Before ‘Obsession’ and ‘Backrooms,’ ‘Lights Out’ Blazed the Trail From YouTube to Studio Hit

This year, audiences flocked to features by filmmakers who cut their teeth on online shorts, like Curry Barker (Obsession), Kane Parsons (Backrooms) and Markiplier (Iron Lung). But they follow in the footsteps of David F. Sandberg, whose 2016 Lights Out was the first studio-backed horror movie to originate as a YouTube short. The Swedish native’s two-and-a-half-minute film starred his wife, Lotta Losten, as a woman stalked by a mysterious figure when the lights go out. After making the short on virtually no budget, Sandberg entered it in the Bloody Cuts Horror Challenge, winning best director. Months later, a Reddit post linked to it, page views skyrocketed from 8,000 to more than a million and Hollywood came calling.

The couple credits the short’s global appeal to its lack of dialogue: “It just floated around the world because I don’t say anything,” Losten tells THR. Sandberg heard from producer Lawrence Grey, who wanted to collaborate with James Wan on a big-screen version. Sandberg worked with screenwriter Eric Heisserer (Arrival) to turn it into a feature that would star Teresa Palmer, Billy Burke, Gabriel Bateman and Maria Bello. During test screenings, the team was flummoxed by low scores, but after they cut the final few minutes that showed the spirit returning, “The scores went up 30 points,” Sandberg recalls. “It was like, ‘I guess that’s the ending.’ ”

Warner Bros. released Lights Out on July 22, 2016, and it grossed $148 million globally on a $4 million budget. With a sequel still in the works, Sandberg, who later helmed Shazam!, offers this advice to young filmmakers: “Keep creating because you never know what’s going to resonate. We didn’t know that Lights Out was going to work.”

This story appeared in the Oct. 21 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.