It is no secret that I am a fan of horror films. One of the earliest memories I can access if of a full color bloody horror movie playing on the screen of a southern drive-in. I often tell people that as a child I did not read fiction and as such many of the beloved childhood classics were missed by me, but I recently realized that there was some fiction I read; ghost stories.

Lights Out is a ghost story and there is no doubt that ‘my’ monster is the ghost. I have tried to analyze just what it is about ghost that so fascinates me but that will require someone with a little emotional separation from the subject – me.

Ghost stories have several basic beats and structures that you generally find in common. Lights Out hits all these beats in a competent and clear fashion and yet someone remains a movie that failed to have me fully engaged.

The story of Lights Out is direct and straight-forward. Rebecca is the estranged daughter of Sophie, living on her own over a tattoo parlor unable to reconcile with her mother over her father that, without any word then or since, abandoned the family a decade or more earlier. Now Sophie has remarried and Rebecca has a small half-brother to whom she is devoted.  It is into the volatile mix of family drama that the ghost, with lethal intentions, appears. The gimmick to this movie is that ghost only appears in darkness and so flashing lights creates the image or a spectral figure that appears and vanishes with each flicker.

The plot moves forward to a clean logical progression. The characters’ motivation is understandable and believable. The suspense and shock are delivered in an adequate manner and yet someone the film never caught my undivided attention. IT may be that the mystery of the ghost was not quite deep enough to provide a sense of revelation when it was explained. It may be that the exposition was repeated and it wasn’t a terrible difficult concept to understand. For whatever reason the film was fun enough to watch but not compelling. At times during the climax I found myself wondering just what was the lumen cut-off that dispelled the ghost.

It is not a bad movie and certainly it had a few curves in the plot. A few things that would have been quite cliché they avoided and the resolution, though flawed because it was not driven by the protagonist’s action, brought everything to a satisfactory conclusion.

Overall – worth the time on Disc or streaming, a C grade passing but not memorable.