![]() ![]() Now, with the guy from the prologue (Sophie’s second husband) offed, the haunting has started up again and young Martin (Gabriel Bateman) finds he’s sharing his old dark house with an increasingly flaky parent and a peculiarly malign, scratchy monster. After her father left, never to be heard from again (uh oh), her mother Sophie (Maria Bello) was pestered by the jealous spirit of Diana, who took to persecuting Rebecca. Then, in some deft set-up, heroine Rebecca (Teresa Palmer) is established as commitment-phobic when she won’t let her nice guy boyfriend Bret (Alexander DiPersia) stay over at her apartment and bears a few scars (literal scarifications) from a bad childhood experience. In a self-contained prologue, an earnest guy (Billy Burke) is menaced in what seems to be a warehouse for scary shop-window dummies (a bit reminiscent of the play Ghost Stories) and we get a sketch of Diana’s capabilities as the lights go out and he gets got. ![]() It may be that Diana only has 81 minutes of variations-on-a-theme scares in her, but for the moment that’s all Lights Out has to deliver. As with a run of recent horrors as varied as Mama, It Follows, Annabelle and The Babadook, there’s a sense of filmmakers casting around to come up with new, possibly franchisable fiends – which is at least a refreshing trend after a couple of decades of retreads. Sandberg and screenwriter Eric Heisserer come up with a backstory and a character for Diana (Alicia Vela-Bailey), their clinging, predatory, spiteful malicious menace. Like Mama, this is the feature-length expansion of a scary short film – and has to work hard on a rationale to shore up its simple, creepy notion of a long-nailed, fright-haired menace who manifests in shadows but turns invisible and intangible in the light. ![]()
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