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![]() ![]() ![]() In Lights Out, Diana - something of a cross between the Ring franchise's Samara and the scarred, vicious guilt-monster from Pascal Laugier's Martyrs - literally lives in the dark, and while she exists as her own character with her own backstory, she ultimately comes to represent Sophie's inner darkness, which occasionally emerges to do psychological damage to her two children (Teresa Palmer and Gabriel Bateman). And there's the essential difference between the feature and its source material: whereas the short was a two-and-a-half minute scare machine, the full-length film presented an opportunity for Sandberg to say something more meaningful while still scaring audiences out of their wits. How many people just put up a wall and decided not to admit that it was there?” We just spent a few meetings just talking about how everyone dealt with it, and how many people avoid it. For someone else it's clinical depression. “We have anecdotally some personal experience with someone in our family or our friend circle who dealt with mental illness,” Heisserer told me via phone. The feature is a long way from Sandberg's original short film of the same name, which hit YouTube in 2014 and subsequently went viral before capturing the attention of producer Lawrence Grey, who helped Sandberg craft an outline for a feature-length version that brought the mental illness analogy into the mix. After getting horror maestro James Wan on board as a producer, the filmmakers hired Final Destination 5 and A Nightmare on Elm Street remake screenwriter Eric Heisserer, who along with Sandberg and Grey brought a personal connection to the material that deepened his interest in telling the story. For a genre not historically known for its sensitive portrayals of psychological disorders, that counts as something of a minor triumph, and the filmmakers deserve credit for bringing added heft to what could have easily been a surface-level scare machine. And yet the film plumbs deeper waters than expected through the character of Sophie (Maria Bello) and her shadow-dwelling “friend” Diana, who mutually represent a surprisingly potent, and unusually perceptive, metaphor about mental illness and its capacity to wreak havoc on generations of families. Sandberg - comes across as your standard-issue fright fest: supernatural spook, family in peril, jump scares from wall to wall. From its brilliantly effective trailers, Lights Out - the new horror film from first-time feature director David F. ![]()
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