Lights Out: Are You Afraid of the Dark?

While there’s nothing extraordinary about director David F. Sandberg’s lean, mean little ghost story Lights Out, the film is worthy of praise for delivering its scares so damn efficiently. It’s challenging to recall the last time a mainstream horror feature had the discipline to wrap up in less than 90 minutes, but Lights Out achieves this distinction. Doubtlessly, some of this is attributable to Sandberg’s short-centric filmography. Co-written with Eric Heisserer, Lights Out adapts the director’s 3-minute film of the same name from 2013.

The film’s prelude is essentially an elaboration on the original short: A textile entrepreneur named Paul (Billy Burke) is stalked and slain in his own after-hours factory by a gangly phantom (Alicia Vela-Bailey) that appears only where there is no light. Paul’s murder triggers the unraveling of his manic-depressive widow Sophie (Maria Bello), who their young son Martin (Gabriel Bateman) glimpses having conversations with no one. By a previous husband, Sophie also has an estranged twenty-something daughter, Rebecca (Teresa Palmer), who reluctantly returns for the sake of her half-brother. Unfortunately, the entity that murdered Paul also begins terrorizing Rebecca and Martin, pouncing from any corner where shadows gather.

Despite its fleet 81-minute running time, Lights Out still features some scenes that lag. Every minute devoted to elaborating on the ghost’s mostly superfluous backstory is a minute not spent on the film’s more essential objective: Creating PG-13 funhouse shocks out of the conceit of a monster that only exists in the absence of light. Sandberg employs space and shadow in clever ways to make the most of his light-phobic specter, and subverts just enough genre tropes to make up for the lazier elements in the screenplay. Expanding the original short’s concept to fill a feature film predictably diminishes its potency, but still makes for a worthwhile spook story.

Lights Out opens Friday, July 22 in wide release.