‘Late Night With the Devil’ Ending Explained: What Happened to Jack Delroy?

WARNING: The following article fully spoils the plot of “Late Night With the Devil.” Read on if you dare.

In “Late Night With the Devil,” David Dastmalchian plays ’70s late night host Jack Delroy, who tries to salvage his show’s falling ratings with a desperate stunt: Getting a possessed teenager to channel the devil on live TV.

In the found-footage movie, we see the doomed broadcast and “never before seen” behind-the-scenes shots as things begin to deteriorate onstage and off.

On Halloween night, he invites Lilly D’Abo (Ingrid Torelli), a girl who was rescued from a satanic cult, and her medium and handler June Ross-Mitchell (Laura Gordon), along with a psychic and a skeptic.

The first sign that something is awry is when psychic Christou (Fayssal Bazzi), who’s already channeled departed loved ones for members of the audience, senses another, darker spirit. Jack believes it’s his beloved late wife Madeleine (Georgina Haig), who recently died of lung cancer despite never having been a smoker. Some blamed that the secret society he belonged to, which met in the woods and performed strange rituals, is somehow responsible for Madeleine’s death.

Christou begins vomiting a black substance onto the stage and is taken away in an ambulance. We later learn that he died on the way to the hospital, a fact that Jack wants kept from his staff, guests and the audience.

The crew, including Jack’s sidekick Gus (Rhys Auteri) are growing increasingly disturbed by the mood in the studio, as is June, who doesn’t want to go through with the planned demon demonstration after all. Jack convinces her, however, and Lilly is game as well. With Lilly safely padlocked to a chair, June summons the demon for the terrified onlookers. And then brings Lilly back to herself as if nothing had happened.

It’s now the turn of skeptic Carmichael Hunt (Ian Bliss) to try to disprove what the shocked audience has just seen. He hypnotizes Gus — as well as the audience — into believing that his belly is full of worms. Gus desperately claws through his own stomach and dies — or at least that’s what the people under hypnosis see. Gus is actually fine, as everyone can see in the playback from the show.

Lilly demands that they show the playback of her segment as well to prove that her possession is not a trick. The footage, unlike the segment with Gus, shows the same demonic presence, but Carmichael remains unconvinced. Lilly gets angrier and the demon returns, but this time, she isn’t padlocked to a chair. Carmichael finally believes, but it’s too late: She sets him on fire and also kills Gus and June as the audience flees in terror.

We see, from Jack’s point of view, that he’s back in the forest with the secret society. He’s brought into a bedroom where Madeleine is alive, but dying. She gives him the ceremonial knife that was recovered from Lilly’s cult and begs him to end her suffering. He stabs her repeatedly and then the camera pulls back: We see that he’s still on stage and that it’s Lilly who he’s stabbed to death, not Madeleine. The film ends with Jack’s stunned realization that he’s just committed murder.

Dastmalchian told TheWrap what he thinks happens next: “I believe that if [emergency responders] didn’t get there in time, which they may have, he was going to end his own life. But if they saved him, then he is currently heavily medicated, staring out the window of somewhere upstate, being taken care of by professionals, who will be trying to unravel this mystery for the rest of his life.”

It’s strongly implied that Madeleine died because of Jack’s participation in the secret society. But Dastmalchian doesn’t believe the character deliberately sacrificed his wife for his own success.

“I absolutely don’t believe that he consciously chose this,” said the actor. “And this is the power of the unconscious, the power of what we open ourselves to and gravitate towards when we are not steering our own ships. Jack is a man who is dealing with overwhelming unprocessed trauma, grief, work, addiction, alcoholism and his mind is on the fray. And he is not doing the work and not getting the help to heal what is ultimately really broken inside of him.”

He added, “I believe, although not with ill intent, that he has opened a doorway to something that is much bigger, much more dangerous, and much darker than he could have ever imagined.”

Dastmalchian shared an anecdote about his friends Zach and Alex of the band Twin Temple, who are billed as a “Satanic doo-wop duo.”

“One time I asked them, ‘Hey, could you just cast a spell and say, ‘I want a mansion?’ And they said, ‘Sure we could. And we believe that the mansion would show up, but you have to be very careful. Because how did you get that mansion? What insurance windfall did you get because all of a sudden, a car crashed into you? And now you are unable to drink out or eat anything other than with a straw for the rest of your life. But you got that mansion.'”

Added the actor, “That really made me think about what people are willing to sometimes trade when we think there’s something that we want more desperately than we may actually need.”

“Late Night With the Devil” is now playing in select theaters and streams on Shudder beginning April 19.

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