Pretty much everyone knows someone who claims to have had a creepy experience with a Ouija board. My sister tells me that while she was in college, her and her roommates — one of whom dabbled in witchcraft — played the game one night and encountered a "spirit" who said awful and threatening things to them. After a black cat they'd never seen before leapt against their living room window, screaming and trying desperately to get inside, they decided it was time to stop playing. It's stories like this that make people believe there's more to a Ouija board than fun and games, so does this mean the new movie Ouija: Origin of Evil is based on a true story?
Nah. The movie is actually a prequel to its predecessor, Ouija, which was also an original film. Ouija was of course inspired by the board game of the same name, and toymaker Hasbro served as one of the production companies of the film. And while the first movie was penned by director Stiles White and Juliet Snowden, the prequel was both helmed and written by Mike Flanagan — the brains behind horror movies like Oculus and Hush. He was given free reign to do basically whatever he wanted with the second film in the Ouija franchise, so that's what he did.
"I initially had no interest in doing a sequel," Flanagan told Dread Central's Staci Layne Wilson. "But Jason Blum really wanted to take the franchise in a new direction and was very open to the kinds of ideas that a lot of studios would reject outright. It’s not very often that you can take a very successful horror franchise and say, 'I’m really interested in making a period piece about a single mother.' These are movies you’d assume are custom made for teenagers, and therefore have to adhere to all of the teenage tropes." Where Flanagan did draw some inspiration was from the horror movies he loved as a teen, and tried to emulate those. "I tried hard to think of the kinds of movies I loved when I was a teenager. Just because they’re teens doesn’t mean they don’t deserve cool horror movies! I had a chance to make something like The Changeling or Poltergeist, and I couldn’t resist that," he said.
Although Flanagan himself didn't have any Ouija board stories of his own to draw from, there were several spooky tales floating around during production. "As for the board, there were definitely people in the cast and crew who were nervous about it. I underestimated how seriously people can take those things," he revealed to Dread Central. "I myself am an ardent skeptic, and I am more fascinated by the psychological processes at work when people sit down to play a game like this. How powerful the subconscious is. But while I’m an atheist, many in my crew were not, and some had some chilling stories of things they’d experienced playing with the board as kids (and a few as adults.)"
So while Ouija: Origin of Evil is not based on a true story, it sure seems like it could be due to the abundance of spooky tales going around surrounding this mysterious board game.
Images: Universal Pictures;