Welcome to the final Horror Happenings of the year, friends! We hope you’ve been having a lovely holiday season and are looking forward to all of the scary cool things that 2016 has to bring. Speaking of 2016, we’ve got an official release date for a much anticipated James Wan produced feature coming to theaters in the new year. Let’s get to it!
Lights Out Gets Summer 2016 Release Date
As we’ve seen over the past calendar year, it isn’t easy to make a good horror movie. We’ve had a lot of duds in 2015 but the word on the street is that genre fans have lots to be excited about when it comes to Lights Out, a feature film adaptation of David F. Sandberg’s short of the same name. The short, which you can watch below, became a hit online and was scooped up by Warner Bros. and James Wan‘s production company Atomic Monster to be turned into a feature film. Bloody Disgusting is reporting that test scores for the low-budget chiller are going exceedingly well and the studio has moved the release to a prime summer date of July 22, 2016.
According to Deadline, the theatrical film revolves around “a young boy and his estranged sister who are confronted by an evil entity that only appears when the lights are out.” The movie went into production this past summer and stars Teresa Palmer and Gabriel Bateman as the boy. Sandberg will make his feature debut on the film with the script having been written by Eric A. Heisserer.
Lights Out is just the latest in a string of scary shorts that have gone viral and led to feature films. Pre-internet era, a young Tim Burton made Frankenweenie which he later adapted into an animated movie, and Sam Raimi‘s Evil Dead was born from the short titled Within The Woods. More recently, however, Mama and The Babadook were both expanded for the big screen and became very profitable. And, of course, we also can’t forget that Wan himself is no stranger to the power of a solid idea and decent short movie with Saw coming from one of the same name that was expanded into a feature and became one of the biggest horror franchises of all time.
In addition to producing Lights Out, Wan has his own scary movie heading to theaters this summer with The Conjuring 2 slated to begin terrifying audiences on June 10, 2016, leaving just a little over a month for all of us to recover. I don’t know about you horror friends, but after a lackluster year of feature length genre, I am certainly excited to have two different James Wan projects to which one can look forward. How about you?
If you’re feeling brave, have a look at Sandberg’s original below and prepare yourself for what’s to come in July 2016!
What do you think of the news? Let us know in the comments below.
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Featured Image Credit: DeviantArtist Anna-line
Clarke Wolfe writes Horror Happenings for Nerdist every Sunday. You can follow her on Twitter @clarkewolfe.
