Dark Film Review – Lights Out
Review Written By Casey Douglass
From the moment I saw
the trailer for horror film Lights Out, I was very interested
in seeing what looked like a horror based on a slightly fresher idea
than the usual ones that seem to be redone ad infinitum. I was able
to watch it at the cinema last night and my thoughts basically
revolve around three words: it was okay.
The film follows the
story of a boy (played by Gabriel Bateman) who just wants a good
night’s sleep but can’t get one. The reason behind this is that
the house he shares with his mentally troubled mother has a third,
shadowy occupant who roams the hallways and generally creeps around
in a way that would probably keep any one of us up at night. He flees
to his sister (played by Teresa Palmer) for help, but it seems that
nowhere is beyond the thing’s reach.
The key idea for the
film is that the creature/ghost/monster only really has power and
appears when it’s dark. I really like this, probably because it
harks back to many childhood fears that saw countless children
rushing for the light switch when they thought something was lurking
in the dark. As far as its use in Lights Out, I found it to be
very effective. The film does a good job of building the tension,
better so than actually being scary. An example is one of the first
few times the apparition appears, crouching in an open doorway
scratching on the floor with its back to the camera. It was pure
silhouette, but when it stopped scratching and turned to look at the
camera, my whole body chilled into goosebumps.
Then the whole effect
was pissed away by a standard jump-scare sequence, with the sound
ramped up to silly levels, to try and raise the audience’s pulse
rates. Predictable and a bit disappointing, even though you could
kind of guess what the film would be like before even sitting in your
cinema seat. The film didn't make me jump once. It creeped me out, as
in my goose-bump example, so it did connect with me on some primal
level, but it wasn’t particularly scary. Some of this is likely
down to an affliction that many horror fans seem to have, a kind of
immunity to jumps and frights that would make a more green viewer
reach for the hand of the person next to them.
On a more mundane
level, I wasn’t a fan of the actor who played the young boy. I just
didn’t think he really cut it, and I’m pretty sure near the end
he actually looked at the camera when he wasn’t supposed to. The
other acting was fine however, the sister was played particularly
well I thought, although this did mainly seem to entail making her
eyes get wider and wider. As far as the creature, it has a great
audio signature that foreshadows its appearance, and being only
visible in silhouette certainly adds to the suspense. As in most
creature-features though, this film trips over the line of showing
too much, in my opinion, particularly in a late scene where you see
its face briefly. Leave some things to the imagination! Grumble over.
Lights Out is a
genuinely creepy, but not really scary, horror. It is worth watching
but I would only give it 3/5. I think it could have been so
much better.
Lights Out Images ©
Copyright Warner Bros.
