lights out movie review essay

“Lights Out”, a Horror: Are You Afraid of the Dark? Essay (Movie Review)

There is no doubt that modern movieland is ready to meet your every need. What kind of films do you prefer? Ones that calm you down and make you feel the sorrow, or ones that make you break into a cold sweat and shake with fear? If the latter is about you, you must have heard about Lights Out , a horror movie that came out a few months ago. This movie from James Wan received plenty of enthusiastic reviews due to its cast of characters, its sustained style, and the key idea that sounds familiar to everyone: childhood fears. Is it worth watching? Let’s see!

The movie tells us the story of a family that has to deal with the mysterious creatures generated by the power of horror. Everything seems to be ordinary in the light of day, but as the night falls, an unknown terror comes out. The main female character, named Rebecca, has been experiencing strange hallucinations since her childhood. Leaving her mother’s house, she believes that she has managed to conquer her childhood fears, but it turns out to be just an illusion. Rebecca feels trapped every time it gets dark, and she is a prisoner kept in a world of delusion, a world of soul-chilling terror that leaves her only at the crack of dawn. The fears that used to make her blood turn to ice are still alive; they are waiting patiently for the right moment to appear again and take her back to the cell of terror and despair. They are in the driver’s seat when the lights are off. Rebecca’s mother, Sophie, experiences a collapse after seeing what is happening to her dear daughter. Rebecca’s younger brother then gets carried away as he begins to see the creatures that made a hell out of Rebecca’s life. With the lapse of time, her fears become more and more obsessive, and the only way out for Rebecca is to fight to the bitter end. Trying to solve the puzzle, she realizes that friendly settlement is impossible. She is dead set on saving her family from death, but will she manage to do it before it is too late?

I believe this movie to be quite an interesting one as it touches upon the topic of the irrational childhood fears that were experienced by most people. If you find it to be more appropriate for comedy rather than a horror film, I would recommend that you remember your childhood fears and imagine all of them coming back together in the darkness. What is more, the movie was highly appreciated by audiences as its box sales revenue appeared to be enormous when compared to its modest budget. As for the cast, I enjoyed their acting as it looked very convincing. The film itself was made by certain traditions of horror movies, such as specific sounds, many jump cuts, and subdued colors. It is impossible to film a movie that will not be called a dime a dozen at least once, and I realize that Lights Out may appear to be boring for some of the fans of horror films. In general, I would recommend watching this movie to those who are looking for something mysterious and exciting.

Works Cited

Lights Out. Ex. Prod. James Wan. USA: Warner Bros. Pictures. 2016. DVD.

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IvyPanda. (2022, January 17). "Lights Out", a Horror: Are You Afraid of the Dark? https://ivypanda.com/essays/lights-out-a-horror-movie-are-you-afraid-of-the-dark/

""Lights Out", a Horror: Are You Afraid of the Dark?" IvyPanda , 17 Jan. 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/lights-out-a-horror-movie-are-you-afraid-of-the-dark/.

IvyPanda . (2022) '"Lights Out", a Horror: Are You Afraid of the Dark'. 17 January.

IvyPanda . 2022. ""Lights Out", a Horror: Are You Afraid of the Dark?" January 17, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/lights-out-a-horror-movie-are-you-afraid-of-the-dark/.

1. IvyPanda . ""Lights Out", a Horror: Are You Afraid of the Dark?" January 17, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/lights-out-a-horror-movie-are-you-afraid-of-the-dark/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . ""Lights Out", a Horror: Are You Afraid of the Dark?" January 17, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/lights-out-a-horror-movie-are-you-afraid-of-the-dark/.

Lights Out is the brilliantly scary, surprisingly divisive movie you need to see

The ending is hated by many. But it’s what elevates the film to a near masterpiece.

by Emily St. James

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Lights Out , the new horror movie about a monster that can only strike when, well, the lights are out, is a near masterpiece of scary movie craft.

There are sequences in this film that left the audience at my screening joyfully applauding their creativity and audacity. And the movie’s central metaphor — the monster is depression! — is surprisingly durable, allowing for some great character moments.

Yes, it has problems — one big one in particular. But it’s the kind of movie where I realized about 10 minutes in how wrapped up I was in the lives of the characters, and realized with about 10 minutes left that I was holding my breath that the director and screenwriter wouldn’t screw everything up.

And while I loved the ending, it’s proven incredibly divisive for what it might seem to say about depression. So to talk about why I enjoyed Lights Out so much, I’m going to have to spoil some things. I’ll warn you before I do so, however.

But before that, let’s talk about the good, the bad, and the divisive of Lights Out .

Good: The monster is terrific on a bunch of levels

Let’s just start with the fact that a monster that can’t attack when someone is standing in a pool of light is a great idea for a movie monster. Considering that films themselves are just contrasts of light and darkness, the concept gives director David F. Sandberg lots to play with.

There have been other creatures like this in movie history (perhaps most famously in Pitch Black , the film that spawned Vin Diesel’s Riddick character), but what makes Lights Out so much fun is that it takes place in our world, where light sources can pop up just about anywhere.

In particular, the film uses everything from candles to cellphone screens to increase the tension in moments when the monster has, say, cut power to a city block and the characters need to cross vast swaths of darkness with only their wits to protect them.

Lights Out is obviously filmed on a smaller budget — it seems to take place in about two different locations, with just five or six characters — but the fact that it can turn literally any place into a house of horrors simply by flipping a light switch gives it a great boost when it comes to staging terrifying sequences.

And make no mistake: This is one scary monster. Named Diana, she cuts a creepy figure in silhouette, and she’s got long, long fingernails she can use to attack. She’ll freak you out.

Good: The use of the monster as a metaphor is better thought-out than in many films

Not since The Babadook have I seen a movie that used its monster as a metaphor for mental illness as effectively as this one does.

In particular, Diana has haunted the same family for two generations, and this serves as a sneaky way for the film’s screenwriter, Eric Heisserer , to explore the ways parents fear their own mental illnesses might be passed along to their children.

There’s so much in this film that feels informed by a life haunted by depression, from the way family matriarch Sophie ( Maria Bello ) sometimes just locks herself in her bedroom because she’s not sure she can spend time around her kids to the way that her daughter, Becca ( Teresa Palmer ), runs her fingers along scars on her arms that are from Diana’s long nails but might as well be from self-harm.

In the tradition of the best horror, Lights Out leaves all of this on the edges of the story, the better for you to fill in some of the blanks on your own. But it’s there, and the more you start to think about it, the more Diana’s function as a metaphor for depression works beautifully.

But Heisserer and Sandberg also dig into depression itself. Diana waxes and wanes the more Sophie takes her anti-depressants, and we learn that she first met Diana when she was committed as a teenager because her parents evidently didn’t know how else to handle her mental condition. There’s room here, obliquely, to find discussion of how people with mental illness have often been treated via being shut away

Mostly good: The acting is largely solid

Bello and Palmer are actresses I don’t always spark to, and there are early scenes where Palmer feels a bit like she’s not the right center for this film, her performance a little listless and disaffected. But that turns out to be intentional on her part. Becca is listless and disaffected.

By the time Sophie and Becca are hashing out their complicated relationship around the family dinner table, lighting fixtures the only thing keeping them safe, I was invested in the two of them.

Gabriel Bateman gives a solid "little kid in a horror movie" performance as Martin, Becca’s younger brother, who has attracted Diana’s attentions in recent months. (In general, I love how the characters already know about Diana and expect the audience to catch up, mostly.)

The movie hinges on his relationships with Sophie and Becca, and that those largely work is a tribute to him.

As Becca’s boyfriend, Bret, Alexander DiPersia rounds out the main cast. And he’s ... fine. He’s playing an impossible character — the good guy Becca keeps pushing away because of her own problems — and he’s at the center of the film’s best scene. But it’s not hard to wish he were played by a slightly more dynamic actor all the same.

Bad: The exposition is airlifted in from some other movie

Lights Out is very, very short — a little over 80 minutes, and that’s with the closing credits. (Without, it’s closer to 75.)

Yet it’s also lean. The actual story of Becca and her family figuring out how to survive Diana takes up only around an hour of screen time, without rushing or padding.

Thus, Sandberg and Heisserer make the choice to drop in a backstory for Diana that takes up an inordinate amount of time and tries way too hard to explain a monster that works better as metaphor anyway.

Once Diana becomes the ghost of an old friend of Sophie’s (this isn’t really a spoiler), she seems much less elemental than she does when she’s just attacking for no real reason. Plus, the exposition sequences seem to arrive at random and grind the story to a halt. They’re handled very poorly.

All right. Last chance to get out before I spoil the ending of this thing. Major, major spoilers follow.

Divisive: The ending of the film is either brilliant — or wrongheaded

In the end, Lights Out argues that Diana’s sole connection to this plane is Sophie, who realizes that if she’s not alive, the monster can’t hurt her children. After firing a gun at Diana during the film’s climax (and the way Diana disappears from dark spaces when the gun’s barrel flares is really neat), Sophie uses the gun to kill herself. Diana is gone, and the family can start healing.

In his review of the film , the A.V. Club’s A.A. Dowd says this is risible when it comes to the film’s otherwise solid portrayal of depression. It’s not hard to read it as, say, an argument that the only way to cure depression is via suicide. And, yes, as a literal reading of the film’s text, that’s more or less accurate — especially if this movie does well and spawns the inevitable sequel.

But I was impressed by the audacity of that bleakness. In particular, Lights Out joins a recent movement of works about mental illness that attempt to argue that sometimes, those who suffer from it get to a place where suicide can seem like a relief or release — though that choice leaves emotional wreckage for those left behind.

Most recent examples are from the literary world, particularly Hanya Yanagihara’s massive novel A Little Life , but "The Gift," the fifth season finale of Buffy the Vampire Slayer , also plays with similar ideas. These stories are, in other words, not defenses of suicide but occasionally metaphorical explanations of it, an attempt to put the audience in the mental state of someone who makes that choice and force us to try to understand it.

That’s a complicated thing to explore, but I think it’s worth doing, if only because it destigmatizes the discussion of suicide itself — and thus mental illness. Both have been topics considered unworthy of polite conversation for ages in America.

If these works are interested in exploring the why of suicide (sometimes someone suffering from a mental illness feels it has become too unbearable to live with), we can perhaps better understand how to help those we know who struggle with those suicidal thoughts. We need to face down these dark fears — which is where horror, which has always helped us confront that which terrifies us, comes in.

Don’t get me wrong: Lights Out is not as thorough an examination of this idea as A Little Life or even Buffy . But if there’s a genre that can take this incredibly complex and dark idea and bring it out into the light, so to speak, it’s horror.

Lights Out could have done a slightly better job of preparing the audience for this final moment, but when it arrives, it has a dark grandeur to it that elevates the film from very fun to something surprisingly powerful.

Lights Out is playing in theaters throughout the country. See it even though I just told you the ending.

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Review by Brian Eggert July 23, 2016

David F. Sandberg’s short film “Lights Out” from 2013 caught the attention of many in Hollywood, but horror maestro James Wan ( Insidious , The Conjuring ) was the first to swoop in and sign the untried Swedish filmmaker. Wan secured Sandberg a budget of $5 million, and the low-budget release Lights Out survives on a singular gimmick to the original short: Over the course of three wordless minutes as she prepares for bed, a woman (Sandberg’s wife, Lotta Losten) sees a female shape in the dark when she switches off the lights. When she turns the lights on again, the shape is gone. Back and forth, off and on, she sees the shape standing in the dark, until she turns the lights off and sees the shape has moved closer, right next to her in fact—a startling progression to be sure.

Taking that basic hook and making a full-length story (well, 81 minutes) was left not to Sandberg, but screenwriter Eric Heisserer, whose previous efforts on the 2010 remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street or the 2011 prequel The Thing do not promote confidence. Heisserer doesn’t bother wasting time building characters or creating emotional stakes before getting into the terror, and his director doesn’t seem to mind. Sandberg’s debut effort shows some clear signs of a novice, mostly in the charming way audiences expect from low-budget horror nowadays. But mostly, he and Heisserer imagine new ways of exploring how their central monster works, and how its would-be victims must get creative to stay out of the dark.

The story opens with a teaser of sorts, featuring Losten as a factory worker who gets spooked by something in the dark, and Billy Burke as Paul, the movie’s first victim. We soon learn Paul’s manic widow Sophie (Maria Bello) has a history of mental illness—she talks to someone named Diana, a dark figure who remains in the shadows. When Sophie and Paul’s young son Martin (Gabriel Bateman) begins to see Diana, he’s too afraid to sleep in his bed and instead sleeps in school, prompting the nurse to call Martin’s rebellious sister from another mister, Rebecca (Teresa Palmer). Alongside her dim boyfriend Bret (Alexander DiPersia), Rebecca tries to protect Martin, because she herself remembers seeing Diana as a child, and the memory gives her the heebie-jeebies.

Sandberg’s execution relies on finding new ways to turn the lights off and on again, such as Rebecca living above a tattoo parlor with an alternating red neon sign, or a crank-powered flashlight that can’t seem to hold a charge. Each fading light source teases the steady approach of the char-skinned Diana, a character whose backstory contains elements of two Wes Craven crazies: Freddy Krueger and Shocker. At first, Rebecca is convinced Diana will go away if Sophie just takes her anti-depressants on a regular basis, suggesting Diana is a figment of Sophie’s imagination; later, it’s proposed that Diana is the ghost of a former mental patient. Even by the end, the audience remains unclear as to Diana’s origins.

Most elements from the original short have been carried over, along with several tried and true horror clichés. Characters tape light switches on; Diana creepily scratches at the wooden doors and floors; the electricity inexplicably flickers; flashlights remain unreliable; and people investigate noises in the dark, though they should really know better. Cinematographer Marc Spicer keeps the night moments lit in a balance of light and dark, so even in the pitch-black we can tell what’s going on. And while Sandberg orchestrates a few sequences of heavy tension, Lights Out doesn’t quite click or retain a place in our minds after the end credits. Despite the addition of several characters well-acted by the cast, we’re left only remembering the monster’s gimmick, which seemed more straightforward and less overcomplicated by muddied attempts to explain Sandberg’s short film.

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Review: In ‘Lights Out’ an Invisible Friend Turns Malicious

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By Jeannette Catsoulis

• July 21, 2016

Psychosis begets substance in “Lights Out,” a shameless piggyback — at least in apparition design and deployment — on the popularity of 2014’s terrifyingly effective Australian movie “The Babadook.”

That creep show also featured an imperiled boy and his fretful single mother (a pairing here replicated by a twitchy Maria Bello as Sophie and Gabriel Bateman as her son, Martin). More, it refused to confirm whether its malicious entity was imaginary or otherworldly, a question that bedevils Martin’s estranged stepsister, Rebecca (Teresa Palmer), when she becomes his protector. Recalling her own troubled childhood with the mentally unstable Sophie and her attachment to an invisible friend she called Diana, Rebecca needs no convincing when Martin tells her that Diana has returned.

Using his 2013 micro-movie as a jumping-off point, the Swedish director David F. Sandberg extracts maximum frights from the simplest of conceits: Diana materializes in darkness and vanishes in light. Whipping up an eerie blend of haunted-house thriller and supernatural-stalker story, he proves less adept at managing Eric Heisserer’s overly detailed screenplay than at choreographing visual scares. In these, he is inventively abetted by Marc Spicer’s bird-dogging camera, which noses around closet doors and into cellar corners with shivery curiosity.

Spackling over any copycat cracks with strong acting and fleet editing, “Lights Out” delivers minimalist frights in old-school ways. Chief among these are the chilling exertions of the stunt actress Alicia Vela-Bailey, a former gymnast who portrays Diana with limber ingenuity. Writhing in the shadows like a child’s charcoal nightmare, she imbues the spook with devilish intent. Whatever you do, don’t blink. JEANNETTE CATSOULIS

“Lights Out” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Pointy fingernails and painful memories.

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Movie Review: Lights Out (2016)

• Movie Reviews
• 4 responses
• --> July 24, 2016

Unable to sleep one night, young Martin (Gabriel Bateman, “ Annabelle ”) ventures from his room to investigate some whispering he hears in the hallway. He discovers his mother, Sophie (Maria Bello, “ The 5th Wave ”), talking in hushed tones to someone in the shadows. She apologizes, asking, “Did we wake you?” and sends him back to bed. Moments later, he sits in terror as someone scratches at the door and tries to get into his room; as a result, he stays awake for the remainder of the night.

The next day, his sister, Rebecca (Teresa Palmer, “ Knight of Cups ”), is called to his school and is informed that Martin has fallen asleep in homeroom three times in a week. Becca, who lives in an apartment on her own and has experienced some of the horror-filled nights Martin describes, tries to take in her little brother as a way to force their mother to attend more carefully to Martin’s safety. A visibly unstable Sophie replies that there’s no threat in her home, and tries to convince Martin that her friend, Diana, means them no harm. Left with no other choice, Becca and her boyfriend Bret (Alexander DiPersia, “Good Girls Revolt” TV series) stay the night with Martin, and try desperately to find a way to keep everyone safe from the extremely frightening being Sophie calls Diana.

Based on director David F. Sandberg’s short film of the same name, Lights Out is an incredibly simple, yet effective horror movie that’s thin on story development, but, admittedly, this isn’t a film people want to see because of a detailed plot. Audiences are immediately sucked into a world that’s perpetually darkened by drawn curtains and lamps with missing lightbulbs. Diana lurks in darkness of all types — she hides in closets, in blackened rooms, and even in slight shadows cast by a lit candle. She is greedy about her connection to Sophie, and ensures her own preservation by snatching her enemies into the dark. The tension is just as relentless as Diana herself, and the film wastes no opportunity to show how terrifying this spectre can truly be when threatened.

The practical effects used to create Diana are as unsettling as they come. Diana crouches in dark hallways, and, as depicted in the film’s trailers, disappears when light is shined on her. She moves swiftly and invisibly, so that when the light goes out, it’s revealed that she’s covered quite a distance. People who admit to being afraid of the dark will tell you that it’s not the dark they fear; it’s what could be lurking IN the dark that makes their skin crawl. Sandberg wields this notion as masterfully as Jason Voorhees wields a machete, and he couples it with masterful sound manipulation — you want those noises to stop, but when they do, you desperately want them back to serve as clues to Diana’s whereabouts.

Lights Out tightly curls its audience members into their seats and forces them to peer apprehensively into the shadows of the dimly lit theater. One of the best sequences involves light uncontrolled by the characters — picture a room lit by a blinking neon sign outside the window, and imagine the terror derived from knowing you can’t keep that sign lit. Your eyes constantly scan the screen for any scrap of light characters can safely surround themselves with, and groan with pained anticipation when that light is snatched away. The film is loaded with the kind of tension that stays with you long into the night — those late-night trips to the kitchen or bathroom won’t be made in the dark without your mind conjuring the image of Diana creeping in your hallway.

Now, while I, personally, prefer a film that’s got a developed storyline with a valid (or at least attempted) explanation for “what’s happening” in a haunting, I have to admit that Lights Out is a enjoyable scarer that’s definitely worth seeing, especially in a crowded theater. We love the summer movie season because we’re given fun popcorn films we don’t have to take seriously and that we can laugh about with friends. Well, what’s more fun than a horror movie that succeeds in getting the most seasoned viewers to jump in spite of themselves? We lament that it doesn’t happen often, so it’s quite the treat when we’re gifted with one. And since we’ve already enjoyed “ The Conjuring 2 ” this summer, we’re pretty lucky to get a second in Lights Out .

Just be sure to keep your flashlights handy.

Tagged: family , ghost , mother , secret

School teacher by day. Horror aficionado by night.

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'Movie Review: Lights Out (2016)' have 4 comments

July 24, 2016 @ 12:38 pm Impaction

I always knew as a child there was something lurking in the darkness..

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July 24, 2016 @ 1:13 pm nightlady

I enjoyed the lack of story–lean and mean jump scares and thrills are all I am looking for to give me my horror fixation.

July 24, 2016 @ 2:53 pm j.siqueira

July 24, 2016 @ 4:01 pm CamOGravey

I thought it more inventive than anything Wan is doing with his Insidious and Conjuring episodes.

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‘Lights Out’ Review: I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness

By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

Why do we still get scared at thing that go bump in the night? At the movies, I mean. Lights Out, the feature-length (well, 80 minutes) film version of a horror short that went viral online, allows Swedish filmmaker David F. Sandberg to earn his stripes as a director in the big leagues. It was horror master James Wan ( Saw, Insidious, The Conjuring ) who gave Sandberg the go-ahead for a $5 million feature.

He does a solid job of raising hell. With screenwriter Eric Heisserer fleshing out a 146-second short, Lights Out provides the reliably smashing Maria Bello a chance to dig into the juicy role of Sophie, a mother who keeps driving away the men in her life — not to mention her children. Insomniac daughter Rebecca (Teresa Palmer) has long ago moved out of the spookily-shaded family dump to an apartment in downtown Los Angeles. Now Rebecca’s 10-year-old stepbrother Martin (Gabriel Bateman) wants to head for the hills, or in this case, her apartment. His father (Billy Burke) has died at work for reasons unknown and Mom sees dead people. Make that one dead person: Diana (Alicia Vela-Bailey), a social outcast who did time with Sophie years ago in a mental institution. She’s is a real chatterbox, and harmless enough … until the lights go out. Then Diana starts death-dancing around the house like a spider hunting for a fly, namely anyone who gets in the way of her and Sophie. Turn on the lights, Diana’s gone. Turn them back on, it’s Halloween!

Predictable stuff, energized by some spiffy scare effects from cinematographer Marc Spicer who works wonders with underlighting. But the on/off tricks would grow tiring without actors who perform well beyond the call of fright-house duty. Bello makes a sympathetic figure out of a loving mother who thinks Diana is something she’s conjured out of her own subconscious. Her scenes with the skilled Palmer have a touching quality that suggest a real mother-daughter relationship grown toxic. It’s these two actors who make something hypnotic and haunting out of a movie built out of spare parts.

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• DVD & Streaming

Content Caution

In Theaters

• July 22, 2016
• Teresa Palmer as Rebecca; Gabriel Bateman as Martin; Alexander DiPersia as Bret; Billy Burke as Paul; Maria Bello as Sophie

Home Release Date

• October 25, 2016
• David F. Sandberg

Distributor

• Warner Bros.

Movie Review

Lots of kids are scared of the dark. Martin has reason to be.

Shadows are dangerous in Martin’s world: The blackness under the bed. The webbed gloom of the closet. Something lurks in the lightless corners, watching, awaiting her chance.

Just fanciful imaginings? Terrors in a little boy’s head? Martin knows differently. But what if the terrors are coming from his mother’s head? Well, that’s another story.

The shadows aren’t so dangerous when his mom, Sophie, takes her meds. She’s struggled with depression since she was a teen. As long as she controls her symptoms, the family’s darkness is held in check. But lately, Sophie’s stopped taking them, and she’s welcomed the darkness like a long-lost friend. Indeed, Sophie even has a name for it, Diana, and she seems to enjoy its company. Sophie spends her days with the curtains drawn, her nights pacing her inky-black living room, talking to someone … or something.

Martin’s father, Paul, tried to help … and was killed for his trouble. Martin’s older sister, Rebecca, wants to protect him, too. When Martin begs her to let him stay with her, she agrees and takes him home. But social services won’t let Becca—a rudderless free spirit—keep custody of her younger brother. Seems the government thinks Sophie’s a dandy mother … and it doesn’t cotton to the idea of bogeymen.

So Martin goes home, where shadows paint the walls. And Sophie’s genuinely thrilled to have her little boy back. She knows that things have been tough and stressful since his dad died. Maybe tonight, she volunteers, they can have a fun movie night together: just the three of them.

“Mom?” Martin asks. “How ’bout just you and I tonight. OK?”

“We’ll see,” Sophie says.

Positive Elements

Lights Out is more than a film about things that go bump in the night. The core fear here is not really darkness, but abandonment. The threat of being left alone—and the temptation to run away—is a powerful manifestation here, perhaps as powerful as Diana herself. As such, the movie’s heroes are those who stick around.

Martin is particularly inspirational. When Becca wants to flee, Martin demands that they stay and rescue their mom—even though he knows, better than anyone, the dangers of trying to do so. “You’ve been gone a long time,” he tells Becca, “But she’s our mom! She needs us more than ever!”

And even though Becca and Sophie had a falling out years ago, Becca does stick it out. She loves her mother and will try to save her if she can. Becca’s boyfriend, Bret—a guy whom Becca has long kept at an emotional (if not physical) distance—shows he’s willing to stay with Becca no matter what. “I’m not going anywhere,” he says.

And even though Sophie shows a disturbing affinity for Diana, her kids are still her highest priority, and she’ll still do anything to save them.

Spiritual Elements

Though Sophie firmly tells Becca that “ghosts aren’t real,” that’s what Diana seems to be. She’s the presence of one of Sophie’s childhood “friends,” a girl she apparently met while the two were in a psychiatric facility together. Unlike most ghosts, though, Diana takes on a powerful physical presence in the absence of light. She also has telepathic abilities, which she naturally uses in the worst ways possible.

Sexual Content

The first time we see Bret and Becca, they’re in bed together, apparently enjoying a post-coital moment. She is in lingerie, and he’s partly covered by a sheet. Bret asks Becca if she wants to “go again,” but she refuses and leaves to take a shower instead. (We see her unclothed from the waist up through a partly translucent window.)

Bret seems more interested in a real commitment than Becca does, though marriage is never mentioned as a possibility. But he’d settle for the ability to leave a change of clothes and a toothbrush over at Becca’s apartment. For Becca, though, even that level of commitment is frightening; she even refuses to acknowledge him as a “boyfriend.” When Bret jokingly tries to hide a single sock of his in her dresser, she finds it and throws it out the window at him.

Violent Content

Diana doesn’t content herself to lurking in the shadows: She’s a killer. In the opening scene, the entity gashes Paul’s leg open as he runs through a partly shadowed hall (we see the bloody wound), then pulls him into the darkness to finish him. His bloody body then gets lobbed back into the light so the audience can get a good look at what sort of mangling deeds Diana is capable of.

Throughout the film, Diana grabs and claws and does her upmost to injure the living folks around her, sometimes succeeding. Two other people die by her hands, and the corpse of one is propped up like a mannequin. She suggests that murder is not new to her. She smashes people into walls and dressers, throws them off balconies, pulls them under beds and holds them up like rag dolls, as if preparing to break them across her knee.

[ Spoiler Warning ] But Diana is not immune from injury. When she was a flesh-and-blood little girl, she apparently suffered from a rare skin disorder, one that left her particularly sensitive to light. Doctors apparently tried to cure her by exposing her to light, but it killed her instead. If Diana touches light even now in her undead state, her spectral flesh will crackle and burn.

Someone commits suicide. Becca finds a picture of another suicide victim, one whose head has been completely blown off its body.

Crude or Profane Language

Five s-words and one use of “b–ch.” God’s name is misused twice, and Jesus’ name is abused once.

Drug and Alcohol Content

Becca’s apartment has a bong in it. As noted, Sophie’s supposed to be taking antidepressants, which Martin calls her “vitamins.” But even when she tries to take them, Diana makes sure she can’t.

Other Negative Elements

When Momma ain’t happy, ain’t no one happy. Lights Out puts a terrible new twist on that saying.

Sure, on one level, darkness is the enemy here. To keep Diana at bay, the film’s other characters must keep the lights turned on. But there’s something else deeper at work: the awful gloom of depression. Diana can only manifest herself and hurt others if Sophie’s mind is sufficiently imbalanced.

But Lights Out doesn’t play like an allegory: Diana is not just Sophie’s depressive alter-ego or something that can be counseled away. Still, the movie’s psychological underpinnings are obvious: How depression can impact a family. How frightening it can be. How damaging. How isolating. How sometimes when we’re confronted by mental illness, we want to ignore it. And when we can’t do that, how tempting it can be to run away.

Which, to me, made the movie oddly inspiring—rarely a word I’d use in conjunction with a horror flick. How should we respond to the people we love when they’re hurting and sick? When they’re suffering through something we don’t understand? We stick with them. We try to help them. Above all, we don’t leave .

But in order to pull that piece of inspiration out of this seriously scary shriekfest, we must also acknowledge— and spoil, I’m afraid—its seriously problematic ending.

You see, in the end Sophie kills herself. From one perspective, that of a mother making a terrible choice to defeat a dark-loving bogeyman, we might be tempted to justify Sophie’s choice as an act of selfless sacrifice. After all, without Sophie, we’re told, there is no Diana. Sophie tells Becca that by killing herself, she is saving their lives.

But as soon as we consider Sophie’s emotional darkness—her depression at the root of Diana’s manifestation—that “sacrifice” turns tragic. In a movie that stresses how important it is not to abandon the ones you love, Sophie does just that. Instead of dealing with her personal demon, she kills it by killing herself. She leaves behind a son who desperately wanted to save her, a daughter weeping bitterly beside her body.

In the last act, Lights Out whispers its own (perhaps unintentional) dark message, a message that many people who grapple with depression don’t need to hear: My loved ones are better off without me. And so the final moments of the movie contradict whatever inspiration we might’ve found before, and that’s a terrible shame. After the credits roll and the lights come on, some bleak, terrible darkness may linger—especially for viewers who grapple with the darkness of depression.

Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.

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What to Know

Lights Out makes skillful use of sturdy genre tropes -- and some terrific performances -- for an unsettling, fright-filled experience that delivers superior chills without skimping on story.

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