31 Days of Halloween 2017: Ouija: Origin of Evil

2016, Mike Flanagan (Gerald's Game) -- download

From a bland movie by a first time director, to a inventive sequel by someone we already liked. We have done his previous movies Hush,  Before I Wake, Oculus and one of my favourites Absentia. If there is anything that ties together Flanagan's style is that he infuses a mythology, a structure behind the horror & terrors he gives us. Where the first just tossed in some scary aspects of evil ghosts from a family of occult hucksters, Flanagan goes back and explores that family.

The Zander family run a psychic business bilking people with fabricated seances and readings. They are down on their luck, having lost the man of the house. Its the 60s so that made things all the more difficult. One of the daughters brings a Ouija board back to the house and things go awry, as the youngest daughter becomes the conduit for dark forces.

In most movies, like the first, the dark spirits would be just that -- bad people who died but are still doing bad things. Or good people who died horrible deaths and are vengeful. But this one finds darker things drawn to a house where dark things had been done. Its not just the spirits of the dead, but worse things that were never people to begin with. We are given a world to think about, to ponder, while we are given the requisite jump scares.