Late Night With The Devil Ending Explained- Was There A Demon, What Really Happened, And Madeline’s Ghost

Shudder’s Late Night With The Devil dropped last week, and those who hadn’t seen it were treated to the mind-melting insanity of the last act. The controversy surrounding the film’s AI aside, it is a unique film that uses the forbidden tape trope to good effect. As most found-footage films do, it uses the unknown and a smartly pointed camera to inform and manipulate the viewer. By the end, everything you thought you knew is questioned.

Jack Delroy(David Dastmachian of Suicide Squad) hosts a second-rate late-night show called Night Owls. Despite his best efforts, he never reached the status of Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show. For years, he toiled away until his devoted wife was diagnosed with lung cancer and died. Before she succumbed to cancer, however, she went on the air with Jack, and his ratings were temporarily boosted. After her death, with nothing left to ground him, his ambition turned into obsession. That dark desire prompted him to invite Dr. June and Lilly onto his show for a chance to eclipse Carson.

Dr. June(Laura Gordon) brought her young charge to Lilly(Ingrid Torelli), the only survivor of a Satanic cult who worshipped the demon Abraxus, who you might remember from Mandy’s murderous motorcycle gang. Lilly refers to the entity as Mr. Wiggles because it wiggles inside her mind and body. June insists the entity is a lower demon, not Abraxus, and insists she can control it. It is heavily implied Lilly survived because she was possessed and thus immune to the fire that destroyed all the other cult members and their house.

Almost immediately, things go south. The first guest is Christou (Fayssal Bazzi), a medium who appears to be a fraud at first. He acts strangely and says he feels the presence of someone named Millie in the room shortly before becoming ill and collapsing. He is taken to the hospital, and later, we find he died on the way. Jack forges on; however, because he is so laser-focused on success, he fails to recognize the danger right in front of him. It doesn’t take long before everything spirals out of control, and things take a tragic turn. Here’s everything you need to know about the ending of Late Night With The Devil: was the demon real, did Jack make a deal, and was Milie involved?

Was the demon real?

The question on everyone’s mind is, what was real? Was Mr. Wiggles, another random demon, or the Devil himself involved, or was it all in Jack’s mind? There’s also the possibility his wife returned from the grave to get even for exploiting her cancer diagnosis and not focusing on her when he could. There could also be another demon waiting, biding its time until it could force Jack to keep up his end of the bargain.

Mr. Wiggles says through Lilly that he had met Jack before. At first, June seems able to control Mr. Wiggles, but when a second demonstration happens, and Jack replays the possession footage, he sees his wife behind his back. Lilly’s head splits open as he realizes this, and fire shoots out of the hole. She then proceeds to kill Carmichael, June, and Gus while Jack looks on horrified. At this point, Jack disassociates, and the viewer’s perspective shifts to his mind. He dreams of the last moments with his wife and his history with The Grove, the demon mentioned earlier. Madeline tells Jack as she is dying that she was the price he had to pay for success. Whether she meant that literally or figurately is up to the viewer.

If you believe there was an actual Devil, then you likely believe Jack made an ill-fated deal that, as most do, caught up with him. The Grove was associated with the same cult from which Lilly had escaped. Did Jack sacrifice his wife for a chance at fame? In exchange for killer ratings, Jack sold his soul to the Devil. He was framed for the deaths on air and tricked into committing most, if not all, of them himself. Either at some point with The Grove or in a moment of weakness during or after his wife’s death, he made a bad deal. Maybe he didn’t realize it was real or didn’t really mean it, but the die is cast, and he now needs to pay.

We know he stabbed Lilly, but we don’t know what happened on camera for the rest of the deaths. It’s possible all of the demonic face-melting and head flaming was from Jack’s perspective only. A demonic intrusion could have caused Christou’s sudden illness and subsequent death. It could also have been the proximity of Lilly in the studio, just as easily as it could have been some demon haunting Jack. Either the vengeful spirit of his wife or something Jack tapped into years ago in the tall trees came for him. It is just as plausible that Jack poisoned Chrysto without realizing what he was doing.

Did Jack lose his mind and kill everyone?

Jack Delroy was obsessed with winning the late-night wars. So much so that when his wife was just days from dying, he put her on television to garner sympathy and win market share. It worked well, but at what cost? His viewer numbers went right back down following her death, and he hasn’t been able to replicate anything even close to that in the years since her death. He has no one and nothing beyond his television show and his ambition. His guilt, grief, and obsession slowly ate him alive, and he lost touch with reality. It is why he agreed to have the spectacle of this young girl’s “possession” on the show. A serious host or even compassionate person might have considered this a poor idea both for the gravity of his show and the health of the young girl who was being exploited.

The argument for a guilty mind is strong. In this interpretation, everything that happened was a product of Jack’s mind. Some light parlor tricks may have made Mr. Wiggles come to life for the program, but beyond that, everything was his imagination. His guilt manifested as the ghost of his wife. It is possible no one else saw her in the footage. We see her briefly in the black mirror, but if everything was from Jack’s perspective, that could be what he was subconsciously seeing. There really could have been a ghost there who knew that Jack’s mind was fracturing and wanted to do whatever she could to help the man she loved before it was too late.

Christou, Madeline, and Mr. Wiggles as symbols of good and evil

It isn’t by accident that Christou was the first to die and the first to sense something was wrong. Whether you believe he was sensitive to the evil forces swirling around the studio or was poisoned, he is the sacrificial lamb. He was an innocent and a Christ-like symbol standing opposed to the evil looming. Mr. Wiggles, Abraxus, and anything else in the studio that night serve as malevolent forces.

Mr. Wiggles is a lower deity. June believes it, and the ending certainly alludes to the fact that there is something more at play than a possessed girl. A minion of Abraxus could have possessed Lilly. That doesn’t mean Jack could also have been possessed, and that demon took control of Lilly when she was vulnerable and killed everyone. Late Night With The Devil might also be precisely as it appears, and Jack met the Devil on stage that night. The silent skeletal audience member could be the Devil in corporeal form waiting to get his pound of flesh.

Did Madeline(Georgina Haig from Archive 81) come for Jack to comfort or torment him at the end? Madeline knew all along who Jack was. She loved him and supported him from the beginning. Likely, she resented his attention to his show while she lay dying. His ambition was the source of his success but also his undoing. Like most relationships, she loved and accepted him despite his flaws. We don’t have a ton of backstory for their relationship and her past beyond what we are told, but they truly seemed in love. Jack was interested in June and likely would have had an affair with her after the show, but he wasn’t a cheater. David Dastmalchian, who plays Jack, confirmed this in an interview with Variety.

Why did he see her frequently that last night? That’s the funny thing about ghosts. Whether real or imagined, they still have the power to haunt us. How you view Jack and the ending of Late Night With The Devil depends on your opinion of Jack and your willingness to believe that he may have been profoundly flawed, but he loved Madeline. If you prefer a more supernatural ending, the Devil, Moloch, Abraxas, or some other lesser demon floating around possessed at least one person and killed a group of people in the air. If you instead like your horror movies more psychological in spirit, then Jack lost his mind in grief, guilt, and obsession and killed everyone while lost in a disassociated state. Either way, everyone but Jack is dead. Late Night With The Devil is on Shudder right now.