Lights Out (2016)

directed by David F. Sanberg
USA
81 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
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So as everybody already knows, Lights Out the movie is based on Lights Out the (very popular) short film. The short's popularity is most likely due to the fact that it was extremely stripped-down, relying on one actress in one very small space, but that it was also backed by the most primal of fears: The thought of something lurking in the dark. This has been humanity's nightmare since the beginning of time- the creature goes away when the lights are on, but comes back in the dark; even though you can't see it, it can see you. Fires die, lightbulbs are extinguished, and in a seamless transition of the ancient nightmare to modern anxiety, the iPhone screen goes dim. The longer movie doesn't abandon this baseline fear even for a moment.

I think it's pretty lucky that the big Lights Out had the same director as the little Lights Out, but I don't know if anybody was too excited when it was announced that the short would become a full movie, because the prospect of elongating something that was good precisely because it was so short sounds like an easy way to bore the life out of audiences everywhere. But the short actually translates incredibly well to a longer format- or I guess a more accurate way to put it would be that the director had enough good ideas to support 81 minutes of expansion on a 30-second source. I don't know when the last time I actually cared about an onscreen romance the way I did with this was. It felt genuine, it wasn't just going through the motions, the extraneous material only enhanced the initial concept.

Its treatment of all of its characters- and I mean all of them- is far and away the best thing about it. It's unfortunate that it ultimately relies on that "if you've ever been in a mental hospital you're scary" rhetoric, more so as the story progresses, but there's still a little something more to the creature's backstory than that. Humanizing a character isn't just giving them something that'll make a viewer sad if they die, it's also putting in the things that make them tick, like what was done with the Diana entity. We understand why she is the way she is, and it's not any kind of excuse, but you do get the feeling that this was done to her, and the story doesn't go the easy route of blind revenge and good-versus-evil mundanity.

The distinction between "ghost" and whatever Diana was also caught my interest a great deal. The way the phrase "dead woman" sounded from the characters' mouths as opposed to calling her a ghost was unique and creative.

Sometimes people discuss what movies released today could become classics 10 or 20 years in the future, and that's always been a question I have a lot of difficulty considering because classic horror movies, to me, always contain some element that can't be replicated with current means. But I can definitely see Lights Out becoming a beloved classic, because it has all the parts of a movie that could be remembered for its originality: Sympathetic characters, strong and non-sappy family bonds, and enough backstory behind everything to make its 81-minute runtime burst at the seams.