I can’t help wondering what Hasbro executives were thinking in licensing the company’s Ouija board property to Universal Pictures. Just how many copies of this seance-themed novelty item — suitable for players age 8 and up who might be looking to commune with the dead on family game night — were they hoping to sell? A horror movie that practically opens with a shot of someone throwing the infernal thing into a fireplace is not exactly the best commercial.
A better question might be: Will this gambit sell movie tickets?
Ouija, the film, is in a difficult position vis-vis Ouija, the board game. Unlike other beloved Hasbro properties that have been turned into films (e.g., Battleship, G.I. Joe action figures and Transformer robot toys), the object at the centre of this story — a device that has been said to facilitate communication with ghosts — still creeps a lot of people out.
That, of course, is an excellent reason to make a scary movie. The thing is, if you’re going to do it, it better actually be scary.
Though Ouija starts off evoking a nicely eerie atmosphere of dread, it ultimately goes too far, making the liminal space between the spirit world and this one all too eye-rollingly literal.
There’s actually some good news here. Ouija features a strong, believable cast. The young actors playing a group of teens who get sucked into an obsession with an antique Ouija board after the suspicious death of a friend (Shelley Hennig) are quite good at conveying the mix of healthy scepticism and morbid fascination that is necessary to pull an audience into the tale. Anything that presupposes the existence of a form of supernatural texting — via a movable planchette sliding over a board that has been printed with the letters of the alphabet — is going to be a tough sell, in this modern age of reason and instant messaging.
There are no credulous idiots among this crew. And the powers of persuasion of the film’s heroine, Lane (Olivia Cooke), a reluctant Ouija board player who at first simply wants to tell her dead BFF, “TTFN,” (Ta ta for now) are formidable. It’s also nice to see actress Lin Shaye, of the Insidious films and other horror titles, crop up late in the film, in a small but pivotal role.
Like Lane, the film is seductive. At one point, our heroine is shown looking up an online video in which the Ouija board’s allegedly supernatural powers are attributed to the “ideomotor phenomenon” (i.e., wishful thinking). This bit of preemptory debunking, by director Stiles White, who co-wrote the film with Juliet Snowden, is canny. It sets up things nicely for when the action starts to get a little more ectoplasmic.
And that’s where the film goes off the rails. The deliciously unsettling ambiguity of traditional Ouija board play — characterised by accusations that one player is deliberately moving the planchette, and the subsequent heated denials — is quickly replaced by standard horror-movie tropes involving ghoulish apparitions, zombie-like trances and violent, Exorcist-style telekinesis. Little is left to the imagination, which is where all real horror lies.
Of course, certain adjustments were necessary in adapting the board game to the screen. As with Battleship, which turned an exercise in strategic guesswork centred around a plastic pegboard into a sci-fi-flavoured Naval action flick, Ouija is hampered by the fact that a bunch of people sitting around a table is not inherently cinematic. Hence, the filmmakers have added a little fillip not included in the original Ouija board rules: In the film, if you look through the “window” of the planchette, you can actually see dead people.
That accommodation may be a necessary evil, but it violates a dictum that any true fan of the Ouija board will acknowledge: What’s seen only by the mind’s eye is far scarier than anything that Hollywood — or Hasbro — might try to sell us.
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Ouija releases in the UAE on October 30.
