Horror Show Showdown: Late Night vs. Nunsploitation

Sydney Sweeney’s Immaculate is a cookie-cutter nunsploitation film with nothing to add to the genre but a couple of rosary-clad jump scares. The real miracle of the weekend was the surprise hit, Late Night with the Devil. 

For decades, horror films have exploited our collective fear of static TV.  

If you did most of your scary movie-going during Spielberg’s peak, you’ll forever associate the phrase, “They’re here” with Carol Anne’s sweet, sing-songy voice and her creepy little palms pressed against a snowy screen. 20 years later, The Ring and Samara crawled into theaters and proved that STILL nothing could generate more panic in the minds of teenagers than the thought of popping in a VHS tape. What, or who, would emerge from the white noise? 

While Late Night with the Devil doesn’t heavily rely on this stirring visual, it certainly evokes the same childhood terror of seeing a room get dark around you, knowing it’s almost time for the signal to stop broadcasting. In Cameron and Colin Cairnes’ found footage meets mockumentary film, the static is coming, but for once it’s what's beforehand that’s unsettling. 

The film opens with a documentary-style reel laying out who the main players are and, in a pretty overt Twilight Zone reference, narrates what we’re about to see. What lies ahead is a Halloween episode from the late night variety program, Night Owls with Jack Delroy, which aired in October 1977. Desperate to improve his ratings, Delroy welcomes to the show four guests: A psychic, a parapsychologist, the possessed girl they study, and a skeptic set on exposing all three. Through the airing of this now infamous broadcast and “never-before-seen” behind-the-scenes clips, the audience witnesses an evening of hellish chaos. 

Everything that occurs “on-camera” is captivating and has an air of credibility - as if it could’ve been an authentic competitor to Johnny Carson almost fifty years ago. From David Dastmalchian’s superb performance, which features a dedicated hand-in-pocket host pose that is maintained throughout most of Jack’s monologue (and the rest of the movie), to story elements that draw on the inherent creepiness and distrust that seemed to flourish in the late 70s, Late Night with the Devil is incredibly believable. Long-haired young girls performing satanic rituals, cultural and governmental conspiracy, STATIC TVs! 

However, it’s these same realistic elements that cause the film to falter when it cuts to commercial. While it’s not distracting to a fault, some backstage moments (A chain smoking producer for example) play a little hokey and may hold the movie back from greatness for some viewers. 

All in all though, Late Night with the Devil is a spooky and fresh horror film that attempts to subvert our expectations for the found footage subgenre. With a strong lead performance, a fun premise, and lots of ooey gooey makeup and creature work, it succeeds. 

The same cannot be said for Michael Mohan’s latest feature, Immaculate. The brisk, 90-minute nunsploitation flick fails on all counts for which Late Night with the Devil succeeds. Where the latter is original, unnerving, and absorbing, Immaculate is flat and forgettable. 

Mohan’s second collaboration with Sydney Sweeney about a devout nun who accepts a role at an Italian convent with dark secrets, is well-made and pretty well-acted, but boring and self-satisfied with a half-baked metaphor for pro-choice philosophy. Whereas Late Night with the Devil succeeds at providing a new twist on a familiar style of horror, Immaculate had extraordinary “been there, done that'' energy. 

The biggest example of this was the film’s conclusion. In the lead up to its release, much was made of its gory and “shocking” ending. However, the movie not only falls short of its mission to surprise, but also fails to match the finales of many modern horror films- something that’s doubly disappointing given Sweeney’s recent criticisms of the genre and films more broadly. 

“The characters aren’t strong, and storytelling seems to have lost its place,” Sweeney told a crowd at the film’s SXSW debut. In many cases, she’s not wrong. We’ve got superhero movies out the wazoo, biopics that contribute nothing to the legacy of their subjects, and more reboots than we can count. 

Unfortunately for her, Immaculate falls into this undesirable category. And more than that, its characters and storytelling aren’t even as strong as the ones in its biggest competitor at the box office right now: Late Night with the Devil.