Don't Turn Out The Lights has a very recognisable premise, a group of young friends go on a trip across country and get into a situation that leads them into terrible danger. It's pretty formulaic, to the point where most of the things I saw in the trailer before watching the movie felt kind of predictable, the group of archetype teens, the spooky forest, the unhelpful and aggressive country folk, it wasn't until the trailer showed a scene with an interesting supernatural bent to it that I realised the movie was more than just another Hills Have Eyes or Wrong Turn type movie. And this is perhaps the biggest problem with Don't Turn Out The Lights it's fairly stuck in horror cliches that whenever it tries to do something interesting it doesn't really have the room to fully realise it.
The film begins with a group of high school friends reuniting to celebrate the birthday of one of their group. Slowly gathering in a park where a huge birthday celebration has been set up (balloons, food and drink, and party favours just left out in a public space unsupervised that somehow didn't get messed with), only to find that the party is a front to hide the real celebration, tickets to a weekend long music festival. In order for the group of friends to make it across country in time to actually make the most of the expensive passes is to drive non-stop in an RV so that they can make it there by midnight. The poor planning in not telling your friends they're going on a weekend long trip, and the fact that the transport means they'll miss almost a day of it (with no thought given as to when they'd have to set off back home either), it shows the level of ill planning that this group of stock characters bring to the table.
It also displays one of my big problems with the movie too, that things just happen with little to no thought about the larger impact of those events, and characters are purely reactive, and can often change moment to moment. We see some of this as the group makes their journey, with several scenes of the group chatting, playing games, and getting into inter-personal drama along the way. It's hard to keep track of all of the relationships and personalities, as even though most of the characters fit into broad archetypes the script will have them doing whatever is needed in the moment, having friends turn on each other, and enemies acting like pals, because it helps the scene; with the larger narrative suffering for it somewhat.
After a confrontation with some racist and sexist truck drivers the group end up having to take an unplanned route and head into more remote countryside, eventually getting a bit lost. Stopping at a bar to ask for directions the locals, who all look like 80's biker bar villains, prove to be little help beyond a cryptic and threatening 'turn around'. Not wanting to listen to the mean bar owner, the group continues on their way until their RV mysteriously comes to a stop on a deserted road. This is where the real meat of the movie begins, as strange forces start to plague the group, targeting them one by one.
By the time Don't Turn Out The Lights reaches the point where it feels like it's finally started to do something the film is almost halfway through, and the slow pacing of the first half means that some viewers attention may be somewhat lacking (one of the people I was watching with had pretty much given up by this point). For me, this was when the film finally grabbed me, especially when the supernatural elements began. The creepy voices coming out the forest that sounded like a group of deadites from The Evil Dead was so sudden and surprising that I couldn't help be be drawn into the narrative. However, the film failed to really do much at this point beyond throw several ideas into the mix without really paying them off.
What was happening here, what was the supernatural force targeting the teens, why was it doing what it was doing? These are all questions the film doesn't answer, and it doesn't even really give any hints either. A couple of the characters question if perhaps this is happening everywhere and the world has gone to hell, but they do this with no real reason to do so and no way of proving it. Later they discover a stash of books in the RV on the occult, but nothing comes from this. Towards the end a character is revealed to have a pentagram tattoo, and it's handled in a way that makes you think a big reveal or twist is coming, but again nothing happens. The film keeps teasing like this, giving hints at a possible explanation that could be coming, yet giving the viewer nothing. Even the mysterious forces that plague the teens seem to change from moment to moment, having no set way of doing things that it feels like the creators just didn't want to stick to one thing and wanted to try out as many ideas as possible.
Don't Turn Out The Lights feels like several films all kind of mashed together into one. There's multiple monsters, multiple spooky events, multiple characters, multiple possible explanations, and it all comes together to create this almost half-formed movie. For a film that's almost two hours long it feels like it never really does much with that runtime. I learned that the writer and director is more used to creating comedy, and that this is his first real foray into horror, and you can definitely see that he's still trying to find his feet. Whether it's not really knowing what to do with the various concepts he had, or only wanting to make one horror film so putting all the ideas into one project, Don't Turn Out The Lights comes across more like an ideas showreel than a fully planned out project.
I wanted to like Don't Turn Out The Lights, I think it's important to support smaller projects and embrace lower budget movies over big blockbusters, but in the end I came away from the movie feeling bored, confused, and a little bit tired. With some tighter cuts in the first half of the movie, trimming down the stuff that doesn't really add much to the movie, and with a focus on one or two ideas instead of multiple different ones, and Don't Turn Out The Lights could have been a decent if predictable low budget horror film; as is, it's a movie that may struggle to find an audience.
Don't Turn Out The Lights is available on digital platforms from 17th March 2025.
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