That basic fear has been the fuel for virtually all horror films on some level, which is why they take place primarily at night and in locations with inconsistent lighting and faulty lightbulbs (except maybe Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, which was shot almost entirely in broad daylight). David S. Sandberg’s Lights Out is uniquely creative in exploiting this sense of unease and dread with a supernatural monster that can literally exist only in the dark. We first catch glimpses of this horrific entity, which comes to be known as Diana, in a prologue sequence set in a badly lit warehouse. When an office worker flips off the lights for the night, we suddenly see a shadowy figure standing in the newly formed pool of darkness, barely silhouetted against the dim light of the next room. Light switches on, figure disappears. Light switches off, figure reappears—except now closer. It’s an absolutely terrifying and extraordinarily clever conceit, which Sandberg originally used in his 2013 short film of the same title (on which the film is based—but more on that later).

The story centers on a family that has been torn apart by mental illness. We are able to piece together the basic storyline, which finds the mother, Sophie (Maria Bello), a manic-depressive whose first husband abandoned her and whose second husband is threatened by the shadowy monster, trying to maintain custody of her adolescent son, Martin (Gabriel Bateman), who is terrorized by both the shadow creature and the fact that his mother appears to be talking to it in her bedroom at night. Martin eventually comes under the protection of his older sister Rebecca (Teresa Palmer), who left home as a teenager and never looked back. Events in her childhood have made her extremely reluctant to commit to relationships, much to the chagrin of her clearly besotted boyfriend, Bret (Alexander DiPersia). This web of dysfunctional family dynamics—twisted by Sophie’s mental problems, Rebecca’s traumatic childhood and subsequent withdrawal from human affection, and Martin’s risk of being even more damaged than they are by his current experiences in Sophie’s sprawling Tudor-style mansion—give Lights Out a particularly strong dramatic undercurrent. Yes, much of the film is fueled by jump scares and creepy atmosphere, but it is ultimately in the service of a meaningful story about a family trying to heal its wounds and come back together, an effort that is repeatedly thwarted by the shadowy Diana, who we primarily see as a dark, lanky figure with dangly Nosferatu fingers, stringy J-horror hair, and glowing eyes.

The idea of scary things in the dark is, as noted early, nothing new, but Sandberg’s film gives it a new twist by absolutely associating the monster with the dark. The lights on/lights off scenario producers plenty of jitters, and characters live or die entirely by their ability to turn on lamps, switch on overhead lights, flip on their cellphones, keep candles burning, and, in one memorable instance, click their car alarm to make the headlights turn on. The rules are quite solid, as Diana must reside in darkness, although that doesn’t mean that she can’t be anywhere near the light, since light and dark often share a very shallow border. Thus, she can reside in, and attack from, a shadow in the corner of a room, a pool of darkness beyond the glow of a streetlamp, or even underneath a bed or just inside a darkened closet. The mystery of who she is and her connection to Sophie’s family is gradually revealed (the film is, at heart, a mystery), but the explanation of her existence doesn’t undermine her effectiveness as a monster; instead, it makes her even more monstrous.

Unlike a lot of horror films, Lights Out has a backstory as fascinating and improbable as what happens in the film itself. Two years ago, Sandberg was a struggling filmmaker putting together shorts in his native Sweden, most of which were shot inside his apartment and starred his wife, Lotta Losten. As part of “Who’s There? A Horror Short Film Challenge,” he made a 3-minute short called Lights Out. He won the challenge’s “Best Director” award, but nothing much happened until after the film had been floating around the Internet for about a year. Someone linked to it on Reddit, and people started watching it and talking about it and linking to it and posting it and watching it some more, and pretty soon millions had seen it (it currently has 10.6 million views on Vimeo and 2.6 million views on YouTube). It wasn’t long before Hollywood producers and agents started calling, including producer Lawrence Grey (Last Vegas, Hidden), who signed a deal to turn Lights Out into a feature and brought Saw and The Conjuring auteur James Wan on-board as a co-producer and hired screenwriter Eric Heisserer (who penned the recent remakes of A Nightmare on Elm Street and The Thing) to expand the film’s premise into a feature.

The most amazing thing of all is that Sandberg, who had only short films to his credit and had been repeatedly rejected for funding by the Swedish Film Institute, was hired to direct it, a gamble that has paid off handsomely. He proves throughout the film that the instincts that made his 3-minute short so memorably horrific translate well to the big screen. He dabbles in cliché and works and reworks familiar tropes, but there is an energy and a vigor that sells it; it doesn’t hurt that he leavens the film with doses of morbid black humor while maintaining a fundamentally humanist outlook that allows for his characters to have dignity and personality. He clearly works well with actors, as he gets good performances from Teresa Palmer as the prodigal daughter (although, dark nail polish aside, she looks too clean-cut and magazine-cover ready to be the damaged soul she is clearly intended to be), Maria Bello (Prime Suspect) as the tormented mother who can’t escape from the curse she’s brought down on her own family, and Gabriel Bateman (already a veteran of a half-dozen television series) as the young Martin, who is both realistically fearful and enjoyably resourceful. There isn’t a whole lot new in Lights Out, but Sandberg proves that he knows the horror genre well and he knows how to work the familiar in a way that makes it feel new and scary. We can only hope that he has more up his sleeve and that his unlikely success story will continue to defy the odds.

Copyright ©2016 James Kendrick

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