But Lights Out doesn’t come up with anything creative. Is this something you can stretch out into an entire movie? Sure! Herman Melville stretched out “there once was a fish this big – but it got away!” into the greatest novel in American letters. Turn the light off again and the creepy, semi-visible creature with catlike tapetum lucidum is even closer! Genuinely horrifying no matter how many times you see it. Did I see a weird silhouette? Let me switch on the light. Basically, there’s a ghoul that you can only see when it’s dark. It would, however, be unfair not to at least praise its central gimmick, 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. I know it’s summertime, and some of the programming can be ephemeral, but Lights Out’s greatest feat is how you can feel yourself forgetting this 81-minute piffle as you are actually watching it. 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 good nightmare. Even the distasteful torture porn of the early 21st century wins a few points just for pissing so many people off. From the Universal Monsters to cheeseball Vampira-hosted B pictures, from Italian giallo to gory 80s exploitation flicks in enormous VHS cases, one can reflect fondly on it all. Few genres lend themselves to nostalgia like horror.
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