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Lights out diana5/25/2023 ![]() ![]() To disguise this in the movie itself, the monster never stays onscreen longer than a split second. That’s the real reason it’s so rare for the monster to appear in a trailer - it’s not to build suspense, it’s because if you knew how bad it looked there’s no way you’d pay to see more. The classics are the ones that make this work, but a lot of movies can’t, and have to build themselves around disguising how terrible their villain looks. The thing to understand is that most slasher movies key in on a monster that is clearly just a guy with a rubber mask. The key lies in Diana’s character design. There are a lot of problems standard jump-scare movies face, and Lights Out gets around all of them. James Wan attached his name for marketing purposes, but otherwise left the movie alone. The end result is very much an 81-minute version of the original short, dodging both the pitfalls that can beset adaptations and horror movies in general. Sandberg, was retained and makes his feature-length debut. With Lights Out, they’ve gotten it completely right. The end result was nothing like the short, but it ate the short up legally and practically - even if someone good gets the rights, it’ll be near impossible to adapt it again, because the feature, which became one of the most hated movies ever made, has name recognition. Sony grabbed the rights to this excellent, inventive 2010 short and then handed it to Adam Sandler and Chris Columbus, who had their own “creative” ideas, then stuffed it with product placement like Sony is wont to do. ![]() Just last year we had Pixels, a soul-crushing example of what not to do. That may sound like a matter of course, this is something that can go wrong. Whenever you have a short like this, the hope is that it doesn’t get commercialized at all and the end result is essentially a 90-plus minute version of the short. You’ve seen this kind of thing a million times before, but it’s so perfectly executed that it doesn’t matter here. When you get fresh pants and watch it again, you notice a couple of things - despite the critical adulation, it’s actually a very traditional, by-the-numbers, sound-based jump scare sequence. ![]() This movie is, of course, based on the brilliant 2013 short film of the same name. Though content to simply run away from the situation when it was happening to her, Rebecca is determined to confront her mother and Diana and save Martin from a similar destiny. Paul’s death exacerbates Sophie’s condition, and Diana once again begins stalking Rebecca and her young half-brother, Martin (Gabriel Bateman). Lights Out is a stellar horror film that walks the line between terrifying and fun, but before that, it’s a happy ending for a genius short.Īfter a pulse-pounding introduction in which a shadowy woman kills Paul (Billy Burke), Lights Out follows his step daughter, Rebecca (Teresa Palmer). Several years before, Rebecca’s mother and Paul’s widow, Sophie (Maria Bello) was left by her first husband and fell into a deep depression, in which she began communing with said shadow woman, the ghost of her old friend Diana (Alicia Vela-Bailey). Diana haunted Rebecca as a child, driving her to cut ties with her mother. That’s the entire mechanic of this scene - it’s on a timer. Rebecca sleeps next to a flashing tattoo sign that periodically floods her room with soft red light. This scene is an example of how Lights Out plays with its monster.
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