Filmmaker David Sandberg made a lot of people sleep with the lights on after watching his 2013 short film Lights Out, which won a few awards on the way to racking up more than 150 million views online, and now even more sleepless nights could be in store for audiences with the release of the first trailer for the full-length feature based on the the short film.
Directed by Sandberg and produced by modern horror maestro James Wan (The Conjuring, Insidious), Lights Out follows a woman terrorized by a mysterious creature who only appears in the dark. Sandberg wrote and directed both the original short film and the feature-length version of the film.
Wan and Sandberg debuted the trailer for Lights Out during the recent WonderCon event in Los Angeles, and the trailer offers a terrifying look at a story that expands beyond the brief encounter chronicled in the 2013 short film.
While Sandberg preprises his role behind the camera, Lights Out features some relatively well-known actors, including Warm Bodies and I Am Number Four actress Teresa Palmer and A History of Violence and The Cooler actress Maria Bello. The cast also includes the star of the original short film, Lotta Losten, Sandberg’s wife.
During WonderCon, Sandberg revealed that a version of the scene that played out in the short film also unfolds in the feature-length movie.
“That’s something we wanted right from the start,” Sandberg told SlashFilm. “Lotta has to be in the film because it was just her and I that made the short. It was very different from the original. Just little details like that light switch that she uses in the film, it’s just a fake Hollywood light switch that doesn’t really do anything. So there’s movie lights overhead that another guy had to time with her. Every time she pushes the switch, someone else had to turn the lights on. It was just so weird, but it was fun to direct her on a Hollywood set and we could speak Swedish to each other. It would be our secret language.”
Lights Out hits theaters July 22.
You can watch the 2013 short film below:
