hand that has seven fingers”. The machine wouldn’t do it. His message was, in essence, don’t be afraid, these tools aren’t creative; they can’t tell human stories, they can only help us tell them. I wonder, Cam, how are you feeling? What have you learned about all this">Cameron: My dog is crying in the next room, so I’m very distracted! I am feeling, look, exhausted. I’m still feeling like I’m in the middle of it all and I haven’t really had a chance to process it all. Yeah, I mean, it’s sort of been, I guess, a little bit tainted. Our press tour has turned into the A.I. apology tour or something, you know, so that’s a bit of a distraction, but like Col’s been saying, it’s a conversation that needs to be had. It’s great that we also get to have the conversation about our team, our wonderful collaborators, and can’t take anything away from what they’ve achieved and what they’ve added to the film and its value. So yeah, I’m ready to take a bit of a break! And I think Col and I are really keen to just get our teeth into something new. 

Colin: And get paid something.  

Cameron: Hopefully, you know, get paid a reasonable amount so I can get my dog medicine to calm her down because she’s freaking out right now. 

So just to confirm: does that mean the money doesn’t currently exist to change out the images and that that’s not something you’re interested in doing for the Shudder or physical media release? It’s part of the film’s cult lore, now">Colin: I don’t know. If someone higher up thinks that’s the thing to do, then we’ll have that conversation. But the film is the product of a really grueling production, writing, the whole process, and we’re very proud of the movie, as is everyone who worked on it. And it’s resonating. This huge couple of weeks that it’s had, we know it works. And to go and change that just because some people have been outraged—and I think outraged by some exaggerated claims and frankly quite a lot of misinformation and misunderstanding—I think, no, I don’t think we should be sort of caving into that. The film is a product of its given circumstances. And who’s to say in five years time there won’t be something else that someone has a problem with and well, oh, we’ve got to change that. I think the film is what it is and it stands on its own two feet. Audiences, mostly, seem to be enjoying it, which is what we’re in it for.