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The Ending of Late Night With the Devil Flubs the Punch Line
After all that ominous build, there’s something underwhelming about this ’70s throwback’s final moments.
And so like Jack’s spiking audience watching from home, we stay glued to the unfolding sensationalism, waiting for the combative conversation — a Halloween-night discussion with a phony psychic, a reformed Vegas hypnotist, a parapsychologist, and the latter’s supposedly possessed adolescent patient — to erupt into genuine supernatural madness. After the demon makes short work of the supporting cast, Jack stumbles through a surreal, dream-logic version of Night Owls, jolting from comedy sketches to stupid pet tricks, all of his formulaic late-night segments suddenly taking on a sinister undertone. This coda serves both a dramatic and an expositional function: The Cairneses use it to show us things — like the unholy woodland ceremony where Jack makes his deal with the devil and his last moments with his wife — that we wouldn’t see on TV, while also subjecting the host to a hell worse than mere death, a psychodramatic reckoning for his sins.
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