Turn the light off again and the creepy, semi-visible creature with catlike tapetum lucidum is even closer! Genuinely horrifying no matter how many times you see it. Did I see a weird silhouette? Let me switch on the light. Basically, there’s a ghoul that you can only see when it’s dark. It would, however, be unfair not to at least praise its central gimmick, the same one found in director David F Sanberg’s viral two-and-a-half-minute video that grabbed the attention of the horror mogul James Wan. I know it’s summertime, and some of the programming can be ephemeral, but Lights Out’s greatest feat is how you can feel yourself forgetting this 81-minute piffle as you are actually watching it. But who will ever be nostalgic for the mainstream horror films that are flooding our marketplace today? Lights Out is yet another half-baked, PG-13 scare-em snoozer centered on an underdeveloped supernatural concept that won’t even give kids a good nightmare. Even the distasteful torture porn of the early 21st century wins a few points just for pissing so many people off. From the Universal Monsters to cheeseball Vampira-hosted B pictures, from Italian giallo to gory 80s exploitation flicks in enormous VHS cases, one can reflect fondly on it all. Why? She came to a tragic end of some sort the trailer indicates a shaky view of what looks like an electric chair - there’s an ominous-looking retro nurse fiddling with switches.F ew genres lend themselves to nostalgia like horror. After all, it’s always the cute little boys, isn’t it? This leads Rebecca to determine that there is a specter in her mother’s past, and that the spirit of this creepy, late young woman, Diana, is hanging onto the mortal plane, feeding off of people’s fear of, you know, the dark. Rebecca suspects that her little brother ( Annabelle’s Gabriel Bateman) is being pursued by a spirit. Lights Out - the full-length film - spends time exploring the relationship between lead Rebecca (Teresa Palmer, who also, incidentally, appears in the American Grudge 2) and her mentally unstable mother (Maria Bello). Yet one wonders how much mileage Sandberg can get out of this aesthetically grabbing visual gimmick, which seems to find its precedence in shadowy Japanese horror standards like Ju-on: The Grudge and Pulse. Sandberg’s movie is perhaps the most iconic horror short of the decade so far, but also likely the briefest its one-trick creepiness feels appropriate for the Creepypasta era. The film’s trajectory recalls producer Wan’s own ascendancy - Saw was originally an eight-minute short film - as well as the backstory for films like the Guillermo del Toro-produced Mama. The film resulted in a deal for a full-length adaptation, after racked up a cumulative 12 million-ish YouTube view count and some horror festival accolades. It’s a pretty indelible image.Īfter seeing the opening minute of the preview, you’ve essentially seen a retread of the beginning of the much-reposted two-and-a-half minute short film, directed by Sandberg. As she flips them on and off, the figure advances towards her. In the Lights Out trailer’s cold open, a woman glimpses a bony, contorted, female figure lurking in the dark corners of a textile factory whenever she turns off the lights. Wan’s attachment to the project, and the preview’s arresting opening, gives the film the air of being something outside of the normal blockbuster horror fare (see The Forest or The Boy for recent, willfully average examples). It opens this weekend in theaters everywhere. This year’s most terrifying movie preview - even, perhaps, over The Conjuring 2 - is probably that of Lights Out, a new film by Hollywood first-time director David Sandberg, and produced by The Conjuring’s own James Wan.
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