You had to’ve seen this coming. Ouija: Origin of Evil, with a different director and writer, and the same producer, pulled off the better prequel/sequel. I don’t give that accolade lightly. Now, I’m not a professional film critic, and I like to say nice things whenever possible, but even sequels/prequels that professional critics do say are better often find me in disagreement. In this case I stand with them. And I have some ideas, apart from natural talent, why it is so in this case. The problem with ouija, and spirit boards, is that you have no way of knowing who or what may be answering your questions. In the first movie we just know it’s someone with bad intent, and we need to wait until all the twists are finished to find out who. The second begins with the premise that we already know who, but we want to know why and how.
But it goes deeper than that. The first movie left religion out completely. The prequel scoops it back in by the shovelful. And if you want to make a movie about ouija work, you need to have demons. To begin with, the family previously in the house is Catholic. The kids go to Catholic school. The headmaster is a priest who wants to help the family. He quotes the Bible (Holy Sequel, anyone?) He recognizes that the entity isn’t who it says it is. Although showing demons is always a bit of a dicey proposition, the prequel opts for the preferred look from the period, and show them only dimly. It still has to work with the world built by the original, which leads to a strange backstory of a Nazi in the basement operating on homeless people, but you have to work with what you’re given.
So the second movie is scarier and better made. It didn’t earn as much as the first one did, though. The idea hadn’t, I don’t think, been tapped out. Rather, I think once you’ve laid out the premise, viewers have to be enticed back. If a subject is mishandled, it does require extra work to convince viewers that the next experience will be better. The critics, however, immediately saw the difference. You really don’t have to know the story behind Ouija to see this movie, but it definitely helps. It earned enough that unofficial sequels were released before the official prequel. One of them only by a matter of days. It pays to get it right the first time, and if you’re working with a naturally religious topic for your horror, you shouldn’t be afraid of religion.