Unfortunately from there things only go downhill, both for the characters and the movie itself. Older daughter Paulina recommends a Ouija board, which she herself recently tried for the first time in another genuinely scary and hilarious scene. The family has been struggling to make ends meet since Alice’s husband died, so Alice goes looking for new ways to reinvigorate business. Alice is a benevolent but fraudulent medium who, with the help of her kids, uses her act to both make money and comfort people who have suffered a loss. In a terrific opening scene that’s equal parts scary and funny we meet Alice Zander, played by Elizabeth Reaser (Esme Cullen from Twilight), and her two girls, Paulina (Annalise Basso) and Doris (Lulu Wilson). It even goes a few steps further to bring the vintage feel home by using throwback title graphics and artificial film artifacts like exaggerated changeover marks-those little ovals that used to pop up in the upper right-hand corner of the screen to tell projectionists to change reels-which of course are unnecessary in digital formats. Set in 1967, the movie immediately begins aping the highest profile period horror film in recent memory, James Wan’s excellent The Conjuring. Yet if you were to ask whether Origin of Evil offers a better quality of timewasting than its predecessor, my finger would hover inexorably over YES.Play Origin of Evil tells the story of those sisters when they were kids.

It’s still no scarier than any branded content, and perhaps only the most lukewarm slumber party would truly need it. Still, the formula is upended somewhat: this time, the Ouija board itself is a minor player, less a piece of obligatory product placement than a springboard for ideas, be it wayward or workable. The final movement doesn’t tie matters up so much as spiral outwards into schlocky incoherence. Yes, he works his soundtrack over, but with co-writer Jeff Howard he sets so much weird narrative running – mom’s thwarted relationship with a priest, unresolved paternity issues, Doris’s overnight grasp of Polish – that he doesn’t have to rely on loud noises to grab the attention.Īrguably he’s caught trying too hard. If nothing quite matches Ti West’s retro exercises ( The House of the Devil, The Innkeepers), at least Flanagan’s trying. The story unfolds when single mom Zander seizes upon the titular toy to jazz up her seance act what she doesn’t expect is for her youngest, Doris (Lulu Wilson), to become an altogether amenable host for passing spectres.įlanagan’s been sent on the movieland equivalent of a coffee run here, so you can forgive him for amusing himself as he goes: dusting off the old Universal logo, reviving those cigarette burns used to alert projectionists to reel changes. Granted, there’s nothing new about its premise – fake psychic learns a lesson about messing with the dark side – and Flanagan has to resort to a 1960s milieu, all kinky boots and intermittent “groovy”s, to distinguish his film from the 1970s-set Conjuring series.

The movie business, as we know very well, is not.įor all that, Origin of Evil – directed by Mike Flanagan, the emergent talent behind 2011’s unsettling Absentia – does just enough to climb over the low bar of expectation.

“The spirit world is unpredictable,” its phoney occultist heroine Madame Zander (Elizabeth Reaser) informs us. Still, it was cheap enough to turn a profit on wide release – $103m (£84m) on a $5m budget – and so, this Halloween, we’re offered a prequel that claims to fill in some of the devil board’s backstory. O uija, 2014’s rapidly forgotten exercise in crash-bang-wallop horror, was chiefly notable as a business proposition, born of a deal struck between Michael Bay’s Platinum Dunes outfit and boardgame nabobs Hasbro to convert the latter’s products into movies.

Ouija origin of evil