Ouija (2014)

The 2014 supernatural horror film Ouija arrives as an adaptation of a Hasbro board game, a proposition that history has treated with the disdain it generally reserves for films named after toys. A group of teenagers summon a spirit, the spirit kills them one by one, and the survivors burn the board in a furnace. The film earned one hundred million dollars on a five million dollar budget. Critics gave it six percent on the aggregate sites. These two facts coexist without contradiction, and together they describe the commercial horror economy of the mid-2010s with uncomfortable precision.

On the matter of social consciousness, the film is a near vacuum. The cast is young, attractive, and overwhelmingly white, a configuration that reflects the demographic habits of the genre without interrogating them. The female characters exist to be possessed, drowned, or sewn at the mouth. The film lets women occupy the screen, but in service of screaming, not argument. There is no racial commentary, no environmental subtext, no critique of the corporate machinery that assembled the thing. The Ouija board itself, a product of a toy conglomerate, is treated as a genuine occult object instead of a satirical one. Nobody eats the rich. Nobody mentions the rich.

The film's deepest ideological commitment is to the jump scare, a form with no politics and no thesis. Its ghosts are not metaphors for grief, trauma, or the housing market. They are ghosts. A search of the runtime for a lesson about body image, neurodivergence, or the revision of the historical record yields nothing, which is its own kind of honesty. The result is a brisk, forgettable exercise in the supernatural, competently lit and entirely silent on the questions of the age. The planchette points nowhere in particular. It never does.