Do you remember Mama, the 2013 supernatural horror based on the short film? I feel much the same way about Lights Out as I did about that one, so I'm going to talk about them the same way, and kill two flicks with one post.
Each film does something wonderful: featuring actors acting. In the former, it was Jessica Chastain and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, and here it is Maria Bello, Teresa Palmer, Gabriel Bateman, and Alexander DiPersia. All are a joy to watch, because they all dig into the bizarre stories and exaggerated drama and perform honestly and mindfully.
Each film also manages to crack a certain glass ceiling often ignored in horror cinema. Both are films about women, in which both the protagonist and antagonist are women, and during which much of the horror is shown to be explicitly female. Perhaps that last is more apparent in Mama, where the villain's lair is a vaginal hole in the wall. Compare, if you will, to images from the original Poltergeist (1982), and see what I mean. There's a lot to be said, too, about the role of motherhood, a relative lack of female sexualization (Palmer, in Lights Out, explicitly controls her own space), and a discussion for victims-turned-victors without a revenge plot (as opposed to The Last House on the Left or every other slasher since). That's a discussion for another time.
Each film features a (yes, female) monster/villain that looks very similar: a hag, deathly and deadly, sporting damp, tangled hair atop her gruesome visage; bugging eyes above toothy snarls; fingers like claws; limbs that are less "flexible" and more "disjointed" with akimbo movements that range from graceful floating on the ceiling to jittery chase sequences on the ground. I don't know that I can describe why exactly, but this character is horrifying to me.
Each film suffers in its basic plot. Each is little more than a haunted house tale, replete with typical (and often expected) jump-scares that, while chilling and atmospheric, do little to frighten us later. The (ill)logic nature of each often undercuts what drama we can connect with, by which I mean that the mythology is thin and shaky at best, and generally distracts me from a more visceral reaction. In Lights Out specifically, the clever concept was more effective in the trailer, which streamlined the melodrama and instead showed most (if not all) of the jump-scares in the film. This made the film seem almost like a second viewing, because the genre scenes were ones we've literally already seen. Good scenes, sure, but familiar.
Finally, each film is PG-13. While I might entertain personal thoughts that start with "What if..." and end with hard R horror ideas, I think that for these films, PG-13 works fine. These are films about motherhood and child endangerment, about domestic life and femininity gone wrong, and while they could always be more explicit and violent and gory, there is plenty to be said for horror that can thrill and chill and engage and intrigue and still stay safely in a clean(ish), classy(ish), mainstream audience's grasp.
IMDb: Lights Out
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