Few depths haven’t been plumbed by Hollywood for movie concepts. Whether that’s a good or a bad thing is up to the viewer – but, remember, we might never have got Snakes on a Plane (2006) or 2010’s Rubber, a story about a murderous tyre called Robert, if execs stuck to only the most sensible, saleable ideas.
Battleship
There’s been a trend for films based on video games and board games recently, which might suggest that Hollywood is either getting more adventurous or scraping the proverbial barrel. Let’s go with the former.
It’d be easy to point to Jumanji (1995) as the start of the board games-to-movie craze, but Clue (Cluedo in the UK) starred in a murder mystery of the same name in 1985. The Rihanna-starring Battleship brought the silliness in 2012, in a year the world was meant to end (and maybe it did, given the fact there’s a Battleship movie).
That brings us to the Ouija board. It’s a mite more menacing than Cluedo (murder mystery aside), but the board ‘game’ becomes one of the most popular tropes among cinephiles around Halloween.
Ouija
Most entertainment avenues are prepped for Halloween right now. Amazon cut the prices of 200 physical horror movies on October 22, and Ryan Coogler’s Sinners is returning to theatres on Halloween Eve. In the casino world, the UK online casino JackpotCity has an entire section of slots dedicated to Halloween. These include games based on The Lost Boys and Ghostbusters. Real Spooky Roulette leaves its coffin, too.
Call of Duty devs have unearthed the game’s annual The Haunting, while World of Warcraft is already well into its Hallow’s End celebration.
These might all have been summoned by the Ouija board, the topic of the 2014 film of the same name and its much more competent prequel Ouija: Origin of Evil (2016). The former effort has a score of 6% on Rotten Tomatoes, partly due to its familiar story – ‘protagonist tries to talk to deceased friend, gets demon instead’.
Even within the confines of a series about summoning spirits, things get a little strange after Origin of Evil, which explored the possession angle of the board’s abilities (and ended up with an 83% on Rotten Tomatoes).
Ouija 4
Ouija 3: The Charlie Charlie Challenge is an unofficial sequel to the Ouija franchise that also emerged in 2016. Compared to its ancestor, its impact on pop culture was minimal (even Wikipedia’s editors skipped over it for what comes next, Ouija 4). This one swaps the Ouija board for the titular challenge.
Ouija 4 (also known as Are You Here) takes the franchise in several strange directions. First, it was made in Hong Kong, and the Ouija board is now a purely digital affair. It comes with the tagline “There’s an App for That”. It has the vibe of a sinister game show, where money is the incentive for taking part. The movie actually didn’t do too badly, lifting the series off the floor to a 4/10 on IMDb.
The biggest puzzle in all this is that, while being listed as an unofficial sequel like Ouija 3, the fourth entry launched in 2015, between the first and second films. It’s a mystery best left to whatever lies beyond the board’s pierced veil.
