Lights Out Movie Cast and Crew Tease the Summer Horror

The Lights Out movie cast and crew remind everyone to be afraid of the dark

On June 10, The Conjuring‘s James Wan returns to the big screen with another feature film based on the real-world experiences of paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren. The Conjuring 2 isn’t the only horror film that Wan and Warner Bros. Pictures will be releasing this summer, however, as July 22 will see the arrival of the Wan-produced Lights Out movie. If you haven’t already seen it, check out the unsettling Lights Out trailer right here.

Light Out began as a three-minute short film directed by Swedish filmmaker David F. Sandberg. Now, Sandberg makes his big-screen directorial debut with the feature length Lights Out movie. You can check out the original short in the player at the bottom of this page and read on for a look at what went into making the feature Lights Out movie a reality.

“I watched it in my office on a bright sunny day with the lights on,” Lawrence Grey, producer on the Lights Out movie version, tells ComingSoon.net. “It scared the pants off of me. I went to bed that night and I had images of the short in my head. I woke up the next morning and realized that the short was so resilient in my mind. It’s one of those genius concepts.”

“It gets your creative mind working,” says Lotta Losten, who starred in and produced the original short and who returns as part of the feature Lights Out movie cast. 

“We want to keep people awake all night,” laughs Sandberg.

“Is that coatrack really a coatrack or is it a person standing there?” Losten continues. “You don’t know when you wake up in the middle of the night and you see something.”

Losten reprises her role in the Lights Out movie, joining a cast that also includes Teresa Palmer, Gabriel Bateman, Alexander DiPersia, Billy Burke and Maria Bello.

“My character of Sophie is so complex,” says Bello of her role. “She’s a mother who loves her children, but who is suffering from schizophrenia. It’s getting worse and worse throughout the course of the movie. She is filled with her demons that she can’t really control. It’s affecting her whole life… Some people would say she’s bi-polar. Other people would say she’s schizophrenic. For me, I work from my own experience with bipolar disorder to figure out what those extremes were and how she could be diagnosed and how she could be thinking or feeling.”

Sophie’s inner conflict is mirrored by the dark force that comes into conflict with the central characters. For Sandberg, building a successful monster meant establishing exactly what it can and cannot do.

“It was very important for me to stick to the rule that she can’t exist in light,” he explains. “Whenever the light is on, she is gone. That created problems because, for 90 percent of the film, she’s just a silhouette. That’s very hard to light. Normally, if someone is very dark, you put a back light on them or a rim light on them just to be able to make them out. I didn’t want to do that here because it would be cheating. If she has lights on her, she’s gone. It made it very hard and very difficult, but it really paid off.”

While the Lights Out movie is aiming for something truly scary, Sandberg stresses that it’s still a film for all manner of horror fan.

“I’d like to think that it’s for everyone,” he says. “We’ve had test screenings and it’s such a fun movie to see with an audience. They’re so engaged! Not only do they jump when they’re scared, they’re cheering for the characters when they’re not typically horror movie stupid. The characters in this film, we wanted to make sure that they do the right thing — the smart thing — in a horror movie situation. People are very into it.”

From a screenplay by Eric Heisserer, Lights Out opens in theaters on July 22 and is rated PG-13.

Lights Out – Who’s There Film Challenge (2013) from David F. Sandberg on Vimeo.