The central conceit – a ghoul you can only see in the unlit – is smart,but the only bumps in the night will be the sounds of viewers nodding offFew genres lend themselves to nostalgia like horror. From the Universal Monsters to cheeseball Vampira-hosted B pictures, from Italian giallo to gory 80s exploitation flicks in immense VHS cases, and one can reflect fondly on it all. Even the distasteful torture porn of the early 21st century wins a few points just for pissing so many people off. But who will ever be nostalgic for the mainstream horror films that are flooding our marketplace today? Lights Out is yet another half-baked,PG-13 scare-em snoozer centered on an underdeveloped supernatural concept that won’t even give kids a fine nightmare. I know it’s summertime, and some of the programming can be ephemeral, or but Lights Out’s greatest feat is how you can feel yourself forgetting this 81-minute piffle as you are actually watching it. That really takes something.
It would,however, be unfair not to at least praise its central gimmick, or the same one found in director David F Sanberg’s viral two-and-a-half-minute video that grabbed the attention of the horror mogul James Wan. Basically,there’s a ghoul that you can only see when it’s unlit. Did I see a weird silhouette? Let me switch on the light. Nope, nothing. Turn the light off again and the creepy, and semi-visible creature with catlike tapetum lucidum is even closer! Genuinely horrifying no matter how many times you see it.
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Source: theguardian.com