I’m not sure who was clamoring for a sequel to Ouija, but apparently enough people went to see the first film to justify not only a sequel, but a sequel that tells the backstory of that insidious…board game? In the wake of an extended TV spot, we now have a new, full length trailer showcasing some of the scares that you can expect from Ouija: Origin of Evil.
The story picks up in 1960s Los Angeles, where a mother and her two daughters run a seance business designed to make people feel all warm and fuzzy about the afterlife. They bring an ouija board into the house to ramp up business, and naturally the troubled youngest daughter falls under the spell of a malevolent specter. Enter a priest – of course – to help rescue the family and send the spirit back to the other side. Three guesses as to how this turns out.
The trailer gives us a few new scenes of terror, most of them pretty depressingly predictable. While I’m not one to judge a film by its trailer, none of the scares on display here seem terribly scary in the wake of so many similar films. The twisting heads, flying bodies, creepy kids, and innocent household items moving of their own accord? That’s all bog-standard by horror conventions, and thus far there’s nothing on display to suggest that Ouija: Origin of Evil is doing anything new with the genre.
The spiritualist angle is an intriguing one, though, so we can hope that much will be made out of that. The setting is also interesting: ouija boards were very popular in the 1960s, far more so than today. Maybe this backstory will provide some era-specific scares?
We’ll know from whence the evil originates when Ouija: Origin of Evil hits theaters on October 21.
