Comrade Courant Culture Critic

Late Night with the Devil (2023): A Fun, if Flawed Séance in the Studio “Do not adjust your set.” — And don’t expect perfection, but do expect a wildly entertaining Halloween night. — 3.5/5 Stars I’ve been hearing about Late Night with the Devil since it dropped—a buzzed-about “instant cult classic” that fused analog horror, found footage, and 1970s late-night TV into something supposedly groundbreaking. As someone who followed ARGs like The Mikaeli ARG (yes, the “hitting metal 17 times” guy— In my opinion a defining voice of modern analog horror, whose project concluded just last year), I went in hoping for a feature-length version of that same immersive, broadcast-based dread. What I got was something far more modest—but still very fun. This isn’t a masterpiece. It’s not even terrifying. But it is a wildly entertaining, impeccably styled Halloween movie that absolutely earns a spot in your annual rotation....

The Blair Witch Project (1999): A Found-Footage Landmark That Changed Horror Forever “What happened to them is real.” — And for a while, we all believed it. — 3/5 Stars In the summer of 1999, a marketing campaign unlike any before it began seeping into the cultural bloodstream. Posters appeared in record stores and video rental shops showing a grainy black-and-white photo of three missing students, their names printed beneath like a police bulletin. A cryptic trailer—aired without context on late-night TV—presented shaky footage of screams in the dark, sticks snapping in the trees, and a voice whispering, “I’m so scared.” And then there was the website: www.blairwitch.com . Now preserved only in the Internet Archive , the original site listed Heather, Mike, and Josh as missing persons, complete with police reports and “recovered” video tapes. There was no mention of actors. No studio...