On his Letterboxd profile, Mike Flanagan describes himself as “Kate Siegel’s husband,” and they’re the only remaining celebrity couple I’m allowing myself to be charmed by. I love the idea of the two of them making horror movies together, having horror movie watch parties with all of their friends, and casting all of their friends over and over in the horror movies they make together.
While I’ve been in the process of catching up on Flanagan’s movies and TV series, I keep hearing about the entry that seems like it must be a mistake: a prequel to an almost universally-panned horror movie cash-in produced by Hasbro and based on their Ouija board toy.1I think it’s for legal reasons they — and all the characters in this movie — insist on referring to it as a “game,” but we all know that it’s not a game. I’d never seen it because of course I haven’t, why would I? But the consensus has always seemed to be “no honest, it’s a lot better than you’d expect.”
Since the “elevated horror” of The Witch was a little unsatisfying for spooky Halloween watching, I figured I’d squeeze in one more entry. I watched Ouija: Origin of Evil in the hopes that it would be “elevated trash.” I was not disappointed.
You can immediately recognize this as a Mike Flanagan movie, with an opening where Siegel appears as the bitchy, money-hungry daughter of a grieving man visiting a spiritualist hoping to contact his late wife. The spiritualist (one of our protagonists) is played by Elizabeth Reaser, who would go on to be in The Haunting of Hill House. A little bit later, Henry Thomas shows up as a priest, and he’s been battling it out with Siegel and Rahul Kohli to be Flanagan’s Most Frequent Collaborator.
I guess you could say the signs start even earlier, with the old-school Universal logo to indicate that this is a period piece set in 1967. (If you’re ever in danger of forgetting that this is set in 1967, a car design or a TV broadcast mentioning the Apollo program will pop up within a minute or so, reminding you). Nothing seems inauthentic, but also there’s a strong sense that the goal isn’t authenticity so much as vibes. It’s setting the scene for a spooky throwback scary movie, immediately establishing a tone of “fun thriller” instead of anything to be taken too seriously.
And that’s the feel I got throughout: this isn’t a funny movie, and it’s never played for laughs, even though I found myself laughing out loud more often as it got more and more absurd as it rushed towards the ending. But it does feel as if it’s intended to be as fun as it possibly can without getting too silly.
It almost feels like a challenge: this assignment is basically a 90-minute-long ad for a toy2Even if the movie does spend several minutes where every character is desperately trying to destroy the toy in a fire, and it has to match up with the story and characters of an earlier branding cash-in that pretty much every one who saw it agreed was garbage. (But it made shit tons of money). Every aspect of this seems to be working together to make it irredeemable trash. But what if… and hear me out, here… what if we tried to make it pretty good instead?
So there are lots of jump scares and gooey, gruesome, black ghouls, and glowing eyes looking out from the darkness. And plenty of filmmaking flourishes like weird angles, and split diopter shots, and shots filmed through the warped glass of a planchette. I watched it streaming on Peacock, which made it all the more distracting to see the reel-change markers placed prominently in the corners every few minutes. I’m assuming that those were added digitally to keep pounding home the idea that you’re watching an old-fashioned classic horror movie from the 60s.
And the movie gets a whole lot of mileage out of a little girl being creepy AF in the foreground or, even better, the background. Lots of glazed-over white eyes and screaming with the mouth stretched unnaturally wide, but my favorites are when she’s lurking behind the other characters acting weird as all hell.
There’s one shot in particular, where she’s unnaturally jerking her head into different positions, each one with an eerie clicking sound, that made me laugh out loud, because I realized that the movie had decided to drop the pretense of being creepy PG-13 spooks and just go bonkers.
While I was watching it, I assumed that the last act was where the movie went off the rails. This is where it had to stop being its own thing and start taking care of the prequel business of setting up everything that would appear in the earlier movie. But thinking back on everything up to and including its last (pre-credits) shot, I think it feels less like a derailment and more like popping the movie into all-wheel-drive and deliberately choosing to take it off road. Bad horror movies often feel like the filmmakers had no understanding of or appreciation for restraint; the end of Ouija: Origin of Evil felt to me more like the work of filmmakers blessedly free from the curse of restraint and wanting to just go a little nuts.
I’ve seen several 4-star or even higher reviews of Ouija: Origin of Evil that describe it as excellent, but personally I wouldn’t go that far. I think a lot of people were understandably primed for it to be awful, were shocked to see filmmakers actually put effort into what could otherwise have been a purely cynical attempt to build a toy-marketing-driven horror franchise, and that surprise unnaturally inflated their opinions of it.
It’s pretty good, though, and it does deliver on the promise of fun PG-13-rated spooky horror.3I do wish that they hadn’t brought in the Nazi angle, and instead had kept it in the realm of serial killers or generic mad scientists or the like, since I think any mention of the Holocaust automatically drops it from “fun” to “exploitative.” I haven’t and will not see the original, though, so maybe that’s an idea that they were stuck with?
The superlatives I would give it: it’s the second best-produced commercial I’ve ever seen, after that Kenzo perfume ad by Spike Jonze and Margaret Qualley. And it’s the second most surprisingly fun and entertaining horror movie prequel that entirely improves on its predecessor, after Orphan: First Kill. Also, it’s perfect for watching on Halloween night, so if you haven’t seen it, you’ve got 364 days to prepare.
