Ouija - Origin Of Evil: That Is One Tasty Burger

So just last week I was talking about how much I don’t like films made off the back of other films. Sequels, prequels, remakes, reboots, re-imaginings, et cetera. Don’t even get me started on franchises. I think it’s the way it turns film into product. I’m not going to get all precious and “my cinema” about films, but…it’s the difference between a home-cooked meal or fine-dining experience and a burger and fries from your fast-food place of choice. But here’s the thing: Sometimes those fine-dining places get a wild hair up their ass and do their own take on the burger and fries. It’ll be a burger and fries, but the meat is top sirloin, the bun freshly baked, the fries hand-cut and fried in duck fat. The form is fast food, but the execution isn’t.

That’s the analogy that came to mind while I was watching Ouija: Origin Of Evil. It’s a prequel to an apparently not-especially-good film about a haunted/possessed Ouija board. Hardly a novel idea, but it’s executed with such taste and care that the finished product is way better than you’d expect.

It's Los Angeles in 1968, and Alice Zander is conducting a séance for a middle-aged man and his visibly skeptical daughter. They’re trying to contact the man’s late wife, and Alice reaches into the beyond to make contact. The table rattles, doors open and shut, candles blow out and relight. A shadowy figure appears behind some curtains before rushing toward the daughter, screaming. The séance ends, the father and daughter leave, with Alice refusing to accept payment.

Once they’re gone, Alice goes back inside and calls to her own daughters to come out, while she breaks down the various devices she used during the séance. The younger daughter, Doris, had made cabinets rattle. Her older daughter, Lina, was the apparition behind the curtain. Lina wasn’t supposed to rush the man’s daughter, but Lina thought she was a bitch. Alice points out that that little stunt cost them their pay. And it’s pay they desperately need. Alice is a widow, and the wolves are constantly at the door. Doris prays at night to her father, she thinks he’s just gone away on business, but Lina and Alice know the truth. He isn’t coming back. Alice is tired and worried, Lina is angry in the righteous, passionate way that teenagers are. She’s straining at the leash, desperate for independence. And it’s this independence that leads her to sneak out at night, to go to a friend’s house while her friend’s mother is away at her bridge club. They listen to music, sip booze. There’s a cute boy there that Lina fancies. Then her friend pulls out this new game her mother got. It’s a Ouija board.

Lina sees how freaked out her friends get at the possibility of communicating with the dead, and mentions it to her mother as a possible new prop. Needless to say, Alice grabs one and goes to work doctoring it, magnetizing the planchette so she can manipulate it hands-free from under the table. Doris wants to know if she could use it to talk to her father, and even though Alice and Lina discourage her, once they’ve left she gives it a try. Something responds.

But it’s not her father.

In the interest of full transparency, the director made one of my favorite horror movies ever as his feature debut, so I’m a little biased. That said, everything I like about his style is on display here and it elevates the result. Like his previous films Absentia and Oculus, this film leverages the power of restraint, of not going loud or making things obvious. The scary moments tend to happen in the background, without an unnecessary amount of fanfare, and I think this makes these moments even more effective. They reward the attentive viewer, catching you unawares and being that much more startling as a result. There are some near-mandatory jump scares, and yes, they’re still jump scares, but inventive staging and - again - a lack of buildup or forecasting make them about as good as those get. It’s a film full of little moments that make you go “GAAHHHHH!” The performances are suitably restrained all-around, with no scenery-chewing to be had. Alice and Lina and Doris seem like a real family, with complicated feelings about life after their father/husband has died, Lina is a resentful teen, Doris just wants her father back, Alice is trying to keep their heads above water, and they’re all wrestling with grief in different ways. It’s not enough to provide much thematic subtext, but it also keeps everyone from feeling one-note. There’s a priest who manages to be smart and thoughtful, and even the expected romantic spark with Alice isn’t overplayed. The relative lack of histrionics throughout is refreshing.

It’s also visually self-assured. The whole thing is shot as if it had been made in the early 70s, and the attention to detail (including reel-change marks) is cool, but the picture quality is still a little too clean to look like an actual film from the 70s, so as it is just seems like a really good period piece instead of a historical artifact. But it also means there’s an analog warmth to the visuals that keeps the whole thing grounded. The narrative is fairly well-paced (with one exception in the second act), and in contrast to last week’s The First Omen, the connection to the film it precedes comes only at the very end, so it works as a self-contained film, with a satisfyingly creepy ending.

On the less-effective side of the register, it does feel at a couple of points like the director’s good judgment is in a tug-of-war with a studio that wants things to be bigger, louder, and more obvious. There are couple of unnecessary musical stings, and an exposition dump at the end of the second act, that leads into a plot development that’s over the top enough to elicit an eye-roll; but largely they let him cook on what is basically a work-for-hire deal, and he took something that could have been as pedestrian as the original film apparently is (ooh, evil Ouija board! Nobody’s ever done that before) and made it genuinely spooky.

There’s an art to making a good classically scary movie, and I feel like that art gets forgotten. You don’t need to shove a bunch of screaming distorted faces at the audience, you don’t need dopey teens doing the dumbest things (at one point, Lina says “splitting up would be the dumbest thing we could do” and I got a good chuckle out of that), you don’t need blaring musical stings to tell us that what we’re seeing is scary. You just need to trust your audience’s intelligence and the result is going to be a lot better. A burger and fries is still just a burger and fries, but made correctly, with really good ingredients, it’s going to be exceptional.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix
Available on Amazon