Editorials
Through the Planchette: Examining ‘Ouija: Origin of Evil’ and What Makes a Great Sequel
Horror sequels are a mixed bag. The court of public opinion typically looks down on them as cash grabs – and they often are – but no sequel announcement meets such immediate disdain as those in the horror genre. And yet, we still watch them. The cheap thrill of Killer Smurfs from Hell draws both haters and excited genre junkies alike, and the vicious cycle of sub-par spooks continues. Don’t get me wrong, fast food is cheap and can hit the spot when you’re hangry, but sometimes we’re craving more sustenance than the dollar menu can provide. Perhaps a second course Hannibal Lecter would serve. The second course we’ll be discussing today is none other than 2014’s Ouija: Origin of Evil.
When a Horror Sequel Actually Improves on the Original
Some seek to break the wheel of mediocrity and expand the menu, reinventing or delving deeper into their original creations. One such instance of a transformative second outing, a film I admittedly overlooked due to these assumptions and expectations, is Mike Flanagan’s Ouija: Origin of Evil. As a prequel to 2014’s singularly titled Ouija, a darkly lit slow burn into dust based on the popular sleepover “boardgame” of the same name, it did the impossible: It was a great successor to a bad movie! How could this be? We’ve all been in or around debates regarding sequels that are as good or better than the original, but if the foundation is already rotten, could they possibly craft something better to stand in its place?
The answer was to burn the whole thing down and start from scratch. The Hasbro tie-in made Universal money, so a follow-up was inevitable, but surprisingly one of those ravenous studio suits decided to do something right for a change.
A Brief Taxonomy of Horror Sequels That Actually Work
Before we take a closer look at this modern-day miracle, let’s have some fun and get into sequel taxonomy. One of the key elements of horror is suspense, and a great sequel cannot simply be more of the same. We’ve seen the scares, we know the twists – something has to change. After pondering some genre standouts, I’ve come up with six categories of notable shriekquels.
Bigger Is Better: The Bombastic Horror Sequel
James Cameron couldn’t have said it any other way when he wrote “Alien$” on a whiteboard in a room full of studio executives. Bombastic sequels aren’t always the answer. They can be quite the problem. Yet, when in the capable hands of a filmmaker such as Cameron, explosions, and gunfire can be a good thing. A claustrophobic classic like Alien evolved into a terrifying study on what happens when one horrific creature becomes an entire hive, and a new classic was born. Other dazzling spectacles that upped the ante include 28 Weeks Later, Dawn of the Dead, and Final Destination 2.
Less Is More: Scaling Horror Down Instead of Up
In what is essentially the opposite trajectory of the Alien franchise, 10 Cloverfield Lane is so good it demands its own category. Indirectly related to the mysterious alien invasion hit Cloverfield, it tells an intimate and intense story of a woman attempting to survive her captor in a bunker during a perceived earth-altering event. To transition from apocalyptic creature feature to psychological thriller was a gamble, but it more than paid off.
Tonal Change-Ups That Reinvent Horror Franchises
A unique approach to a sequel (and my favorite) is when filmmakers decide to throw caution to the wind and alter the entire tone of a film. The Bride of Frankenstein experimented with mixing comedy and horror way back in 1935 to great success, and Evil Dead 2 continued that trend fifty-two years later. Introducing us to Bruce Campbell’s comedic talents, this sequel created a farcical remake that would permanently alter the franchise. Bride of Chucky followed suit in 1998, and each has spawned beloved television series that marries dark comedy with horror. The tonal change-up can apply beyond humor, too, as we saw when Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects went on the lamb and transformed his House of 1000 Corpses into a sadistic road movie.
Generational Horror Sequels and Legacy Characters
A more recent trend, franchises like Halloween and Scream have risen from the dead in 2018 and 2022 respectively. They’ve combined legacy characters with fresh young casts, modern technology, and new blood spills while we get to spend some time with our faves again. These films have their critics, but I love a good comeback. Doctor Sleep, Stephen King’s sequel to The Shining, was also committed to film in 2019. A genuine surprise, it tells the arresting tale of an adult Danny Torrance battling a clan of psychic vampires led by the bewitching Rebecca Ferguson. It sounds silly, but damn, does it work.
Sequel Satire: When Horror Turns the Joke on Itself
The big gun here is Scream 2. It doesn’t alter the slasher formula, but takes the bigger is better approach with thrilling chase scenes and shocking deaths, while simultaneously throwing everything you think you know about horror sequels back at you. It may follow the same format as the original, but its knowing winks to what it means to be a sequel, especially a slasher, holds Scream 2 in a league of its own. The time loop slasher Happy Death Day 2U takes this approach one step further, thrusting protagonist Tree into an alternate dimension where her death loop persists, but the killer and her reality have shifted. It’s strangely familiar, yet entirely distinct, and keeps Tree and the audience guessing.
Expansion Pack Sequels That Deepen Lore and Characters
If run-of-the-mill horror sequels are known for anything, it’s an absolute disregard for plot and character development. Every so often, a sequel arrives that continues the original story in a captivating and insightful way. Insidious II picks up immediately where the first leaves off, weaving a dark tale of a family marked by those beyond the veil that is fascinating to watch. Hellraiser II similarly takes us to Hell and expands on its twisted lore, and Paranormal Activity 3 travels back to the 1980s to reveal a sinister origin story of its own. Finally, we come to Ouija: Origin of Evil, a prequel set in 1967 that forgoes the typical dead teenager body count for a more personal story of a struggling family’s inner demons that just so happens to include some actual specters, too.
Mike Flanagan’s Ouija: Origin of Evil and the Power of Auteur Horror
When Ouija: Origin of Evil was released in 2014, Mike Flanagan wasn’t the household name he is today. He had some smaller, well-loved films like Hush and Oculus under his belt, but this marked his first excursion into larger studio fare. After having read some interviews with him surrounding the film’s release, it’s clear he was hesitant to accept the job, as he most likely groaned at the thought of a sequel to Ouija just as many of us did. It’s unclear, however, why Universal decided to take the success of the original and craft something of quality as a follow-up. It’s easy money, but perhaps one of the producers felt burned after checking out some Letterboxd reviews.
Anyone familiar with his work knows Flanagan’s specialty is that of tragic family portraits met with the supernatural, so aside from the necessary inclusions of an ouija board and some light ties to the original, he was able to write and direct a true Mike Flanagan feature. It invites us into the world of struggling faux medium Alice Zander (Elizabeth Reaser) following the death of her husband. She spends her days with her two daughters, Lina (Annalise Basso) and Doris (Lulu Wilson), scamming nice folks out of their money through elaborate seances and spiritual readings. To spice things up, Alice introduces a Ouija board to the mix. Young Doris takes an interest while attempting to contact her late father, and something otherworldly takes hold of her.
How Ouija: Origin of Evil Fixes Everything the Original Got Wrong
The differences between the prequel and the original are immediate. The 2014 film is a bare-bones mystery involving a teen’s supposed suicide that is – you guessed it – actually the work of a spirit she contacted via her Ouija board. It is dark and lifeless, and the plot primarily involves everyone being confused until Lin Shaye shows up two-thirds in and provides some much-needed exposition. Characters are unceremoniously killed without anyone batting an eye, and the climax concludes just as you’d expect from an early 2010s supernatural mystery. Origin has character. The attention to detail in its 1960s setting is immersive, down to the old-school Universal logo showing up at the film’s opening and digital cue marks dispersed throughout to give it that authentic feel.
Why Ouija: Origin of Evil Delivers Genuine Scares
And the scares? Plentiful! When the family first discovers the Ouija board’s properties, the film takes on an almost Spielbergian sense of wonder. Though this camaraderie is short-lived, it helps us grow attached to the characters, and when things ultimately take a dark turn, it’s all the more upsetthttps://horrorpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=2195&action=edit#wpseo-meta-section-readabilitying. Lulu Wilson is a wonder herself, embodying a child gradually being taken over by an evil entity in a way that not many could turn out at that age. She becomes cold and calculated, uttering unholy whispers into the ears of her loved ones, and even takes part in a jaw-dropping moment of CGI body horror that isn’t something you’ll soon forget.
There are an appropriate amount of jump scares and creepy imagery, and it’s not much of a spoiler to suggest things end in tragedy for this family. It’s a far cry from the 2014 Ouija, which offs characters we barely know in quick succession and includes only a single notable scary moment.
Why Horror Needs Better Sequels, Not More of Them
Suffice it to say, choosing the “Expansion Pack” route for a sequel and hiring an auteur of Flanagan’s caliber proved wise. The studio managed to turn a Fillet-o-Fish into a filet mignon paired with some fava beans and a nice Chianti. We all enjoy kicking back with a Friday the 13th sequel now and again – it’s almost like comfort food – and I genuinely mean no disrespect toward your B-movie favorites. They’re great fun and a necessary pillar of the genre, but sometimes it’s nice to be challenged by horror. Or, at the very least, kept guessing.
You can only go in blind to a franchise once if every sequel is more of the same, and eventually, the magic is lost. Whether it’s a total tonal change-up, a salacious satire, or one of the elusive sequels that go smaller and more concise, I welcome change in the horror genre and hope filmmakers continue to embrace it, too.
When Creature from the Black Lagoon splashed onto screens in 1954, it gave birth to a very specific kind of horror lineage. The Gill-man became shorthand for aquatic terror, spawning sequels, remakes, homages, and an entire design language of webbed hands, dorsal fins, and rubber-suited menace. Decades later, Hollywood is still wading in that same water. Shark thrillers, deep-sea survival films, mutated piranha, colossal squids; the mechanics change, the budgets grow, but the imagination rarely leaves the lagoon. All the while, an entire ocean of water spirits: older, stranger, and far more psychologically terrifying, remain largely untouched. I’m talking about Mami Wata.
Who Is Mami Wata?
I’m Nigerian, and my first encounter with Mami Wata wasn’t through film or television but through my grandmother’s stories. The descriptions were consistent across tellings: impossibly beautiful women with flowing hair, luminous skin, and eyes that seemed to reflect light even in darkness. They appeared near rivers, lakes, shorelines — always half-revealed. The upper body was woman. The lower half, fish.
What unsettled me wasn’t just the imagery but the certainty. My grandmother didn’t narrate these encounters as distant folklore. She spoke about sightings, about people who had seen her, about behaviors one was expected to follow around certain waters. You didn’t swim in particular rivers. You didn’t wear certain colors near the shoreline. And you never interfered with offerings left at the water’s edge.
I didn’t need Universal Studios to teach me that water was dangerous. Mami Wata wasn’t a movie monster. She was real. That distinction between spectacle and belief is where the divide between Western aquatic horror and African water cosmology truly begins.
When Water Has Memory
Western water monsters tend to operate on biological logic. The shark in Jaws is hungry. The predators in Piranha are territorial. Even more fantastical aquatic beings, from the Gill-man to the amphibious figures in Guillermo del Toro’s films, are framed as species with instincts, habitats, and vulnerabilities. They can be tracked, studied, and eventually killed. The horror is physical.
African water spirits operate on metaphysical logic. They are not random predators but enforcers of balance, custodians of spiritual agreements, embodiments of moral consequence. If a water spirit targets someone, the cause is rarely accidental. Something has been violated, promised, inherited, or ignored. The fear is not of being eaten but of being claimed.
The Diasporic Reach of Mami Wata: From West Africa to the Atlantic
This cosmological framing transforms aquatic horror from a survival narrative into an existential reckoning. You cannot harpoon a covenant. You cannot dynamite a spiritual debt. If the water is calling, it is calling for a reason, and that reason may predate you.
Part of what makes Mami Wata so cinematically rich and so underutilized is that she is not a singular entity but a vast spiritual continuum stretching across regions and diasporas. There are a thousand different variations of this spirit, and no one is truer than the other.
Senegal, she manifests as Mame Coumba Bang, a river guardian presence tied to protection and retribution. In Haitian Vodou, her energies merge with La Sirène, a mermaid lwa associated with beauty, wealth, and the depths. In Brazil and across the Afro-Atlantic religious sphere, her echoes appear in Yemanjá, the maternal oceanic force honored in coastal ceremonies. This Yemanja is just a transliteration of the Yoruba Orisha (celestial spirits of the Yoruba culture) called Yemoja, revered as the “Mother of All” or “Mother of All Fishes”, and the guardian of water, motherhood, and fertility.
Despite regional variations, core iconography persists: mirrors, combs, serpents, flowing hair, radiant adornment, and the promise or danger of prosperity. She is seductive but sovereign, generous but exacting, beautiful but never harmless. That multiplicity alone gives her more narrative elasticity than most cinematic monsters, whose mythologies are often fixed and biologically bounded.
Mami Wata (2023)
Mami Wata in Contemporary Horror Cinema
Film has approached this cosmology cautiously but meaningfully in recent years.
Nikyatu Jusu’s Nanny (2022) offers one of the most psychologically layered depictions. The film follows Aisha, a Senegalese immigrant working in New York, whose life becomes threaded with visions of Mame Coumba Bang. Water appears everywhere: bathtubs, swimming pools, reflective surfaces transforming modern infrastructure into spiritual thresholds. The haunting is tied to grief, migration, motherhood, and sacrifice, presenting the water spirit as an emotional and cosmological force rather than a jump-scare device.
C.J. “Fiery” Obasi’s Mami Wata (2023) takes a more mythic approach. Shot in stark monochrome, the film portrays a coastal village structured around devotion to a water deity embodied through a human intermediary. As belief fractures, so does communal stability. The horror emerges not from attack but from spiritual imbalance, aligning the film more with atmospheric folk horror than creature features.
Even outside explicit depictions, diasporic media has drawn from the imagery. Lovecraft Country incorporates mermaid and water-spirit symbolism tied to Black feminine transformation. Beyoncé’s Black Is King floods its visual language with aquatic rebirth imagery; flowing fabrics, submerged figures, reflective ritual spaces invoking water as passage. The archetype is already present onscreen. It simply hasn’t yet been centered within a full-scale horror framework.
Erotic Horror and the Siren Archetype in Mami Wata Lore
One of the most cinematically potent aspects of Mami Wata mythology lies in how it intersects with erotic horror, though not through the framework Western audiences might expect.
She is not typically described as maintaining human lovers or demanding sexual exclusivity in the manner of succubi or possession demons. Her seduction is visual, atmospheric, and spatial. In many riverine and coastal accounts, she appears to fishermen or travelers as a breathtaking woman poised just above the waterline, adorned in jewelry, her hair impossibly still despite the wind.
Her beauty is disarming rather than aggressive. She beckons without words, drawing men closer step by step, deeper into the water, past the point where retreat is easy. By the time the illusion fractures, the shoreline is distant and the water heavy around the body. She pulls them under, sometimes violently, sometimes with an eerie calm inevitability. This places her closer to siren mythology than to Western erotic demons, her beauty functioning as a gravitational force.
Literature Has Long Understood Her Terror
While cinema is only beginning to explore these waters, literature, particularly African and diasporic speculative fiction, has spent decades charting them.
Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard presents one of the earliest surreal landscapes where seductive river spirits and feminine supernatural entities blur beauty with existential threat. The protagonist’s encounters unfold in dream logic, where attraction overrides caution and spirits operate according to unfamiliar moral rules. The instability of desire wanting to move closer despite danger mirrors the psychological pull found in Mami Wata lore.
Ben Okri expands this cosmology in The Famished Road. Though centered on an abiku (a child destined for an early death), the novel’s watery metaphysics are constant. Rivers function as liminal highways between worlds, and feminine presences tied to water drift through the narrative like half-seen memories. Okri’s horror is not violent but permeable. The material world feels thin, easily breached, as though something vast waits just beneath its surface tension.
Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl channels similar unease through psychological haunting. Mirrored selves, spirit doubles, and invasive presences echo Mami Wata’s reflective themes, especially the idea that one can be watched, claimed, or shadowed by a presence from beyond visible reality.
Nnedi Okorafor’s Akata Witch and its sequels places water spirits within a broader African magical system. In these books, wealth and power connect to spiritual forces older than modern nations. Even when Mami Wata is not directly named, the cosmology she belongs to, rivers as sentient boundaries, spirits as binding forces, remains intact. When she was talking about describing the beings from her Akata series, Okorafor noted, “You would be shocked by how much I don’t have to make up.”
Literature succeeds where film often hesitates because it can inhabit interiority. It can describe the humidity of river air, the hypnotic shimmer of reflected light, the emotional dissonance of wanting to step forward even when danger is understood. Readers feel the seduction and the dread simultaneously. The terror lies not in attack but in recognition in sensing the water knows you.
Why Mami Wata is Horror’s Most Untapped Goldmine
Modern horror has already shown an appetite for spirit-driven fear. Films like Hereditary, The Witch, and His House prove audiences are willing to engage with spiritual systems, ancestral consequence, and metaphysical dread. Aquatic horror, however, remains largely trapped in biological threat models.
Mami Wata offers something far richer; a mythology where water remembers, seduces, rewards, and reclaims. Where beauty is as dangerous as teeth. Where drowning can be spiritual as much as physical. For Black History Month especially, I’m sure engaging these features through horror is cultural storytelling; preserving oral traditions and diasporic continuity through cinematic language. Hollywood has spent seventy years circling the same lagoon.
Meanwhile, somewhere between the rivers of West Africa, the diasporic Atlantic, and the reflective surface of a midnight pool, a far older presence waits for the camera to find her. Preferably through a mirror she’s already holding.
Henry Selick’s return to the director’s chair after Coraline, represents righteousness, anti-authoritarianism, and the subtle art of not giving a fuck. With the support of Monkeypaw Productions and Jordan Peele in the writers’ room, Wendell & Wild crossed the cult classic finish line with a new round of applause from the wide intersections of punk rockers of color. A community, might I add, that historically has never stood to be disrespected.
Who Are Wendell & Wild?
The title refers to a witless pair of demon brothers, voiced by Peele and former Key & Peele co-star Keegan-Michael Key. In its early stages, the pair, along with Sister Helley (Angela Bassett), would lead the story. To explore themes of navigating trauma, anti-capitalism, gentrification, and how our justice systems set Black youth up to fail, though, Katherine “Kat” Koniqua Elliot (Lyric Ross) had to have taken the helm.
Kat’s character design forced a shift in Wendell & Wild’s sound. Heavily inspired by Brooklyn’s Afropunk festival, her hair is green, she rocks facial piercings, what I imagine are a pair of Demonia boots, and a DIY school uniform. The social commentary already aligns with the framework of original punk values. Why not make it a 3-for-3 and line it with the real world soundtrack of Black punk, as a young one reclaiming the righteousness left by punks before her. When we first meet the Elliott family, Kat and her father are seen wearing matching Fishbone band tees while their song “Ma and Pa” plays underneath. This small detail stands out, as punk these days is commonly hereditary, and used to teach positive righteousness in communities of color; not always simply born out of rebellion.
Henry Selick, Fishbone, and the Afropunk Connection
What the general public failed to see under the shadow of The Nightmare Before Christmas, was the strong allyship between the art of Selick, and generational Black punk movements. His love of the sound led him to direct the music video for Fishbone’s “Party at Ground Zero” in 1985, and his appreciation for the Afropunk next gen basically created the look and idea of Kat. Selick and music supervisor Rob Lowry knew that “punk songs offer more than energy and rebellion; they show the deep connection between Afro-Punk Kat and her father, Delroy, a first gen Black punk fan”. Delroy isn’t present for Kat’s journey, but his boombox is, allowing his songs of Black punk to drive and support his daughter through a system we know wasn’t meant for us to succeed.
After the death of her parents, Kat acts out, and lands in the “Break the Cycle” program, offering benefits to struggling schools from the government when admitting troubled youth. She realizes her position as a pawn for cash immediately, but carries on. Her first day at Catholic school is decorated by legendary Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex, chanting “I am a poseur and I don’t care. I like to make people stare” as the nuns in the hallway plug up their ears in judgment of the alternative. Styrene’s vocals mirror Kat, from her stubborn nature to her unapologetic vibrancy, and right back to her (almost) fragile confidence.
Black Punk Soundtrack Breakdown: Songs That Define Kat’s Journey
Even more than dressing a scene with a song that fits, Kat’s character development is literally narrated by the sounds of her boombox. Her boost of confidence navigating hell, earth, and the system is echoed by the lyrics of generational punk Black women. “Young, Gifted, Black, In Leather” by Special Interest is not only an affirmation, but a window into Kat’s understanding, and foreshadowing into the hellmaiden she was born to be. “Every night the law is on my back. That’s why we fight, ‘cause we are young, gifted, Black, in leather”. Tamar-kali’s “Boot,” and “Fall Asleep” by Big Joanie offer the same, while throwing an “I told you so” at the erasure in a genre Black folks had a large hand in creating back in the day.
If I were to break down every weighted needle drop in this 105 minute runtime, you’d need some eyedrops. The toughest track moment takes place during the confrontation between private prison company Klaxon Korp and the locals of Rust Bank, soundtracked by “Wolf Like Me” by TV on the Radio. Even if Rage Against The Machine is the only punk name you know, it’d be impossible to ignore the feeling of how integral Black punk is to the soul of this story. I don’t mean to get preachy on you, but besides the hell of it all, you might still be able to relate off-screen.
Black Punk Representation and Why It Still Matters
I would like to be able to say “many have tried, few have succeeded” to wrap this up, but the truth is, Black punk is fighting monolith status when it comes to representation. Shazam any of these songs- the low play count despite the community fame, and street cred that runs for decades is problematic. Punk is a tight community that relies heavily on the “iykyk”, leaving room for misconceptions on what it’s about, and the undeniable fact that Black punk is larger than you think. It’s not just an edgy sound you can brood in your dorm room over. It’s a vibrant, independent lifestyle filled with war cries of freedom of expression, power to the community, and sticking it to the man. Fuck the prison system. Wendell & Wild got it all correct.
Don’t miss a beat. Listen to Kat’s playlist, straight from the boombox.
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