Day 11: Ouija (2014)

Day 11 of Calloween Movie Month

Content warnings: suicide, body horror, child abuse

Recommended?: No

Spoilers and discussion of many of the mentioned topics below, you have been warned.

I think this movie was made by dentists in order to scare teens out of flossing.



Ouija follows teenager Laine Morris. After her childhood friend mysteriously commits suicide, her and her friends as they try to figure out the secrets behind the cursed Ouija board she left behind.

Ouija boards, even as someone who isn't entirely a supernatural skeptic, have never been scary to me. It's a board game with 0 spiritual origins, sold in the toy aisle by Hasbro next to Operation and whatever the newest iteration of Monopoly is. As is, Ouija boards are about as scary to me as, like, a haunted game of Candyland.

At the same time, I think anything has the ability to be scary or unsettling with the right execution and a good understanding of horror fundamentals. Ouija has none of this. I wasn't surprised that the director has this and this alone under his belt.

Ouija is the kind of movie that's a little hard to talk about. It's not good by any stretch of the word, but it's also not so bad it's fun to laugh at or offensive to my sense of good taste. It's just... nothing. Ouija is one of the movies ever made, and that's close to all I can say about it.

The story is at times nonsensical but not so much that it's baffling. The acting is bad, but not to the extent that I feel like they graduated from the Wiseau school of preforming arts. The script is... fine. The directing is equally... fine.

So I want to take this chance to talk about the overt sanitization of horror.

In the mainstream, horror has been stripped of it's inherently transgressive and sometimes unpalatable elements to become the most squeaky clean version of itself that it's possible to be while still being called horror.

This isn't to say that every new horror movie that comes out as bad. There are also films and filmmakers striving to breathe life into and shake up the genre, many of my personal favorite horror films are less than 5 years old.

But if you compare the biggest franchises now to the biggest franchises in the 70s, 80s, 90s, and 2000s, you begin to see the rejection of all things gross and hard to sit with.

Gone are the psychological manipulators, the twisted monsters, and the unstoppable, cruel killers. Now we have old lady ghost with big long wide open mouth and like... I don't know. Child with weird eyes. It's all so boring. Like all the attempts at horror icons for people my age are CGI versions of copyright compliant Party City costumes.

Frankly, it's boring. Ouija and many movies like it, even ones more competently produced and well crafted, are depressingly dull. I actually fell asleep during the second Conjuring film.

I think horror is at odds with capitalism. Most art is, of course, but horror especially is hard pressed to be able to thrive in a hyper capitalist entertainment industry.

You can't dive into things that make people too uncomfortable, or leave behind too many questions, or make the ending too unhappy, or leave anything unexplained. It has to be palatable to not only the lowest common denominator, but to the advertisers who allow the thing to exist. Hell, the only reason Ouija itself exists is because Hasbro wanted to boost the sales of their dinky board game before Halloween.

Overall, Ouija, and movies much like it, work better as sleep aids than as nightmare fuel. Made for people who don't like when art asks a little too much of them mentally and emotionally to sit back and take up a couple hours of their time just to be filed away deep into their memories never to be thought about again. To put money in the pockets of toy manufacturers and movie studios until the next big Hollywood horror comes around to replace it. And that, is the scariest fate I can think of.