As a child, you're so vulnerable and dependent on your parent, so I just felt that would be scarier. It started with this idea of how, in a lot of horror movies, you have this trope of the little kid who has an imaginary friend who turns out to be a ghost, but I always thought it would be much scarier if it was the parents who had the imaginary friend. I started thinking of this mental illness angle pretty early on because it felt like that was a darkness within people, or something like that. It also felt like if someone's going to trust me to direct a movie, they're not going to give me a huge budget, so let's do something more manageable. Like, it had multiple Dianas and a lot of people, and it just felt like it was bigger than what I wanted to do. At first, we talked to a writer here in LA, but his idea was very big. What happened was, we came into contact with producer Lawrence Grey, who really wanted to develop this, and I just felt very comfortable with him and his ideas. What were some early ideas that were scrapped? What made you and Eric Heisserer want to tell this story? You mentioned earlier that since the short doesn't have a story, you could take the story anywhere. Let's keep doing it." We saw Bloody Cuts guys from the UK had this online competition. We made a short before Lights Out called Cam Closer, about a phone that sees the future. I have a camera, Lotta's an actress, we can come up with something together. ![]() We figured, let's just make our own movies with no money. They've never been really interested in horror, or at least not our horror projects. It's with the grant money from the Swedish Film Institute. Lotta and I had been trying to get money from the Swedish Film Institute to make shorts, because that's how you finance shorts and features in Sweden, really. I had no idea that just a two-and-a-half minute short could get all that attention. I had to make this spreadsheet with everyone I've talked to, and what was said last just to keep track. From producers, and studios, and agents, and managers. Then, a couple of days later, I started getting all these emails from Hollywood. ![]() We didn't really know if that meant anything, or if that was going to lead to anything. Lotta and I were sitting there, refreshing the page, to see it go over a million, and it just kept going. I was like, "Oh, that's amazing." Then all of a sudden it had 70,000 views. I was like, "Oh awesome." So I went to the short, and I saw that it had, suddenly, 8,000 views. Then, a few months after that, I was on Reddit and saw someone had linked to our short. We figured that was it for that short, and let's keep making other shorts. We made the short for the contest, and I won Best Director when it made the top 6 finalists. How did you first notice the popularity of the short film?
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