Lights Out is a pretty good film overall as a horror film. It’s based on a short film of the same name that appeared on youtube, which starred Lotta Losten, and she even makes an appearance early in the film, which is nice. The concept is that there is a creature/undead dark, shadowy figure, and the figure is not able to travel through the light, but can be seen in darkness and can travel through it. In the short, the woman flicks off the light and sees this figure at the end of the hallway, then turns it on, and the figure is gone. She turns the light off and on a few times to make sure she isn’t seeing things, and sure enough, it is really there.
They expanded on this concept in the film by creating a backstory about this shadowy figure, who is haunting this family. Although they did add some meaning to the figure, it seems like they could have done more. After having found out that the writing was done by the same person who re-imagined the A Nightmare on Elm St. reboot, We can see why it was lacking in that department.
Most of the film’s scares are jump scares. In this case, that is completely ok. The concept pretty much relies on it. The lights are on, and everything is fine. The lights go off, and the shadowy figure is right there. So while most films use cheap jump scares that don’t make sense, this film gets a pass and uses it pretty well.
Going back to the writing, though, they could have built up a bit more atmosphere to complement the jump scares. There are too many scenes where there is a lot of downtime. I think this time could have been used much better.
Overall, Lights Out is a good horror film. The shadowy figure is creepy as hell, there are enough atmospheric moments to build your anxiety through most of the scenes with the monster, and it pulls off what it was trying to accomplish fairly well. We would definitely add this to our collection, and recommend it to anyone to at least watch once.
