LIGHTS OUT (2016) - FILM REVIEW

       It is with great simplicity and masterful manipulation that David F. Sandberg, director of the newly-released horror feature Lights Out, shot his 2013 short of the same name, prompting it to become viral around the Internet and come into the hands of Hollywood. Sandberg, a thirty-two year-old at the time, swimming in debt in his home country of Sweden, made the short with a zero-budget, DIY approach, and submitted it to a local film festival. From there, it struck many, and, following a similar path to the 2013 film Mama, it sent a regular guy with a low-paying job and an unpromising life to Hollywood, where he was granted a film director’s seat, a nice apartment, and now, looking at Lights Out’s box office slam, a healthy amount of American dollars.
       It’s a great story -- a story that makes us cinephiles hopeful. A story that reflects how sometimes, it isn’t just the explosions and bikinis and action movies and The Rock. Sometimes, when one truly is creative and cinematically gifted, they can get that one-way ticket to success their dreams always hoped for. It is a story of resourcefulness and persistence, of glamour and goodwill -- which makes it even more unfortunate to say that Lights Out is one of the most disappointing films in recent memory, and a further testament to some depressed moviegoers’ claims that the horror genre, in mainstream America at least, is on its last leg.
       The story is as promising as any others, moreso perhaps. A brief summary: when turning off the lights, bad shit occurs. Simple, yes? It could very well be. This movie is only eighty-one minutes long, which makes one hopeful; the length hints to the viewer that this ride will be short, yet fulfilling, because the filmmakers will not try to break the walls of reason and blow beyond what is expected. They will follow the short: direct, neat, never dull. With a runtime like this, you expect them to follow the original short in that way. And yet, those eighty-one minutes are rarely spent with tense scares, but rather with (some) jump-scares, but mostly, a dull story about depression and familial ties, that honestly, despite its well-intended nature...I couldn’t care less about. It is no longer a tight-knit horror show -- it’s a stubborn slog.
       Not only does the production fail to consistently entertain, interest, and scare, but even when scares do come, they’re far from chilling. They are, perhaps, above the average run-of-the-mill jumps, boos, and shrieks that are so common-ground at this point. Still, however, the viewer gliding into the theater hoping for something different, something bold, something with true bravura, will slump out of said theater after the length of about four Modern Family episodes feeling played, like a fool. Whereas Sandberg manipulated the audience’s expectations and rose above them in his original short film, showing a distaste for cheap thrills, he succumbs to such expectations in his feature, almost as if he blindly forgot what directorial genius got him his job in the first place.  It is indeed a great travesty that the merit of the film is being so heavily compared to the short, but such a comparison is reasonable: it highlights a director’s growth or decline from their own original content. And in this unfortunate case, the content was butchered; not in the editing room, or the  shooting stage, but simply from the very beginning. We should've expected a filmmaker of IKEA budgets to flop on such a stage, even if only marginally.
       Lights Out was as promising as any horror flick recently based solely on premise; and yet, judging the book by the cover here was a mistake. And yet, still, I remain hopeful. Glimmering on the horizon is change in the Hollywood horror film, I just know it. Soon it will be back to greatness. Until then, my friends, we must be patient, for the future holds much light, and horror will prosper, unless we keep those lights out.

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