I don't consider myself one to be scared easily. The Conjuring was a "scary" movie that hardly phased me outside of, like, one good scene that I forgot about immediately after it was over. I had heard from people that this movie, Ouija: Origin of Evil was just absolutely terrifying and I should watch it and yadda yadda yadda. So I watched it. And you know what? It wasn't. Outside of like one good series of scenes around the 30-to-40-minute mark of the movie, I was almost totally unphased. Here are some things I noticed about Ouija: Origin of Evil.
The director, Mike Flanagan, uses wide shots a lot. He specifically likes to put our main characters in the foreground with creepy stuff, usually Doris smiling or standing around with her eyes rolled back into their sockets and her jaw on the floor, in the background. One particular scene I liked was the one where Marcus, the monster, stands in the doorway of Paulina's room when she goes back to sleep. You can see his bright, yellow eyes peering into the darkness six and a half feet off the ground, it's very creepy. Even the scenes where Doris peers into the planchette are really tense. You already know she's going to see him eventually (it's a possession movie, after all, they're no better known for being unpredictable than your average yearly slasher), but you still ask yourself, "What's he going to do?" And then we get a good look at him. And he's very silly looking. And then the movie stops being scary. Lulu Wilson's performance as Doris low-key carries the remaining two-thirds of the movie. She's very good at making Doris seem both innocent and sinister at the same time so you're never totally sure how much control Doris has over her own body, even when you think you know who the characters are talking to. It's honestly super impressive for an eleven-year-old. One that stands out to me is the scene of her describing what it feels like to be strangled. It's just the right amount of creepy and disturbing without taking itself way too seriously, and the uninterrupted shot slowly zooming in on her while she's talking makes it a really well done scene. There's also a scene, just before the climax really gets going, where Doris's head starts twitching while she smiles at the camera from the background while Mikey reaches into a hole in the basement wall in the foreground. It's genuinely really disturbing. That is, without sound. With sound, you can hear her neck loudly cracking every time it moves, and it's very goofy sounding. Basically, The Exorcist did it better. The soundtrack's nice, the directing is good (there's a nice shot of the camera turning with the Ouija board), and the story and characters are fun enough. The ending was actually surprisingly good. I know this movie is a prequel, but I'm still happy with the direction it took. Killing off the whole family except Paulina was a gutsy move, something a similar movie in the vein of The Conjuring probably wouldn't have done. I don't have much to say about the story or characters outside of that. You root for the family to make it out alive, and you hope they'll be able to exorcise the demon. Also, Lina is easily the best character, I know she's more the everyman for this movie than a typical final girl, but she's smart, she knows not to split up, and she knows what she has to do when she has to do it. 7/10, pretty entertaining, even if it wasn't that scary, and--what's this? MY GOD, IT'S PAULINA ZANDER WITH A STEEL CHAIR!
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