Lights Out

The award-winning short is now a Hollywood cakewalk. A cakewalk through the dark.

[ C+ ]

There are stylish horror films, and there are horror films with stylists. Lights Out is the latter. It's actually a well-made haunter with some effective jump scares and a couple of great laughs.

A general audience will be unnerved, occasionally scared out of their wits, and probably satisfied by this old-fashioned exploration of fear of the dark. Horror enthusiasts will bemoan this tepid, overly safe foray that expands debut director David F. Sandberg's award-winning three-minute short into a Hollywood cakewalk. Little brother Martin (Gabriel Bateman) is the most believable character, though none of the performances is poor. Big sister Rebecca (Teresa Palmer) is the bad girl protagonist whose walls are plastered with posters of major-label metal acts like Avenged Sevenfold and Ghost—but she doesn't listen to any metal in the entire film. That's probably due to budget restrictions, but Sandberg should have that solved soon enough since 5 mil isn't much to recoup for a ghost flick getting a wide release. Hopefully, he's proven himself a capable studio lapdog and will be given a longer leash in the future.

Rated PG-13.

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Willamette Week

Nathan Carson

Nathan Carson has been a WW contributor since 2008. He also writes weird horror and science fiction stories, and is a founding member of the international touring doom metal band Witch Mountain. Carson owns and operates the boutique music booking agency Nanotear, and hosts the XRAY FM radio show the Heavy Metal Sewing Circle. The only reason he can do all these things is because he drinks a lot of water and gets plenty of sleep.

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