Movies
[Review] ‘Lights Out’ is a Frightening Study of Mental Illness
Adapting a short film into a full-length feature can prove to be a troubling task. All too frequently, there just isn’t enough material to mine out of the short film to stretch out into a 90-minute film. Or the creator/director can be too close to his/her original product and be unwilling to make necessary changes to the original concept. Luckily for us, screenwriter Eric Heisserer (A Nightmare on Elm Street, Final Destination 5) and director David S. Sandberg proved up to the task when adapting Sandberg’s 2013 short film Lights Out. The final product is a taut, competently made and wonderfully acted horror film that wisely pairs supernatural horror with the very real horror of mental illness, adding a certain amount depth not seen in many mainstream horror films.
After his father (Billy Burke) is murdered, Martin (Gabriel Bateman, Annabelle) repeatedly sees the same ghostly apparition around his house. This apparition, named Diana, is only visible in the dark and has a direct link to his clinically depressed mother Sophie (Maria Bello, A History of Violence, Assault on Precinct 13). When Martin begins falling asleep in school, Child Protective Services gets involved, as does his sister Rebecca (Teresa Palmer, Warm Bodies) who left home years ago to escape Sophie. With the help of her boyfriend Bret (Alexander DiPersia), Rebecca seeks a way to uncover the mystery behind Diana and rid the world of her before she is able to hurt Martin.
Performances are strong across the board, especially those from Palmer and Bello who really do look like mother and daughter. Bello’s anguish over her mental illness is palpable in every scene she is in, and Palmer proves to be up to the challenge of matching her beat for beat. The real MVP here is Bateman, who is one of the best child actors I’ve seen in recent memory. He is tasked with spending the majority of the film wide-eyed with terror, and he sells it incredibly well. He also doesn’t fall into many of the tropes you usually see with child characters in horror films.
Lights Out runs an all-too-brief 81 minutes (including credits), which is both a positive and a negative. On the plus side, the film moves at a brisk pace that never dwells on any plot point too long. You won’t find time spent on a miscommunication between Rebecca and her boyfriend or unnecessary scenes where no one believes Gabriel and Teresa about Diana’s threat. This is a film with a mission and it accomplishes that mission successfully. That being said, the third act of the film does feel a little rushed and the big battle is over before its even begun. While it is suspenseful, it would have behooved the film to hold certain moments just a bit longer or take more time during certain scenes, specifically those involving the relationship between Rebecca and Diana. You get a clear sense of their relationship, but you want to see more of it. In that respect, the film can be viewed as a success. It’s always better to leave you wanting more.
Linking Diana to Sophie’s depression is a wise decision and is the most fascinating aspect of the film, but the short length of the feature prevents the film from delving into it beyond a surface level analysis. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but one wonders what it would have been like had it been written more as a psychological drama that happened to have a ghost in it as opposed to a supernatural horror film that happens to have dramatic elements. The former wouldn’t have been as marketable though, so it’s easy to see why they went this route.
Lights Out is the most commercial film that could have come out of this premise. It is sure to be a crowd-pleaser. The scares are the main focus here, and they mostly work. By the end of the film you will become numb to Diana’s presence as the majority of the scares consist of her suddenly appearing when the lights go out. That being said, the jump scares don’t feel as cheap as they normally would in the hands of a lesser director. Sandberg finds many creative ways to utilize the gimmick (a sequence involving the flash of a gunshot comes to mind) that are sure to keep you intrigued all the way until the credits. On the writing side of things, Heisserer is commendable for avoiding many of your standard horror clichés, though Lights Out does feature another appearance of an inept police force that induces more eye-rolls than fear.
Lights Out is a fun little film with a nice amount of depth that you don’t usually find in many mainstream horror films nowadays. Though the scares become repetitive after a certain point, the film never ceases to keep you engaged. It boasts strong performances and a novel concept that lends itself to clever, if sometimes obvious, scares. It’s certainly better than other films that have used the same gimmick (see: Darkness Falls, Darkness). At the very least, it is impressive that a film of its kind is even seeing a wide release, and for that we should all be thankful.
Here’s what we know about Longlegs so far. It’s coming in July of 2024, it’s directed by Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter), and it features Maika Monroe (It Follows) as an FBI agent who discovers a personal connection between her and a serial killer who has ties to the occult. We know that the serial killer is going to be played by none other than Nicolas Cage and that the marketing has been nothing short of cryptic excellence up to this point.
At the very least, we can assume NEON’s upcoming film is going to be a dark, horror-fueled hunt for a serial killer. With that in mind, let’s take a look at five disturbing serial killers-versus-law-enforcement stories to get us even more jacked up for Longlegs.
MEMORIES OF MURDER (2003)
This South Korean film directed by Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-ho (Parasite) is a wild ride. The film features a handful of cops who seem like total goofs investigating a serial killer who brutally murders women who are out and wearing red on rainy evenings. The cops are tired, unorganized, and border on stoner comedy levels of idiocy. The movie at first seems to have a strange level of forgiveness for these characters as they try to pin the murders on a mentally handicapped person at one point, beating him and trying to coerce him into a confession for crimes he didn’t commit. A serious cop from the big city comes down to help with the case and is able to instill order.
But still, the killer evades and provokes not only the police but an entire country as everyone becomes more unstable and paranoid with each grizzly murder and sex crime.
I’ve never seen a film with a stranger tone than Memories of Murder. A movie that deals with such serious issues but has such fallible, seemingly nonserious people at its core. As the film rolls on and more women are murdered, you realize that a lot of these faults come from men who are hopeless and desperate to catch a killer in a country that – much like in another great serial killer story, Citizen X – is doing more harm to their plight than good.
Major spoiler warning: What makes Memories of Murder somehow more haunting is that it’s loosely based on a true story. It is a story where the real-life killer hadn’t been caught at the time of the film’s release. It ends with our main character Detective Park (Song Kang-ho), now a salesman, looking hopelessly at the audience (or judgingly) as the credits roll. Over sixteen years later the killer, Lee Choon Jae, was found using DNA evidence. He was already serving a life sentence for another murder. Choon Jae even admitted to watching the film during his court case saying, “I just watched it as a movie, I had no feeling or emotion towards the movie.”
In the end, Memories of Murder is a must-see for fans of the subgenre. The film juggles an almost slapstick tone with that of a dark murder mystery and yet, in the end, works like a charm.
CURE (1997)
If you watched 2023’s Hypnotic and thought to yourself, “A killer who hypnotizes his victims to get them to do his bidding is a pretty cool idea. I only wish it were a better movie!” Boy, do I have great news for you.
In Cure (spoilers ahead), a detective (Koji Yakusho) and forensic psychologist (Tsuyoshi Ujiki) team up to find a serial killer who’s brutally marking their victims by cutting a large “X” into their throats and chests. Not just a little “X” mind you but a big, gross, flappy one.
At each crime scene, the murderer is there and is coherent and willing to cooperate. They can remember committing the crimes but can’t remember why. Each of these murders is creepy on a cellular level because we watch the killers act out these crimes with zero emotion. They feel different than your average movie murder. Colder….meaner.
What’s going on here is that a man named Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara) is walking around and somehow manipulating people’s minds using the flame of a lighter and a strange conversational cadence to hypnotize them and convince them to murder. The detectives eventually catch him but are unable to understand the scope of what’s happening before it’s too late.
If you thought dealing with a psychopathic murderer was hard, imagine dealing with one who could convince you to go home and murder your wife. Not only is Cure amazingly filmed and edited but it has more horror elements than your average serial killer film.
MANHUNTER (1986)
In the first-ever Hannibal Lecter story brought in front of the cameras, Detective Will Graham (William Petersen) finds his serial killers by stepping into their headspace. This is how he caught Hannibal Lecter (played here by Brian Cox), but not without paying a price. Graham became so obsessed with his cases that he ended up having a mental breakdown.
In Manhunter, Graham not only has to deal with Lecter playing psychological games with him from behind bars but a new serial killer in Francis Dolarhyde (in a legendary performance by Tom Noonan). One who likes to wear pantyhose on his head and murder entire families so that he can feel “seen” and “accepted” in their dead eyes. At one point Lecter even finds a way to gift Graham’s home address to the new killer via personal ads in a newspaper.
Michael Mann (Heat, Thief) directed a film that was far too stylish for its time but that fans and critics both would have loved today in the same way we appreciate movies like Nightcrawler or Drive. From the soundtrack to the visuals to the in-depth psychoanalysis of an insanely disturbed protagonist and the man trying to catch him. We watch Graham completely lose his shit and unravel as he takes us through the psyche of our killer. Which is as fascinating as it is fucked.
Manhunter is a classic case of a serial killer-versus-detective story where each side of the coin is tarnished in their own way when it’s all said and done. As Detective Park put it in Memories of Murder, “What kind of detective sleeps at night?”
INSOMNIA (2002)
Maybe it’s because of the foggy atmosphere. Maybe it’s because it’s the only film in Christopher Nolan’s filmography he didn’t write as well as direct. But for some reason, Insomnia always feels forgotten about whenever we give Nolan his flowers for whatever his latest cinematic achievement is.
Whatever the case, I know it’s no fault of the quality of the film, because Insomnia is a certified serial killer classic that adds several unique layers to the detective/killer dynamic. One way to create an extreme sense of unease with a movie villain is to cast someone you’d never expect in the role, which is exactly what Nolan did by casting the hilarious and sweet Robin Williams as a manipulative child murderer. He capped that off by casting Al Pacino as the embattled detective hunting him down.
This dynamic was fascinating as Williams was creepy and clever in the role. He was subdued in a way that was never boring but believable. On the other side of it, Al Pacino felt as if he’d walked straight off the set of 1995’s Heat and onto this one. A broken and imperfect man trying to stop a far worse one.
Aside from the stellar acting, Insomnia stands out because of its unique setting and plot. Both working against the detective. The investigation is taking place in a part of Alaska where the sun never goes down. This creates a beautiful, nightmare atmosphere where by the end of it, Pacino’s character is like a Freddy Krueger victim in the leadup to their eventual, exhausted death as he runs around town trying to catch a serial killer while dealing with the debilitating effects of insomnia. Meanwhile, he’s under an internal affairs investigation for planting evidence to catch another child killer and accidentally shoots his partner who he just found out is about to testify against him. The kicker here is that the killer knows what happened that fateful day and is using it to blackmail Pacino’s character into letting him get away with his own crimes.
If this is the kind of “what would you do?” intrigue we get with the story from Longlegs? We’ll be in for a treat. Hoo-ah.
FALLEN (1998)
Fallen may not be nearly as obscure as Memories of Murder or Cure. Hell, it boasts an all-star cast of Denzel Washington, John Goodman, Donald Sutherland, James Gandolfini, and Elias Koteas. But when you bring it up around anyone who has seen it, their ears perk up, and the word “underrated” usually follows. And when it comes to the occult tie-ins that Longlegs will allegedly have? Fallen may be the most appropriate film on this entire list.
In the movie, Detective Hobbs (Washington) catches vicious serial killer Edgar Reese (Koteas) who seems to place some sort of curse on him during Hobbs’ victory lap. After Reese is put to death via electric chair, dead bodies start popping up all over town with his M.O., eventually pointing towards Hobbs as the culprit. After all, Reese is dead. As Hobbs investigates he realizes that a fallen angel named Azazel is possessing human body after human body and using them to commit occult murders. It has its eyes fixated on him, his co-workers, and family members; wrecking their lives or flat-out murdering them one by one until the whole world is damned.
Mixing a demonic entity into a detective/serial killer story is fascinating because it puts our detective in the unsettling position of being the one who is hunted. How the hell do you stop a demon who can inhabit anyone they want with a mere touch?!
Fallen is a great mix of detective story and supernatural horror tale. Not only are we treated to Denzel Washington as the lead in a grim noir (complete with narration) as he uncovers this occult storyline, but we’re left with a pretty great “what would you do?” situation in a movie that isn’t afraid to take the story to some dark places. Especially when it comes to the way the film ends. It’s a great horror thriller in the same vein as Frailty but with a little more detective work mixed in.
Look for Longlegs in theaters on July 12, 2024.
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