![]() However, the movie’s utilization of the concept of depression to represent Diana isn’t the only thing that reminds the audience of their own realities. When Diana’s relationship with Sophie is put in the context of an individual’s relationship with depression, it adds a different nuance to the overall outcome of the movie. “She represents mental illness and clinical depression, and how keeping that in the dark or keeping that as unspoken within a family can fracture a family dynamic and can even cause harm,” Heisserer said in a 2016 interview while discussing the film. Similarly, Eric Heisserer, the screenplay writer whom Sandberg worked with on the 2016 film, crafted Diana’s storyline with her metaphorical significance in mind. That’s how it all started.” Sandberg shared in an interview about the birth of the idea behind ‘Lights Out.’ As a child, you’re so vulnerable and dependent on your parent, so I just felt that would be scarier. It started with this idea of how, in a lot of horror movies, you have this trope of the little kid who has an imaginary friend who turns out to be a ghost, but I always thought it would be much scarier if it were the parents who had the imaginary friend. “I started thinking of this mental illness angle pretty early on because it felt like that was a darkness within people or something like that. This inherent relationship between Diana, the somewhat tangible threat presented to the characters, and mental illness, an issue numerous people in the real world encounter, forms a connection between the film and reality. Therefore in the movie, she survives only as a side-effect of Sophie’s depression. The base idea behind Diana stems from mental health issues. Interestingly, the short film received high praise and critical acclaim, and Sandberg was eventually approached by production companies looking to turn his short film into a full-length movie. The short film has a similar premise to the feature film about a woman haunted by a supernatural creature that only appears in the dark. ![]() It was three-minute-long and created by Sandberg and his wife for a film festival called the Bloody Cuts Horror Challenge. Instead, the movie is an adaptation of an eponymous 2013 Swedish short film by director David F. No, ‘Lights Out’ is not based on a true story. If you’re curious about the origin of ‘Lights Out’ and if it is rooted in reality, here is everything you need to know! At the same time, this horror plot also allows a rich backstory for its monster, Diana, and builds a compelling world around her. With a complicated but sincere family dynamic at its center, the supernatural movie is full of terrifying imagery and themes while still telling a convincing story about trauma and depression. But you can’t build a whole movie from top-to-bottom out of that alone.However, Diana’s attachment to Sophie is much more extreme than anyone thought. It’s just that in Lights Out, he had a bang-on jump-scare and an inspired visual idea. So we know the man can direct the shit out of a good horror premise. When he was given meatier material to work with in Annabelle: Creation, he fucking knocked it out of the park. Doing it in reverse is hard, and this film shows us why.Īnd of course, Sandberg is a very talented horror director. Usually you come up with the story idea first, and then build the imagery around that. But the rest of the film’s parts are all working around that visual idea which was the genesis for the entire enterprise, and that’s a tough ask because it’s got the process pretty much backward. Sure, when the lights start flickering and then hit you with a jump-scare of a creepy-ass dreadlocked ghostie, it’s pretty satisfying. But it has to work to pigeon-hole that image into a functional plot and it doesn’t completely work. This is an OK horror movie, that relies heavily on a single (really scary!) visual image and trick. And it’s no surprise that when Sandberg tried to extend the really striking visual idea he had into a movie with a cast of characters and a back-story and a plot, the spooky shadow creature on its own wasn’t quite enough to carry all that weight. It’s not to say that a really clever image from a short film cannot possibly become a good feature-length film. The clip became so popular that, naturally a studio came bumbling over and commissioned it into a feature length film because clearly a 3-minute Youtube clip that leans entirely on one creepy visual image can be seamlessly lengthened into a satisfying feature.Įxcept, as the movie 9 showed us pretty unequivocally, this is not true. It’s a pretty brilliant little exercise in using silhouettes and editing to achieve maximum and visceral effect. Sandberg wrote, directed, scored, shot and gave birth to a 3-minute horror short called Lights Out.
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