Dark room illuminated by flashlight?

[performlabrit]

I'm having some strange issues with lighting.

My goal is to create a perfectly dark room that can be illuminated with a directional spotlight / flashlight.

However, I'm unable to get started, because I can't turn off lighting in the room! The room is empty, and consists of only 6 textured walls (this includes the ceiling and floor). I've set both the ambient and emissive properties of each wall to [0,0,0]. Yes, the headlamp has been deactivated, and no, I am not creating any other light sources. The walls still appear uniformly illuminated. What am I missing?

The next step will be to make sure that the planes are tesselated enough to produce smooth shading until spot illumination. Is jumping into Maya / 3Ds Max the best way to do this? Is there a clever way to subdivide planes in the code?

Thanks.