![]() This is very much a plot contrivance, but the movie travels so fast that it does not matter. Instead, our heroes literally find a box the explains everything. When the movie finds itself required to explain the monster during the second act, it spares the audience the indignity of an exposition-spouting “expert” in the paranormal or a suspiciously accurate web search. Lights Out breaks out its monster early enough and consistently enough that the “rules” are quite clear from the outset. This speed helps to compensate for some of the issues with the contemporary horrors the requirement that modern monsters come with extensive back story and documentation. There is very rarely time for the audience to catch their breath before the next scare pops up. Thanks to a very tight edit, Lights Out is able to hit those beats one after another after another. A longer movie would have to ration those scares, spreading them further apart to pad out a film and sapping any momentum. Lights Out breezes through a variety of clever “it’s behind you!” or “its right there!” scares with reckless abandon. The movie’s abbreviated runtime means that these scares and sequences arrive in rapid succession. Lights Out constantly draws the audience’s attention to the small dark spaces lurking in even the brightest frame the negative space over a character’s shoulder, the shadow under the bed, the space behind the door. ![]() The monster has the ability to hide everywhere. ![]() Turn the light on, the spectre disappears turn the light back off, the spectre has moved. A small family find themselves menaced by a silhouette that in only visible in certain lighting conditions. The premise of Lights Out is incredibly versatile. Here’s a little ditty, ’bout Sophie and Diana… The result is a film that never meanders or never gets lost down cul de sacs. Lights Out does not go on a second longer than it needs to, and it wastes no time in setting up its premise and executing its scares. The premise could easily have been extended past that, but Sandberg and Heisserer are shrewd in that regard. The movie clocks in at just over an hour and twenty minutes. With that in mind, there is something very effective about the decision to keep Lights Out so trim and efficient. Judd Apatow comedies are perhaps the best example of this, stretching about ninety minutes of material over two hours. Perhaps motivated by a desire to offer viewers some measurable return on investment, movie runtimes have become increasingly bloated. This is most obvious in summer blockbusters, but it also applies to horror movies and comedies. Recent years have seen movie runtimes extend across the board. One of the most endearing aspects of Lights Out is how taut the finished film is. Still, discounting those final few minutes, Lights Out is a visceral thrill-ride and a joy from start to almost-finish. The problem is that the movie’s final big plot development rather brutally undercuts the central allegory in such a way that the film trips over its own wit. The film follows its basic premise to a very clever and innovative conclusion within the world that it has created. ![]() However, there is a sense that Lights Out is just a little bit too clever for its own good. It is a premise that The Babadook used to great effect, and it adds a little extra heft to Lights Out. This demon that stalks its prey through darkness is treated as an apt metaphor for depression, a creature that has latched on to a small suburban family and tormented them quietly for years. In the style of many classic horror stories, Lights Out positions its demon as an allegorical device. However, director David Sandberg and writer Eric Heisserer go a great deal further. The premise alone is enough to drive Lights Out, to power an eighty-one-minute horror film.
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