Swedish director David F. Sandberg burst onto the scene with the 2016 horror hit Lights Out, and went on to direct The Conjuring spinoff Annabelle Creation, and both Shazam! movies. A sequel was greenlit for Lights Out a long time ago, but it has still yet to materialize into a real thing. And as such, Sandberg’s original plan for Lights Out 2 had to be scrapped.
Lights Out 2 Left in the Dark
Lights Out’s story sees a woman named Rebecca (Teresa Palmer) who thought that when she left home, she’d left her childhood fears behind. Growing up, she was never really sure of what was and wasn’t real when the lights went out…and now her little brother, Martin (Gabriel Bateman), is experiencing the same unexplained and terrifying events that had once tested her sanity and threatened her safety. A frightening entity with a mysterious attachment to their mother, Sophie (Maria Bello), has reemerged.
Speaking at a Q&A during a screening of the original Lights Out hosted by Collider‘s Perri Nemiroff, Sandberg laid out what his original idea for Lights Out 2 had been and why the sequel plans were scrapped
“In that draft, Martin was still young, and he’s not young anymore. He’s like a man now, you know. No, but she was sort of attacking a new family, but then this cast got involved to sort of help out with that,” Sandberg said, ”Because, I mean, you kind of have to do that. Because the fun thing with a horror movie is the discovery when the haunting starts, and you don’t know what’s going on. So, if she just comes back to this cast, like, ‘Well, yeah, we know who Diana is. We’ve dealt with her before.’ So if you have a different family at first, then they can go through all that, but then you can have this cast come in and sort of, you know, be the experts to help defeat.”
Even if Sandberg doesn’t make a revised Lights Out 2, he’s still looking to make a horror movie again after his Shazam! stint. Back in 2020, it was revealed he was working on a film called The Culling in which a troubled priest confines himself to a remote cabin in the middle of the woods where he attempts to make a last stand against the demon that terrorized his family when he was a child.
