Los Angeles, 1967. Alice is a still grieving widow who works at home as a spiritual medium, and is accompanied by her two daughters when tricking their customers into making them believe that spirits are present. The oldest daughter, Lina, one day suggests that they implement a Ouija Board into her mother’s readings. The youngest daughter, Doris, tries it out alone and invites an evil presence into their home, not realizing how dangerous it is.
This is a prequel to Ouija from 2014, and this time with Mike Flanagan in the director’s chair. And that really shows. Compared to the first movie which was a very formulaic teenage horror flick, this prequel packs in a good bunch of tension and atmosphere. I also liked how the movie has a style that reflects the time period it’s supposed to be set in with a bit of a “retro” style to it, even starting off with the old Universal logo. The performances are good, and the visuals well done.
If you’ve seen the first movie, you more or less know how it will end, but strangely that still doesn’t take anything away from the viewer experience. You already know that the family will not experience a happy ending, but the point of this movie is not to reveal a twist at the end but to explain the journey that led to it. If there’s anything I’d like to nitpick on, it’s the “ghostly gape” scenes that, instead of building the tension and atmosphere further, manages to take us into cringe-land instead. Seriously: big, gaping mouths rarely look scary, and they’re such a tedious horror-trope to watch these days. Now, I personally don’t think these scenes ruins anything for this movie, but my personal opinion is that it would be much better without them.
Overall, Ouija: Origin of Evil is a very decent, yet quite unexpected prequel of a film that didn’t really warrant any sequels or prequels. While the movie doesn’t manage to become scary, it’s still quite atmospheric and a big step-up from the first. Also, here is a little fun fact: for those that have seen Mike Flanagan’s Oculus from 2013, you get a little Easter Egg where you can see the mirror in the basement.
Director: Mike Flanagan
Country & year: USA, 2016
Actors: Annalise Basso, Elizabeth Reaser, Lulu Wilson, Henry Thomas, Parker Mack, Halle Charlton, Alexis G. Zall, Doug Jones, Kate Siegel, Sam Anderson, Chelsea Gonzalez, Lincoln Melcher, Nicholas Keenan, Michael Weaver, Ele Keats
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt4361050/
Related post: Ouija (2014)
A girl plays with an old Ouija Board, and is later found dead in her own home, supposedly having killed herself. One of her closest friends is not convinced that she committed suicide, and suspects that something else must have caused her death. Desperate to find answers, she finds the old Ouija Board and convinces her other friends to play with it inside the dead girl’s home. When they get in contact with what appears to be their deceased friend, they soon discover that something is not right…and that certain things should never be played with.
It’s a dark and stormy night when comic book artist Colin Childress (Jeffrey Combs) works on his horror series Cellar Dweller. He sets his final drops of ink on a sequence where a young, half-naked damsel in distress runs through the woods and ends up trapped by a satanic, hairy monster. After Colin randomly quotes some obscure phrases from a book of witchcraft, he unconsciously manages to summon both the monster and the damsel who emerges right behind his back. While Herbert West..uhm, sorry, I mean Colin, runs frightened out of his studio, the monster kills the damsel off-screen. Since the monster was summoned from the drawing paper, Colin gets the brilliant idea to set the artwork on fire, which escalates into an inferno that kills them both. The rest of his artwork manage to survive, though.
Philip (Sean Harris) is a middle-aged man returning to his hometown in Norfolk with a population of probably ten people, which looks like a depressing place to live in. With him he’s got a brown bag containing a puppet called Possum. A terrifying thing with a human head made of rubber, and with spider feet. Philip turns out to be a totally fragile, traumatized man, trapped in a severe life crisis, who constantly seems be on the verge of blowing out in full panic attack at any moment. And the nightmare fuel provided by Possum clearly doesn’t makes it any better. Time to watch some cat videos on YouTube, I would say. Anyway, he goes to his decayed, filthy childhood home where he meets his stepfather Maurice (Alun Armstrong), a greasy old man who probably hasn’t taken a shower in years, and likes to preach stuff that doesn’t make much sense. They turn out to have as much of a resentful relationship with each other as Philip has with Possum, which he repeatedly tries to get rid of by dumping it in the river, burying, burning, and beat the shit out of it to a point where you almost feel more sorry for the puppet than for Philip. But just like a cursed Ouija board, Possum always reappears.
On a remote New England Island in the 1890s, two lighthouse keepers have to stay there for four weeks. Thomas Wake, the oldest between the two, has been watching over the lighthouse for a long time and is used to the unfavorable conditions. His new assistant, Ephraim Winslow, does not settle in with ease however. Ephraim is getting more and more frustrated by the older man’s fussing and complaints, where he is being bossed around constantly. When the four weeks are over, and the boat still doesn’t come to pick up Ephraim due to very bad weather, they both realize they might be stuck on the island for far longer than anticipated. Plagued by bad dreams and hallucinations (or are they hallucinations?) Ephraim tries to keep his sanity on the forsaken rock – but this proves to be difficult as deeply sunken secrets are about to break the surface.
