Spoilers for the entire film. Late Night with the Devil ends with Jack Delroy believing he has returned to the woodland gathering known as The Grove, where his dying wife Madeleine asks him to end her suffering. Jack repeatedly stabs the woman in front of him—only for the film to reveal that he is still on the television stage and has murdered Lilly D’Abo, the possessed teenage cult survivor, during the live broadcast.
The final twist is both literal and psychological: Jack sees Madeleine, but the cameras reveal Lilly. Whether a demon, Jack’s guilt, hypnosis, or all three create the vision remains deliberately uncertain. What the film makes clear is that Jack’s hunger for success has turned real suffering into entertainment, and his apparent act of mercy becomes another act of violence.
What happens at the end of Late Night with the Devil?
The film is presented as recovered footage from the Halloween 1977 broadcast of Night Owls with Jack Delroy. Jack’s ratings have declined since the death of his wife, Madeleine, so he stages an occult-themed special featuring psychic Christou, skeptic Carmichael Haig, parapsychologist June Ross-Mitchell, and Lilly D’Abo, a teenage survivor of a Satanic cult.
What begins as provocative television gradually becomes genuinely dangerous. Christou appears to contact a hostile presence, identifies a name Jack associates with Madeleine, and vomits a black substance. He later dies while being taken to the hospital. The program nevertheless continues, because Jack and the production team see the escalating horror as the material that might save the show.
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June and Lilly then perform the evening’s central demonstration. Lilly is restrained while June attempts to summon the entity Lilly calls Mr. Wriggles. The entity speaks through Lilly and says that it knows Jack from “under the tall trees”—a reference to The Grove, the secretive woodland organization connected to Jack’s occult past.
After this revelation, Lilly becomes violently possessed. The entity attacks people in the studio, including Carmichael, Gus, and June, while the audience runs for safety. Jack is left amid the wreckage of the broadcast, still surrounded by cameras and the machinery of live television.
He then appears to return to The Grove. In a room there, Madeleine is alive but dying from the illness that killed her. She gives Jack a ceremonial knife associated with Lilly’s cult and asks him to end her pain. Jack believes he is carrying out her final request. He stabs her again and again.
The camera pulls back. Jack is not in the room with Madeleine. He is on the television stage, and the woman he has killed is Lilly. The apparent mercy killing of his wife was a vision that concealed the real murder until the final reveal.
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Who does Jack kill?
Jack kills Lilly D’Abo, not Madeleine.
The film deliberately lets the audience occupy Jack’s point of view during the stabbing. We see Madeleine because that is who Jack believes is standing before him. The final change in perspective exposes the physical reality: Lilly is on the stage, Jack is holding the ritual knife, and the broadcast cameras have recorded him killing her.
This is more than a surprise identity swap. Lilly represents a vulnerable person whose trauma Jack has packaged as television. By making Jack see Madeleine while murdering Lilly, the film connects his private grief to the public exploitation taking place on the set. He imagines that he is resolving the pain of his past, but he is actually inflicting new suffering on another person who has already been victimized by occult forces and adults seeking power.
Why does Jack see Madeleine?
Madeleine is the emotional center of Jack’s guilt. Her death is the event that damaged him personally and coincided with his professional rise. The final vision turns that unresolved grief into a weapon against him.
There are several compatible ways to understand the vision:
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- Psychological collapse: Jack is exhausted, grieving, frightened, and surrounded by supernatural-looking events. His mind converts Lilly into Madeleine because Madeleine is the person whose death he cannot accept.
- Demonic deception: Mr. Wriggles or the larger force connected to The Grove manipulates Jack’s perception. The entity gives him a vision designed to exploit his guilt and make him commit murder.
- A hypnotic or perceptual effect: The film has already shown that perception and recorded reality can diverge. Jack may be experiencing an induced hallucination or a supernatural event working through the same mechanisms.
- A combination: The supernatural force may not invent Jack’s guilt; it may simply use what is already inside him. His grief supplies the image, while the entity supplies the pressure and deception.
The directors intentionally preserve this uncertainty. The movie does not require viewers to decide that the ending is either “only a hallucination” or an entirely objective demonic event. The important physical fact is stable across the interpretations: Jack’s vision is Madeleine, but the person he stabs is Lilly.
Did Jack sacrifice Madeleine for fame?
Late Night with the Devil strongly suggests a Faustian connection between Jack’s ambition, his involvement with The Grove, and Madeleine’s death. Jack appears to have participated in a secretive organization presented publicly as an elite men’s club but associated with occult ritual. His professional success and his wife’s death are linked by the film’s imagery and structure.
However, the movie never shows Jack signing a clearly stated contract that says he knowingly exchanges Madeleine’s life for ratings. It is therefore too simple to say that Jack deliberately sacrificed his wife for a television career.
A more precise reading is that Jack made a bargain through omission and self-deception. He wanted fame, influence, and a successful show. He may have been willing to “sacrifice anything” in the abstract, without understanding what that promise would cost. He invited dangerous forces into his life because he believed he could control them, and Madeleine became part of the price.
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David Dastmalchian has offered a similar interpretation of Jack as a damaged and grieving man who opened himself to something more dangerous than he understood, rather than someone who knowingly selected his wife as a sacrifice. That is the actor’s reading, not a final statement of canon, but it supports the film’s refusal to give Jack a simple motive.
Who—or what—is Mr. Wriggles?
Mr. Wriggles is the name Lilly gives to the entity associated with her possession. The entity speaks through her, recognizes Jack from “under the tall trees,” and appears to be connected to both The Grove and the cult that Lilly survived.
The film also mentions Abraxas and Satanic ritual, but it does not establish a complete supernatural hierarchy. It does not definitively explain whether Mr. Wriggles is:
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- an independent demon;
- an avatar or aspect of a larger force such as Abraxas;
- a familiar serving The Grove; or
- Lilly’s name for a presence that the film intentionally leaves undefined.
The safest conclusion is that Mr. Wriggles is the possessing demonic presence connected to Lilly. Claims that Mr. Wriggles and Abraxas are certainly the same entity go beyond what the film confirms.
Are the worms real?
No—not as a physical transformation in the ordinary sense.
Carmichael’s hypnosis demonstration causes Gus to believe that worms are emerging from his stomach. Gus appears to mutilate himself, and the people in the studio experience the horror as if it were real. But when the footage is reviewed, the worms are absent from the recording.
This creates an important distinction in the film:
| Event | What the characters experience | What the recording shows |
|---|---|---|
| Gus and the worms | A grotesque transformation and apparent self-mutilation | Gus’s body without the worms |
| Lilly’s possession | A demonic manifestation and violent attack | The manifestation remains visible on the recording |
The contrast prevents two overly broad explanations. The entire broadcast is not simply fake, but every frightening image is not necessarily an objective physical event. The film contains stage performance, deception, induced perception, supernatural activity, and subjective visions at the same time.
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What is the significance of the recording?
The recovered-footage structure makes the viewer question the authority of the image. Television normally promises that a live camera is showing us what is happening. In this film, that promise repeatedly breaks down.
The worms are experienced in the studio but do not appear on playback. Lilly’s possession, by contrast, survives the transition from live experience to recorded evidence. Jack’s final vision is even more complicated: the film initially shows us his subjective reality and only later reveals the stage reality.
These changes in perspective mirror Jack’s public persona. On camera, he is polished, charming, and apparently in control. Backstage, he is frightened, compromised, and increasingly unstable. The broadcast is therefore not a neutral record of events. It is a performance shaped by perception, editing, hypnosis, occult influence, and Jack’s collapsing ability to distinguish guilt from reality.
What does the final murder mean?
1. Jack’s ambition has a cost
Jack keeps the program running despite mounting evidence that something is seriously wrong. Christou becomes violently ill, the occult material becomes dangerous, and Lilly is clearly not merely an entertaining guest. Jack still sees the broadcast as an opportunity to recover his ratings.
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The film’s Faustian pattern suggests that success obtained by courting forbidden power and exploiting vulnerable people eventually demands payment. Jack’s punishment is not abstract. He is forced to turn his deepest grief into a new act of violence.
2. Television converts suffering into spectacle
The talk-show format is central to the horror. Lilly’s trauma becomes a segment. Carmichael’s skepticism becomes part of the entertainment. Gus’s terror becomes a demonstration. Even the supernatural crisis is treated as valuable programming because the ratings are improving.
Jack’s failure is not merely that he encounters a demon. He continues producing television after the human beings around him have ceased to be safe. The final murder is the logical endpoint of a system that keeps filming because stopping would mean losing the show.
3. Jack’s host persona is a mask
Jack’s on-camera confidence conceals a private man who is grieving, fearful, and desperate to regain control. The final reveal strips away the host persona. He believes he is acting as a loving husband, but the cameras show what his ambition and confusion have actually produced.
4. Guilt becomes a supernatural punishment
Jack’s vision does not show him an arbitrary victim. It shows him Madeleine, the person whose death defines his guilt. By making him believe that he is granting her mercy, the force behind the events gives him a fantasy of absolution—then reveals that he has committed another killing instead.
He is not allowed to repair the past. He can only repeat its violence in a new form.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What happens to Jack after the broadcast?
The film does not show Jack’s legal, medical, or supernatural fate. It ends with him alive long enough to understand that he has killed Lilly, but it does not establish whether he is arrested, hospitalized, institutionalized, possessed, or killed.
Possible outcomes include police custody, psychiatric confinement, emergency hospitalization, or suicide, but these remain speculation. Dastmalchian has discussed possibilities such as Jack dying by suicide if responders do not reach him, or spending the rest of his life institutionalized and medicated. Those comments are the actor’s theory, not events confirmed by the film.
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The unresolved fate is appropriate to the ending. Jack’s public life has collapsed, the broadcast has ended, and the film leaves him suspended between criminal responsibility, psychological breakdown, and supernatural punishment.
Could the entire ending be a hallucination?
The film allows that interpretation, but it does not settle on it.
The worms establish that the characters can experience something that does not appear on the recording. That makes it possible to read some of the later imagery as hallucination or induced perception. The film also presents Lilly’s possession as a genuine supernatural manifestation that remains visible on playback, which argues against reducing the entire story to ordinary deception or mental illness.
The strongest interpretation is not that one explanation cancels out the others. Jack’s damaged psychological state may be the way the supernatural force reaches him. His guilt determines why he sees Madeleine, while the entity determines how that vision ends. The movie’s ambiguity concerns the mechanism, not the moral result.
Collector note
For viewers who want a physical memento after revisiting the film, the Late Night with the Devil soundtrack vinyl is an optional collectible directly tied to the movie. It is not necessary for understanding the ending, and availability can vary by retailer and region.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Madeleine alive at the end of Late Night with the Devil?
No. Madeleine is dead before the final scene. Jack sees an image or vision of her, but the woman he physically stabs on the television stage is Lilly D’Abo.
Does Jack kill Lilly on live television?
Yes. The final reveal shows that Jack has stabbed Lilly during the broadcast while believing she is Madeleine. The movie ends before showing the consequences.
Are Mr. Wriggles and Abraxas the same demon?
The film does not definitively establish that they are identical. Mr. Wriggles is the possessing entity named by Lilly, while the exact relationship between it, Abraxas, The Grove, and Lilly’s cult remains intentionally unclear.
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Repair common Windows errors and clear accumulated junk for a smoother, more stable PC - no reinstall needed.Free scan · no reinstallDid Jack knowingly sacrifice his wife for fame?
The film implies a Faustian connection between Jack’s occult involvement, his success, and Madeleine’s death, but it never confirms that he consciously chose to sacrifice her. A stronger reading is that Jack pursued power without understanding—or admitting—the cost.
What do the worms mean in the film?
The worms are experienced by Gus and the studio audience but do not appear on the playback recording. They demonstrate that the film distinguishes between induced or subjective perception and events that are physically recorded.
The Bottom Line
The ending of Late Night with the Devil is clear about the murder but ambiguous about the mechanism. Jack believes Madeleine is asking him to end her suffering, yet the cameras reveal that he has killed Lilly. Whether the vision is caused by demonic manipulation, grief, hypnosis, psychological collapse, or a combination, the meaning is consistent: Jack’s pursuit of fame turned other people’s pain into entertainment, and his guilt is transformed into one final televised act of violence.
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