Reel Entropy

This scene is an example of how Lights Out plays with its monster. Rebecca sleeps next to a flashing tattoo sign that periodically floods her room with soft red light. That’s the entire mechanic of this scene — it’s on a timer. Also, it’s red. Photos courtesy Warner Bros.

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.

After 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. Paul’s death exacerbates Sophie’s condition, and Diana once again begins stalking Rebecca and her young half-brother, Martin (Gabriel Bateman). 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.

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