What was with the bright lights?

The two theories I've seen are:
1. Aliens dun it (because that style of light combined with the sound effect it made is a very common thing in alien abduction movies)

2. It was a really poorly done effect of the witch changing the time to be day for a few seconds (Which makes more sense, but if this is the case the director really really messed up getting that point across, since it looked nothing like sun light)

It resembled like a ufo light to me

people keep saying that was the sun but that makes no sense. sunlight coming in would never look like that or be that white. this was like a Beam of horizontal light directed at the house.
plus those sounds were like from a space ship.

IF they were intending that light to be the sun then they did a really really bad job at it.

This link might explain everything... http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0161325/reference

11... 92... 12...

Could it be the flashlights of themselves when they were still outside, the moment before they went in to the house.....because before they went in the house you also see light inside the house,.....the time-loop?

I think the one thing we can all agree on is that whatever it was, it wasn't made very clear. There aren't even any clues. It's just completely open to interpretation.

Personally I suspect the film makers simply thought it was a visually interesting shot. Nothing more, nothing less.

If it was daytime being speeded up there would be far better ways of showing that. Ambiguity can be a huge asset in a film, but it needs to be used with care. This felt thrown in for the sake of it, like the daft looping end/beginning.

I thought I heard one of the characters say, "We're in hell," or something like that when the lights got bright like that. So, if the witch is truly evil, maybe it was intended to be hell light, a glow from flames.

I could have misheard the line, but it's still a possibility.

I think we can say, definitively, it's not aliens. That's ridiculous and has absolutely zero to do with the movie. People see strange lights and they automatically think aliens. I blame The History Channel.

From my own thread on the topic:

The time loop element of the witch powers the two main characters both have simultanious adventures in the house that take different amounts of time but they still meet back up - the witch is clearly manipulating the time in the house - with Layne having been there for a LONG time at that point.

Now when they get into the attic at the end the girl has the camera with torch on which would be able to be seen out of the window in a DARK forest setting.

So they are sat next to the lightning strike tree outside (where the tapes were found) seeing their own light from upstairs to lure themseves to their own deaths.....


An alternative theory is that at that point the witch has all the footage she needs to lure them using the video from the future hidden under the lightening tree at this point (or from slightly in the future from whatever aspect of the timeline is running in whatever part of the temporal maze that the house is) and the light from outside is the tree being moved back in time (where it would be daylight) for Layne to find the tapes from the future....

I disagree that it's time compression - why does the witch need to do that if she phycially controls time and space - there would have been two other instances of these flashes to have the 2 protagonists brought up in to the two times they met Layne. The with seems to physically move the characters where she wants them and what time she wants them.