After surviving several Diana attacks, Rebecca and Martin - and poor tagalong Bret - decide to stage an intervention of sorts on their mother, camping out in her labyrinthine, heavily-curtained mansion for the night. Rather than get distracted dwelling on ancient lore or gruesome case files, Sandberg and scripter Eric Heisserer get to work right away imagining increasingly clever, practical-effects applications of the pic’s primal conflict: how to stay out of the darkness. (Which is not to say they don’t make some conveniently illogical decisions - this is a haunted house horror movie, after all.) Sandberg has little interest in dragging out the setup here - there is only the most perfunctory skepticism that what seems to be happening is actually happening, and Rebecca begins to uncover the mystery behind her mother’s imaginary friend quite quickly - but the central relationships work, primarily because this small core of characters are all generally decent people, believing each other and looking out for one another. When Martin tells her the reasons for his sleeplessness, she immediately remembers her own similar experiences in the house, and invites him to stay with her. Rebecca recently fled her gloomy home for a goth bachelorette apartment above a tattoo shop, where she keeps her sweet, not-so-bright boyfriend Bret (Alexander DiPersia), at arm’s length. Martin is so terrified of his mom’s behavior, not to mention the scraping sounds that echo through the halls at night, that he hasn’t been sleeping, and a concerned school nurse calls in his stepsister Rebecca. In a clever reversal of creepy-kid cliches, it’s mother figure Sophie who spends her time talking to an imaginary friend, named Diana, who lurks in the darkness around her home. We spend the rest of the film with Paul’s survivors: his rebellious twentysomething stepdaughter Rebecca ( Teresa Palmer), his jittery grade-school son Martin (Gabriel Bateman) and his mentally ill widow, Sophie ( Maria Bello). This time, it’s set in a gloomy textile factory, and ends with the factory’s owner, Paul (Billy Burke), lying mangled on the floor. “Lights Out” opens with a bigger-budget recreation of the original short, featuring the same actress - Sandberg’s wife, Lotta Losten - and the same female figure in the darkness. But there’s an invigorating leanness - and a giddy, almost innocent energy - to the filmmaking, with Sandberg shooting for nothing more than inventive, relentless jolts, and the film should win over a sizable fanbase as Sandberg continues on to bigger things. Very obviously a first feature, “Lights Out” is full of camp (most of it clearly intentional, some perhaps not), and its underlying mythology is confused and often ridiculous. What’s most shocking is how well it still works. Now armed with studio backing, his feature length expansion of that short never strays too far from its source, essentially repeating the same jump scare, over and over again, for most of its muscular 80 minute running time. But Sandberg’s three-minute execution of this simple premise was clever enough - and virally popular enough - to secure the inexperienced Swedish filmmaker the support of horrormeister James Wan. A woman is alone in her apartment, and when the lights turn off, an eerie female figure appears when they come back on, the figure disappears. Sandberg’s no-budget, near-wordless 2013 short film “ Lights Out” features a premise so simple it’s essentially a cinematic haiku. Sandberg's third movie in just four years is out in theatres now.David F. He must have impressed producer James Wan, and shortly after he got a shot at the superhero comedy "Shazam!”. Soon he was offered a chance to direct an "Annabelle" prequel, and once again the movie was a hit at the box office. The low-budget horror flick came out in 2016 and made 148 million dollars for Warner Bros. This is when he added the F in his name, to try to avoid some of the confusion. Screenwriter Eric Heisserer wrote the script for "Lights Out", and David moved to Los Angeles to direct. His short film "Lights Out" made quite a splash online, and soon Hollywood called suggesting a feature-length film. His scary stories with clever, homemade special effects screened at film festivals, and it was in 2013 that David won the Best Director award at a film festival called Bloody Cuts Horror Challenge. He started making animation and short films at a young age and uploading them to YouTube. David Fredrik Sandberg was born in 1981 in Jönköping.
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