Why Late Night With The Devil Is The Low-Budget Horror Movie We Need Right Now
With films like Megalopolis garnering mid-tier reviews on a $120 million dollar budget, and IF on a $110 million dollar budget, it begs the question, “Who’s willing to fund those risks?”
That’s why it’s good to remind audiences that sometimes, keeping movies self-contained with limited characters, effects and locations, pushes storytellers to be more creative.
A movie must generate two and a half times the budget from a release, to avoid being regarded as a financial failure. This is because the production budget is typically matched by a separate, but equivalent marketing budget. Therefore to be profitable, it needs to recover these costs and exceed them and ensure the effort was not in vain. The higher the budget, the higher the risk.
The probability of it paying off can entirely rest on hiring a well-known director or cast, favouring the odds positively, as audiences will return to what and who they know. However, looking at the examples above, this isn’t always reliable.
It’s all about script, script and script
Horror is an outlier in this case, usually relying on the initial concept to draw in the numbers. As with the case of Late Night With The Devil, the idea of a live television broadcast in 1977 that goes horribly wrong, unleashing evil into the studio is what brings the attention.
Accompanying this with a small budget of around $1.5mil, a few unknown actors (David Dastmalchian usually appearing in supporting roles up to this point) offer more creative freedom for the storytellers and a narrative that steers away from the usual formulaic suspects. The film was impressive enough for test audiences that they even managed to give it a theatrical release.
Late Night With The Devil proves that you don’t need to throw huge amounts of money to garner critical acclaim and a global audience.
Some of the time, yes it does work, but with horror, audiences are going to the cinema seeking out one thing - to be scared. Scaring your audience only works if they’re invested in the characters on screen.
Once the storytellers have nailed this down, then it’s far easier to terrify them, thus giving them bang for their buck and a good review.
Small bucks, big returns
Another example is Paranormal Activity. Made on a micro $15k budget, the film grossed nearly $200m at the box office and has funded the rest of Blumhouse’s back catalogue.
It shows that squeezing in between these Gods and Monsters of super high-budget movies, horror films such as Late Night With The Devil, prove to be the underdogs.
Sacrificing big paychecks for the likes of creative control and freedom offers more in-depth storytelling, and narratives that would otherwise go unfunded if they require the biggest of Hollywood talent.
With so much scrutiny and stigma around horror, films like Late Night With The Devil prove to audiences as well as filmmakers that we need this genre to thrive and push boundaries.
It’s no good releasing mega-budget movies if they don’t earn profitable returns - the MCU and DC are an exception to the rule, but they’ve had over fifty years of building that audience. Small-budget horror films have not.
In conclusion, go watch more horror and always support the lower budget, indie style movies. Or better yet, keep watching short horror films on YouTube. Check out Ed’s article on “8 Short Horrors to keep you up at night” to get your started.
