Before ‘Late Night With the Devil,’ Watch This Halloween Special Gone Wrong

The Big Picture

• Two 2024 horror releases will look at the terror of television, A24’s I Saw The TV Glow and Shudder’s Late Night With The Devil.
• WNUF Halloween Special
  plays as a lost episode of a public access TV show from 1987 with a dark twist.
• The film explores the dangers of trivializing unknown forces and the horror of media indifference.

2024 is shaping up to be the year of television horror; not just spooky series but horror films about the weird and wild world of TV Land. The two big horror releases in question are A24’s I Saw The TV Glow, by We’re All Going To The World’s Fair director Jane Schoenbrun, which promises to be just as mind-bending but even more star-studded, and Shudder’s Late Night With The Devil, directed by Colin and Cameron Cairnes. The latter comes out March 22nd, with David Dastmalchian as the host of a failing ’70s late-night talk show. It promises a truly twisted lost Halloween special as demonic forces are summoned into the studio to keep the audience, and sponsors, happy. All this talk of horror, television, the subtle terror of obscure nostalgia, and the lengths people are willing to go to for an audience brings to mind a film that is, unfortunately, a little difficult to find as of writing this article: 2013’s WNUF Halloween Special.

What Is ‘WNUF Halloween Special’ About?

Similar to Late Night with the Devil, WNUF Halloween Special‘s framing device is a lost episode of a public access television show, kept off-air because of the terrible events that occurred. Late Night with the Devil‘s footage is from the fateful Halloween night of 1977, whereas WNUF takes a neon-painted spin on the idea. Directed and produced by Christ LaMartina, it’s Halloween, 1987, and those who aren’t out trick-or-treating or protesting demonic influences are sitting down to watch the evening news, and the WNUF Halloween special hosted by Frank Stewart (Paul Fahrenkopf). Throughout the film, we see three different segments of television footage. The first is the news show hosted by Deborah Merritt (Leanna Chamish) and Gavin Gordon (Richard Cutting), discussing local happenings during Halloween night, an approaching political race, and hearing out the religious fundamentalists who are vehemently and violently against any celebrations going on. Second is the special proper, as Frank, followed by religious and supernatural experts, investigates an allegedly haunted house. Third, cut in between all the action, are fictional advertisements for local businesses, channel promotions, and Halloween products made by various filmmakers.

WNUF Shows Us The Horror Of Public Access Television

While not particularly frightening, WNUF is a fantastic mood piece that has more to say than meets the eye. Is Late Night with the Devil a rip-off of this film? Not at all, but it’s a subgenre with a real-life precedent, both in the story and the medium it uses to tell it. In real life, there are television tapings that present a real-life horror show. When the cameras are live and we’re seeing exactly what’s happening in real-time, anything can happen, even terrible things. The deaths of people like Owen Hart, or Christine Chubbuck, and the explosion of the Challenger shuttle show how quickly tragedies can happen on live air. They unintentionally become historical events, and it was only a matter of time before people would use those events to tell their own stories.

Since it’s the 1980s, another important factor in WNUF Halloween Special is Satanic Panic, the zeitgeist of moral conservatism and superstition that exploded in the 1970s and 80s. At this point, many of us know about the negative and downright demonic face that was put on anything even mildly alternative, from heavy metal to Dungeons and Dragons. These were believed to indoctrinate children into living a life of sin. These beliefs are covered in the film by a population of religious fanatics who think Halloween comes directly from the devil. However, there is also a flip side to Satanic Panic that forms the basis of both Late Night with the Devil and WNUF Halloween Special: With that fear, there’s also a fascination.

The Halloween special itself shows a reporter taking a tour of a house where a tragedy took place years prior: A boy, supposedly possessed via a Ouija board, murdered his own family. With a crowd outside the murder house, Frank brings not only himself but someone hired to play a priest (Robert Long II), and some so-called experts on the supernatural to prove or disprove the existence of the supernatural. This is also something based in our world, with Dr. Louis and Clair Berger (Brian St. August and Helenmary Ball) clearly being a nod to another well-known ghost-hunting couple: Ed and Lorraine Warren. They weren’t alone in gaining significant fame and no small amount of money for their apparent ability to see into another world, speak to loved ones beyond the grave, and unlock the answers to the universe. But by the time there was well-and-truly a television in every home, people like Miss Cleo, Walter Mercando, and later, John Edward were immensely popular across the world.

A Cautionary Tale About Villainizing And Trivializing Unknown Forces

Throughout the special, you wonder how seriously Frank takes the Bergers’ claims about the supernatural presence in the house and the danger that comes from lingering too long. He insists on staying, on getting his fake priest to perform a fake exorcism, because he promised the audience a show, having them do a call-in séance even as things start to go wrong. Perhaps, if ghosts do turn out to be real, one should take them more seriously. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter; the real danger comes from the religious protesters who claim they want to save the soul of their town. It goes to show, once again, that humans are the true monsters.

There is horror in WNUF Halloween Special that comes from the subtle malice of the television station and the surrounding town. There’s a certain mundanity to incredibly tragic events that are described in the evening news; a child getting killed while trick-or-treating, toxic waste being dumped into the town’s water supply, and even the incredibly tragic events of the Webber house. All of it is described as if it’s just another day. No one wakes up and says that this is wrong, the cameras don’t stop rolling, and no one calls for help. This sense of jaded apathy and bystander syndrome is something we’re still dealing with now, and that’s what ties the period piece elements of WNUF Halloween Special to when it was released, to even now.

Doing a retro-horror throwback is about more than throwing a gradient filter over the lens and calling it a day. Those that are the most successful at this specific type of horror film, such as Anna Biller‘s The Love Witch and Ti West’s The House Of The Devil, have to say something meaningful that reflects both the time it’s recreating and our own. Despite seeming like more of a goofy homage to those ideas, WNUF does have something to say about how the world and media present real-life tragedies to an audience, whether it’s looking for villains and people to blame, or making a spectacle of something that got real people hurt, or something much worse.

WNUF Halloween Special is available to buy on Blu-Ray from Terror Vision in the U.S.

Buy on Terror Vision