Longtime readers of this blog probably know that I am a deeply skeptical person. I am a pure existentialist. I believe this is all there is and we make our own meanings in this life. This might seem at odds with my appetite for horror movies, but I had an understanding about the willing suspension of disbelief from an early age. There are uses for fantasy even to an adult mind. It can be the valve on a pressure cooker. But even I have limits. I did not like 2014's Ouija, in part because Ouija boards are such obvious humbugs (in the original meaning of that word, not the Ebeneezer Scrooge version). They are so easy to debunk that I cannot believe that otherwise intelligent people fall for them. Maybe I'm giving reason too much credit, especially in the current political moment when a large portion of the body politic would love nothing more than to roll back the enlightenment. "It's just a game," is the riposte to my skepticism, but that hardly accounts for how seriously many people take them. P. T. Barnum would have recognized this age of credulity. Now, as in Barnum's time, there's a sucker born every minute. The film compounded my ingrained scorn by being a terrible film and I admit that my experience with it put me off seeing its sequel even though it is well-regarded by people whose tastes I respect. Ouija: Origin of Evil (2016) has a director I like, too, though at the time of its release I didn't know Mike Flanagan from Adam. I like Flanagan's movies, so I suppose it was inevitable that I would eventually get around to Origin of Evil. And here we are, ten years later.
Ouija: Origin of Evil takes place in 1967 and follows the fortunes of the Zander family. Alice, a widow, makes her living as a fortune teller. She enlists her daughters in this enterprise and has no illusions that what she does is a scam at its core. The film debunks her practice early, showing the audience all the gags she uses to fool the marks. She deludes herself that she is helping people. Her daughters are in on the con. Lina, the older daughter, is beginning to chafe at her mother's rules; she's a rebellious teen and she's smitten with a boy. She sneaks out after bedtime to hang with her friends, who decide to play around with a Ouija board. Lina uses it to ask her beau, Mikey, if he would go to the homecoming dance. Before she gets her answer, they are interrupted by parents, and Lina is driven home by her angry mother. She describes the Ouija board to Alice, though, and suggests that it might be a useful prop in their fortune telling show. After taking the kids to school the next day, Alice buys one. Alice's younger daughter, Doris, takes to the board immediately. Soon after, Alice receives a foreclosure notice on their house. As Alice and Lina commiserate on the porch, Doris appears with a bank bag full of money. The spirits, via the Ouija board, have told Doris about money in the wall of the basement. Both daughters are having trouble fitting in at school, attracting the attention of the school's resident priest (it's a parochial school), Father Tom. Father Tom has a conversation with Alice, and vows to keep an eye on her daughters. Doris becomes more and more obsessed with the Ouija board, though this is no concern to her mother, who uses Doris to great effect in her readings with clients. Lina is not so sure. Doris claims that she communicates with her departed father, and with others, particularly a spirit named "Marcus". When she looks through the glass lens of the planchette, she can see the spirits. When she sees Marcus, she is horrified to see a blackened ghoul with baleful yellow eyes. Marcus sees her back and possesses Doris. When Doris writes down the history of their house in Polish, Lina takes those pages to Father Tom, who gets it translated and learns that the house was the site of atrocities by a fugitive Nazi doctor who continued his experiments after the war was over. His prey were the Polish survivors he came into contact with at the asylum where he worked. This prompts Father Tom to take Alice up on a reading in order to test Doris. Unfortunately for him, "Doris" tests him back...
A friend of mine describes Flanagan as a "boggy" director, perhaps on the evidence of his television shows, but I prefer to think of him as "deliberate." He has absorbed the Stephen King lesson of introducing the audience to the characters and inviting the audience to like them before throwing them to the wolves. There is barely a breath of other worlds in Ouija: Origin of Evil before the forty minute mark. In its place is a portrait of a family getting by on deceit and humbug. This is a clever way to rope in a viewer like me, because it begins with a tacit admission that the hugger mugger of seances and channeling and psychic reading is theater. It even brings up the technique of cold reading, by which most alleged psychics dupe the unsuspecting. Alice is a first class fraud who even deceives herself into thinking she is doing good for her clients, that she is helping them come to grips with their trauma. She hasn't come to grips with her own trauma, and neither have her girls. Then the film introduces another kind of spiritual world with Father Tom. The film ultimately finds his own spirituality to be impotent, even though Father Tom is shown to be a pretty capable priest in a secular capacity. His reading is a clever confrontation with Doris and her "friends," demonstrating that they can't know anything but what they've already observed. Because this is a horror movie, and because it is attached to a franchise, the film comes down on the side of actual malevolent spirits. Flanagan also understands how to use his props. The idea that looking through the lens of the planchette enables one to see the spirits provides the film with its most effective jump scare.
Flanagan has a mean streak, too, and the position this film occupies as a prequel to an established property gives him license to exercise that mean streak. The surprise here is that any character can die at any moment, which is of a piece with the kinds of films this one is emulating. Not only is the film set in 1967, it has the philosophy of the horror movies from that era. Its obvious antecedents are The Exorcist and The Omen and (per its director) The Changeling, and like those films, this is a movie that does not reassure the audience that all will be well once the credits roll. It even swipes specific scenes from those films. One particular shot late in the film will instantly tip the filmmakers hands, so it's wise that they put it at the end. Flanagan also pays attention to the intangibles that generate mood. This was shot on digital, but graded to look like it was shot on film, complete with the appearance of cigarette burns on the screen where the reel changes would be. It was shot in Panavision, too, which recalls the films Dean Cundey shot back then. The particulars of its production design--the house set, the incessant news bulletins about the space program on the TV, the period costumes--all manage to coalesce into that Gothic atmosphere unique to the early 1970s, particularly the atmosphere of the TV horror movies of that era. That texture does a lot of heavy lifting here.
So, too, do the actors. Flanagan is still in the early stages of assembling his stock company of players, but Henry Thomas is one of those actors Flanagan employs often. This is his first film with the director and he brings a caring and competence to Father Tom that is refreshing to see in a cynical world sixty years after the film is set. He's definitely a force for good in the film and Thomas gets that. It's a wonder that Flanagan didn't typecast the actor after this film, but to his credit he didn't. It's the trio of actors playing the Zanders family that really shines, though, especially Lulu Wilson as Doris. Directors have become so good at getting terrific performances from child actors that it's easy to write this off as business as usual, but Wilson is so good that that would be a mistake. The ways she transitions from bright, happy kid to possessed demonic kid bears some comparison with, say, Martin Stephens in The Innocents or Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense. It's that good. Analise Brasso is a smidge less showy in her performance, but the story gives her a wide register of performance keys and she's up to all of them, from rebellious teen to smitten girl with her first crush to terrified final girl. Of the three of them, Elisabeth Reaser as Alice is the most mundane performance. She's more of an archetype than anything, recalling, say, Dee Wallace as E. T. 's mom. The flavor sprinkled over her character comes from her unusual profession, which also provides her with an external manifestation of her character's driving motives.
That all said, Ouija: Origin of Evil still contains many of the elements of its predecessor, particularly in regard to Ouija boards. The current owner of the trademark, Hasbro, has apparently put their foot down to prevent the filmmakers from using the appropriate branding from the period and the box it comes in--placed conspicuously in frame fairly often--has no brand at all, let alone a Parker Brothers logo. That's an engulf and devour monopoly at work for you. The filmmaking isn't without flaws, either. Father Tom's conversation with Alice and Lina about the history of the house is so obviously an exposition dump that it brings the film to a screeching halt when it should be revving the engine for the blow off. Flanagan (also the film's editor) softens this a bit by crosscutting to Doris guiding Mikey to his doom, but it doesn't mitigate the damage much. In general, Flanagan has made a silk purse out of this, but there are still some bits of the hog's ear lying about the place.
So begins this October's edition of the Horror Movie Challenge, in which I try to watch as many horror movies as I can. I have some competing activities this month, so I doubt I'll make it to my usual 31 films, but we'll give it the old college try.
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