While Mike Flanagan’s new Carrie series is set to debut on Prime Video this week, an acclaimed horror sequel directed by Flanagan has resurfaced on Netflix. It may be one to watch for horror fans on Netflix for the Halloween season, as it’s stood the test of time as a rare sequel that’s been labeled as “superior” to the original.
In 2016, Flanagan’s Ouija: Origin of Evil was released in theaters. The film was a follow-up to 2014’s Ouija, but while it similarly featured a Ouija board at the center of the story, it focused on a different cast of characters. While it was a big success at the time, it has been a bit forgotten in more recent years as Flanagan has moved on to many more acclaimed horror projects. For anyone who wants to revisit the film or watch it for the first time, or for those who haven’t, it is now officially streaming on Netflix.
Ouija: Origin of Evil Has Arrived on Netflix
Flanagan directed Ouija: Origin of Evil after co-writing the script with Jeff Howard. Set in Los Angeles in the late 1960s, it followed a widowed mother (Elizabeth Reaser) posing as a spiritual medium, as she and her daughters (Annalise Basso, Lulu Wilson) use fake supernatural tricks to scam grieving customers. When the mother brings home a Ouija board to help with the ruse, problems arise when a demonic entity uses it to possess one of her daughters.
Lin Shaye was the only cast member of the original film to appear in Ouija: Origin of Evil, but it was only for the post-credits sequence. The film also starred Henry Thomas, Kate Siegel, Parker Mack, and Doug Jones.
The Sequel Has Been Labeled as “Superior” to the Original
The original Ouija film was very heavily panned when it was released. It holds an abysmal approval rating of just 6% on Rotten Tomatoes. Meanwhile, the score for Ouija: Origin of Evil is 82%, a gigantic improvement. CBR praised it as “2x scarier” than the original, and while it’s already rare for sequels to outshine the original films, it’s much more so with the difference in the reception being to such an extreme. At the time, it was also praised as being among Flanagan’s best work. For his part, Flanagan has previously said how he was determined to make the movie shine as a horror despite its PG-13 rating.
“What I wanted to do more than anything—thinking about how these movies tend to be targeted primarily towards teenagers and younger viewers—was to remember the movies that made me fall in love with horror movies when I was that age, which for me were Poltergeist and The Changeling, in particular—those were the ones we talked about quite a bit when we were prepping this,” he told Daily Dead. “There’s this sense of PG-13 horror out there, that by its nature it is going to be less good and less sophisticated than its R-rated counterparts, and I don’t think that that rings true.”
Ouija: Origin of Evil is streaming on Netflix.
