Short Film - 'Lights Out' by David Sandberg and Lotta Losten
'Lights Out' is a short horror film produced and directed by David Sandberg and Lotta Losten as an entry to the 'Who's There?' Short horror film challenge and has a total of 30 sponsors that contributed to the creation of the short film. It's narrative is simple, a woman is home alone going to bed when a chain of unusual events occur raising the tension of the short film, she eventually too scared to turn out the lights as something is hiding in the shadows. This follows many conventions of the horror genre, using the absence of light to play with the audiences mind as they are unknown of what lurks in the shadows, allowing for a low budgeted short to create tension and build a climax as the audiences imagination runs wild as to what the creature could be. The director is essentially using the audiences own mind to scare the audience, this is a cleaver trick that was used by Steven Spielberg when creating 'Jaws' now claimed as one of the films ever created. Spielberg originally used mechanically sharks during production but due to failures the sharks where sinking, this occurred twice which had taken a large chunk out of the films budget. Spielberg look to one of the worlds greatest directors, Alfred Hitchcock, a thought what would he do, as he didn't have the technology we have now.
The first camera shot was a establishing shot of the house that is the setting for he short film, the shot is dark and gloomy with a few lights on in the house visible through the widow the title of the short film appearing at the left of the screen, the title has a type of font to make it appear as if it was hand written out of chalk. It's a conversation of horror films to have various symbols for rituals and markings, these are normally draw with white chalk as it was used centuries ago before we could uses pens to write, thus has made the use of chalk a common convention in the genre of horror.
The scene starts with a woman preparing to go to sleep, she's about to turn the light off when she sees something in the shadows, this is a convention of horror films as many of them use the dark to help convey a scary creature as we can't fully see it. We are naturally hardwired to fear what we don't know, so this short film taps into that. The representation of woman are also used a lot in horror film, in media men and women are represented differently depending on their stereotypes, women are seen as more delicate, and men are there to protect them. Closes up are used to show the audience the characters face and emotion, this shows the audience how scared the woman is.
Most good horror films use jump scares, to engage their audience, over the years it's become predictable for the audience to know when a jump scare is going to occur, most directors add sound effects to further engage the audience, this is an example of the predictability as we can see the creature in the hall so most horror audiences know that they are going to use a jump scare as she flicks the light on and off. This attempting to appeal to a mass audience that like horrors by conforming to the convention set out by horror films, this makes the film easily recognizable as a horror film. This is what makes horror films hard to be successful as their is a large number of people dedicated to watching them.
The camera cuts to the woman sleeping in her bed the audience can see she's scared, as the lamp flickers on and off showing she scared to be in the dark, this contributes to the tension being created leading up to the final jump scare.
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