Headscratchers / Lights Out (2016)

• Diana can turn off electric lights by her mere presence - we see her do it a bunch of time. They flicker and go out. So it's not like she cuts power or shatters the lightbulb. Yet why can't she do the same to the black light flashlight (Which makes her vulnerable), or the crank lantern? Or the cops' flashlights?
  • She can't. The characters all just have terrible luck.
  • Since she appears to be able to teleport, perhaps she goes to a wire or circuit breaker and cuts off the power that way.
• One that's been bugging me - was Diane actually evil prior to her institutionalization? After all, it wouldn't be the first time a parent overreacted to a child having an abnormal condition by all-but imprisoning them. Just look at the case of "Genie".
  • I'm going to guess that she was "evil" before being institutionalized. Given that we get that quick flashback with a man (father?) lying on the couch dead, having written "Get out of my head" in blood, while she was in the corner. Yeah, I'd say she's always been evil.
    • However, perhaps that was a case of Then Let Me Be Evil, or even I Didn't Mean to Kill Him - she could, after all, have been confined to the basement with minimal contact prior to manifesting that ability, and even then she might not have had strong control over that ability to start with.
• If Diana was physically destroyed as a child, then why would her spirit appear as an adult? Shouldn't she be appearing as a ghostly child instead? Is it fully capable of growing like a normal human?
  • Considering she's manifesting through Sophie's mind, it's possible she appears as whatever age Sophie is. That, or Our Ghosts Are Different.
  • Here's some fringe theory for you...what if there is NO Diana? Her mom just had telekinesis or something, after all apparently Diana could Mind Screw people too so maybe that's why they were being experimented on. After her death, Sophie went crazy and started imagining her, which would make Diana a split personality. The ending thus becomes a more violent version of the Fight Club ending.
    • Alternatively, Diana didn't actually die in the chair (as she'd told Sophie that Reports of My Death Were Greatly Exaggerated), but was somehow "shifted" in terms of where she exists - and she can only coalesce around those that she's formed a bond with. This would explain the Room Full of Crazy in the basement, as well as give her a sympathetic motivation in that she went completely insane from those decades of solitude.
• Why bother haunting the kids in Rebecca's apartment? That should be great for Diana, leaving her alone with Sophie. Heck, drawing attention to herself only made it worse, as the kids try harder to get Sophie to take her meds.
  • It may have been intended as a (non-romantic) example of Murder the Hypotenuse - eliminate all possible distractions, and Diana gets Sophie's undivided attention.
  • Rebecca was considering trying to become Martin's legal guardian. This likely would've inspired Sophie to fight for custody and start taking her medication again, thus banishing Diana. But if both of the kids are dead, Sophie is all alone and becomes even more dependent on Diana.
• Why is Diana still visible under the blacklight when the kids also shine the flashlight on her? I thought the light made her vanish, not burned her.
  • The Blacklight cancels her ability to vanish, forcing her to burn.
  • Another possibility is that she didn't vanish because only part of her was in light.
  • Or the lights don't actually make her vanish, she teleports reflexively in response to light because it burns her.
• It feels like the rules to Diana's limitation are always fluctuating. The way Diana walks, runs, and jumps around imply that in the dark she has to physically move to get to an area, she even has to open doors physically to get into a room; yet at one point she blatantly teleports from a closet where the light suddenly comes on, through a lit room, to under the bed where it's dark, and then again during the third act where she teleports from one side of the room to crawling out of a shelf.
  • It seems like she can move while the lights are on, but only has a physical presence when they're either off or the right type of light. Otherwise she'd never have been able to go to Sophie's apartment, among other things. And the third act scene had her move behind the shelves while Rebecca was on the other side of them.
• I understand why they used "Stop, children" as the theme song; to convey that there's a mystery, but wouldn't "Fear of the Dark" been a better choice?