The new horror film Late Night with the Devil hit theaters late last month amid a lot of really good buzz. It has a 96% on Rotten Tomatoes and has broken box office records for its distributor, IFC Films. It seemed poised to become the indie movie success story of the first half of 2024. But that buzz has curdled quite a bit once word started to circulate that generative AI had been used in the film.
It didn’t take long for viewers to notice the use of AI in the film, the film-centric social network Letterboxd filled up with negative reviews. “Listen. There’s AI all over this in the cutaways and ‘we’ll be right back’ network messages,” reads one top review for the film. “Complacency in accepting AI now is complacency for AI in the future—a very bleak future,” reads another.
But the way AI was used in Late Night with the Devil was interesting because it highlights an often-undiscussed element of the tech: So far, it’s been deployed in pretty boring ways.
When you hear that a horror film used AI, you might assume that it was in place of practical effects or traditional CGI, but that’s not actually the case here. Late Night with the Devil is full of your classic puppetry, blood, slime, and levitating objects. Instead, the AI images only appear on screen briefly.
Late Night with the Devil is set on Halloween night in 1977 and follows a Johnny Carson-like late night host who ends up summoning a demon on live television. The movie is constructed like an episode of a talk show, and it cuts to ad breaks at different points throughout. It’s during these cutaways that the AI-generated images are used as interstitial cards. They’re basically just retro-looking pictures of skeletons with the fictional talk show’s name written on them.
(Even more curious, they appear to be a relatively new addition to the movie. According to viewers who saw its premiere at SXSW 2023, the AI-generated images weren’t in that earlier version. Directors Cameron and Colin Cairnes told Variety, “We experimented with AI for three still images, which we edited further, and ultimately appear as very brief interstitials in the film.”)
Doug Shapiro, a media consultant and analyst, tells me that generative AI is popping up most commonly in relatively small-stakes instances during pre- and post-production. “Rather than spend a ton of money on storyboarding and animatics and paying very skilled artists to spend 12 weeks to come up with a concept,” he says, “now you can actually walk into the pitch with the concept art in place because you did it overnight.”
