It wasn’t hard to picture the big screen possibilities when the original Lights Out short went viral a few years ago. The resulting film, written by Eric Heisserer (Final Destination 5, 2010’s A Nightmare on Elm St remake), isn’t the most interesting extrapolation of the short imaginable, but its central hook remains effective enough to keep the movie afloat for its brisk running time.
In filling out the mythology of ‘Dirty Diana’, the shadowy antagonist who disappears when the lights come on, Heisserer offers a generic horror back story (insane asylum, light sensitivity etc), but does a better job with his human characters.
Director David F. Sandberg has some creative fun staging peek-a-boo shock scares, even if his debt to J-horror tropes becomes increasingly apparent as the film progresses.
Mario Bello and Teresa Palmer are believable as mother and daughter and the film threatens to get interesting when it intertwines the supernatural events with the mental health issues faced by Bello’s character, but the thread isn’t exactly explored with subtlety.
Lights Out is no modern horror classic, and will seem especially frivolous to anyone who saw The Babadook, but it delivers more than its fair share of jump scares and knows when to bail out.
