Ouija: The Most Baffling Horror Movie I've Ever Seen
Since we’re getting into spooky season, I recently decided to watch a horror movie. Specifically I wanted to watch a bad horror movie, for the content.
I did not know what I was getting myself into when I decided to watch Ouija. This might be the worst horror movie I’ve ever seen.
Produced as part of the same Hasbro multimedia initiative that unleashed Michael Bay’s Transformers upon the world (because remember, Ouija boards are toys that were created for a toy company, not some modern continuation of ancient occult practices), Ouija is a blatant cash-grab that still should have been a lot better than it is. I have to admit, making a Ouija board movie seems like a much easier proposition than turning Barbie or Hot Wheels into films. The pitch almost writes itself: someone uses a Ouija board, ghosts ensue. And since people buy these things specifically to get spooked, this is perhaps the one case where you can imply that your product is going to kill its buyers without losing out on sales.
The story, as far as I can remember it (I watched this movie mere weeks ago, that should tell you something about how little impact it made as it travelled through my brain) is that a teenage girl hangs herself after messing around with a Ouija board, so her friends get their own board and try to Ouija their way into communicating with her spirit. This goes badly because it turns out she was talking to the ghost of a witch, or something.
The witch starts killing the friends one by one via, I think, possession–one of the deaths happens entirely off-screen so it’s a little unclear–which is presented as a sequence of PG-13 Final Destination-esque events, except with a ghost directly compelling the victim to do the thing that kills them. In between these scenes, the witch shows up and goes a-booga-booga at people, except she’s not very scary so it’s pretty anticlimactic. The spirits of her victims also appear with their lips sewn shut, an image that I think was meant to be frightening but is also not very scary.
I know this is getting repetitive, but I can’t emphasise enough how un-scary this movie is. Even the worst horror movies generally tend to pull off an effective jumpscare or two, but not so here. You could play this movie on full volume at a sleep clinic and I don’t think it would affect any test results. There are endless repetitive scenes of the characters creeping slowly through dark rooms and corridors, building up to a completely flat crescendo.
It’s actually kind of eye-opening seeing the mechanics of horror filmmaking revealed like this. All of the elements that in other movies would make for a functional scary scene are present, but they’re put together in such a way that they just don’t work. It’s the cinematic equivalent of Covid taste-loss: you feel the texture of the food entering your mouth, but the flavour never appears.
But it shouldn’t really be surprising that Ouija can’t be scary, because it’s also shockingly incompetent in every other regard. This is one of the worst-made films I’ve ever seen. It’s so bad, I’m not even sure I can explain to you in words how bad it is, but I’ll try.
For starters, the temporal editing is completely off. Way too much time passes than is necessary for the story being told, entire days zipping by with only a brief transition indicating what any of the characters were doing. The movie keeps inserting all of these random, short scenes of the characters arriving at or returning home from school, during which there will either be no dialogue or conversations that are irrelevant to the plot. I think what they were trying to do was to show how the events of the plot are slowly weighing on the characters’ mental states in order to build a sense of impending dread, but it’s pulled off so incompetently that it just makes the movie’s pacing seem delirious.
Again, I feel like I can’t really explain this in text, but picture a sequence you’ve seen from a normal horror movie where it’s established that a character has a reason to go to a spooky house, visits the house and gets spooked, then returns home at night and is visibly unsettled by the experience. You’ve seen these story beats before.
Here’s how Ouija would do it:
Conversation where the reason for protagonist to visit the spooky house is established
Scene where the protagonist talks to her friend at school, presumably that same day but possibly not
Scene (after school?) of protagonist walking up the driveway to the spooky house while ominous music plays
Cut to protagonist back at home that night, using establishing shot that doesn’t make it clear which house this is because it’s the first time we’re seeing the exterior of their home
Protagonist has an argument with her younger sister that doesn’t have anything to do with anything else in the script so far
Another five-second school scene the next day where nothing happens
Interior shot of the protagonist entering the spooky house
This isn’t an exact description of any particular set of scenes in the movie because I’m not watching this shit again to check, but it really is that choppy and unfocused. Oh, and keep in mind that both the protagonist and her sister are being played by actresses who are clearly fully-grown adults, and the “younger” sister looks older than the main character, just to make things extra strange.
And that’s not even talking about how fucking bizarre some of these individual scenes are on their own. There’s one bit where one of the boys rides his bike down into this concrete sewer tunnel thing, where he gets fake-out scared by a jogging woman before seeing something creepy and Ouija-related. What’s meant to be happening is that this is like a pedestrian access-way, but it was clearly filmed in some sort of storm drain that no one would ever be jogging or riding their bike in. It’s so strange that it’s surreal. You could splice this scene into a David Lynch movie and it wouldn’t feel out of place.
I realise I’m making this movie sound like a wacky hate-watch, but outside of the really strange scenes, for the most part it’s just boring. Even as I write this review, I’m having a hard time remembering anything that happened in the second half, which is in part why this post is so short. I didn’t think it was possible for a movie to be simultaneously fascinatingly bad and also completely unmemorable, but it is in fact the case.
Out of curiosity I also watched the sequel/prequel, which is directed by Mike “Netflix” Flanagan and which I had heard is surprisingly good. This is true, in the sense that it’s a competently-made film with normal editing and directing, but that’s about all it has going for it.