I love to be scared, and one of my biggest fears is of the dark, so the recent release “Lights Out” (2016) should have been right up my alley.
The general premise was adapted from an independent horror film submission created by hollywood newcomer, David F. Sandber. Sandber's short film "Lights Out" (2013)—of which the recent full-length release inherited the same name—features a story with no dialogue and a simplistic plot: a woman is haunted by a sinister creature only visible in the dark.
That's it. That's the entire three minute film. There's no character development or fancy CGI, and you know what? It scared the living daylights (pun intended) out of me. No joke.
The pacing was phenomenal. This was some of the most suspenseful buildup I've seen in a horror movie in a very long time, and the fact that it was all done successfully in under three minutes just adds to my appreciation of the short. It worked for a number of reasons, but one of the biggest highlights was that it didn't rely on jump scares. It played with your head by not showing what was tormenting this poor woman. You hear it walking around, and you think you may have seen it flicker in the very corners of the set, but it never grabs her leg or jumps dramatically out from behind a door, and that's what's so scary.
Because let's be real. The dark isn't scary. An overactive imagination creating all of the possibilities for what could be hiding in the dark is what's scary, and the short film capitalized off of this.
The full-length film, unfortunately, did not.
MAJOR SPOILERS FROM THIS POINT ON!
At the heart of it all, “Lights Out” (2016) was about
mental illness, and it used the horror genre merely as a backdrop.
The premise revolves around a middle-aged woman who has an "invisible friend" who can only be seen in the dark. The shadowy fiend torments the family and wreaks absolute destruction on the mother's mental well-being. There were a lot of discussions about prescription drugs and whether or not the mother was fit to take care of her children due to depression and even possible schizophrenia. All of this drama could have worked if not for the very disturbing and insulting ending: the solution to solving the family's problems was to shoot herself in the head. Once the mother is dead, the family is free to live out their lives ghost free. To say I felt disturbed and unclean by the end of the movie would be a gross understatement. Add to this the fact that there is absolutely no suspense created throughout the film because all of the "scary" moments are shameless jump scares you could see coming from a mile away.
The character development was average, and the acting wasn't terrible, but the worst aspect of the film was the pacing. Within the first few minutes of the movie, you can clearly see the monster doing its thing in the background, and this ruined the suspense. The more of the monster I saw, the less scary it became until finally, it stopped being threatening at all because I knew what it looked like and my imagination no longer needed to fill in the blanks!
For a movie about a creature only visible in the dark, it sure got a lot of full-frontal screen time.
"Lights Out" (2016) was one of the biggest cinematic disappointments for me this year. It took a terrifying concept and ruined it with an abundance of cliches and a deplorable ending. I recommend you skip this one and watch the short film instead.
If you're in the mood for a suspenseful horror film about mental illness done beautifully, I highly recommend "The Babadook" (2014).
