Although the plot was abysmal, “Lights Out” was a fairly enjoyable horror flick. The monster was actually scary for once, and watching the creature practically teleport through the night was one of the most suspenseful aspects of a film I've seen all year.
The story was based around a little girl named Diana, who befriended another girl named Sophie, while they were in a medical institution together. One day, Diana was forced into miscellaneous tests to find a cure for her rare skin affliction, and due to the reckless actions of the doctors she was burnt to a crisp and died on the spot.
Although her body died during the examination, her spirit didn’t want to leave the human world. Sophie found her friend Diana after the experiments, except this time she was no longer in her body. Dianna’s spirit attached herself to Sophie’s conscience, and since then has cursed Sophie’s life with tragedy.
Decades later, Sophie is now a widow, trapped by thoughts of her past and kept in constant psychosis due to her spirited friend, who can only interact with the physical world when the lights are out.
Now I understand I can’t try to use any sort of real world logic to break down this film, because it’s a supernatural movie, which is allowed so many more passes. I find it unfair, due to how most of them are complete garbage for reasons rooting from their script. On top of that, you can’t really critic the writers for making no sense because spooky ghosts have different ways of interacting with humans based on the writers own imagination.
You can, however, point out contradictions in their own scripting, which these films usually have enough to go around. For instance, this film gives different qualities of interaction to different types of light. When Dianna is put in a regular light, she vanishes and is not able to interact with the physical world. When she is put under a black light, she is somehow physically back in the world as an aged conscious form of her rotting carcass. Inconsistently, if the black light shines on her first, she can be burned if regular light is shined onto her simultaneously.
Another little hiccup of this film is how the child protective care officer truly does not care whatsoever about one of Sophie’s kids, who is obviously being deprived of sleep from Dianna. She puts up this charade of being caring, but in the end all she’s doing is ignoring the problem of his mother being a lunatic who talks to a pitch dark closet and ignores the needs of her children to satisfy her hunger for interaction with a dead girl.
How in the hell is this chick even able to keep a child in her household in the first place? She’s a widow who is obviously suffering from some form of lunacy to the point of being medicated. She talks to the pitch black darkness, makes sure no lamps have light bulbs in them, and puts her kid in complete danger with this crazy ghost who terrorizes him to the point of insomnia. Her son is better off living with his promiscuous older sister, who has commitment issues and just leaves drugs out in the open for anyone who walks into her apartment.
Even though the plot was obviously flawed, the suspense driven pacing caused by Diana was done well. She kept the story interesting, with how she interacted with her host, Sophie, and how she tormented Sophie’s children. The only thing holding back this spirit from tearing apart those around her is the light surrounding her prey, not her own conscience, and that is terrifying.
I wish more movies would put more thought into their antagonist like the director of this film, David Sandburg used this concept in the past to create a short film version of this story.
This was a mediocre film, but the build-up and suspense pushed throughout the movie was on point. I feel like the crew producing this film was made up of writers who they found making bad horror fan-fiction on Tumblr, and up-and-coming cinematographers who understand pacing. This was by no means a good film, but it was an enjoyable horror flick to say the least.
