Witchboard (Kevin Tenney, 1986)

Talking to the dead is a grave mistake

Linda had never really given the supernatural much thought until her ex-boyfriend, Brandon, brought a Ouija board to her house party. But experiencing is believing, and after making contact with the spirit of a young boy named David, Linda fully believes in life after death, reincarnation, and all the new age hocus pocus that Brandon is pushing.

But young, dead David might not be quite so sweet and innocent as he first seems…

The setup by Brandon does a great job of establishing the rules of the spirit world: many spirits are untrustworthy and some will outright lie. Fortunately, he has communicated with David on multiple occasions in the past, and the two of them have established a signal so that Brandon knows it’s truly David that he’s speaking with.

When he forgets to take his Ouija home with him, Linda experiments with it alone, and is successful in communicating with David by herself — and he proves very useful: he helps her locate a lost piece of jewelry and confirms her suspicion that she is pregnant.

Which brings us to her current boyfriend, Jim.

Here’s the deal: Jim and Linda are a couple, but Linda and Brandon used to date. Jim and Brandon hate each other with a passion, but they used to be best friends. Brandon is a preppy, rich kid, college student. Jim is a blue-collar construction worker — but he used to be a medical student… until he quit.

The assured characterizations and the dynamics between them provide depth and richness that elevates the film and lend it a sense of genuine peril above and beyond a by-the-numbers horror movie.

It’s Jim who is really the protagonist of the movie. He’s the one charged with saving Linda when it becomes abundantly clear that something seriously spooky is going on. Not that he really believes in any of this stuff, of course. At least, not at first.

As Linda summons David’s spirit more frequently, it soon becomes apparent that he (like Brandon) is not at all fond of Jim. In fact, Jim narrowly avoids a fatal accident at work. Could it be that David was responsible, and that Jim was his intended target?

Sure that something horrific is going on between Linda and David, Jim is forced to turn to Brandon for help. Together, they recruit a medium to exorcize David from Linda, and to remove the Ouija (David’s portal to the world of the living) from their apartment.

At first, it seems the séance is successful, but when the medium turns up dead the following morning, it seems clear that David must be responsible.

Forced to bury the hatchet between them, Jim and Brandon work together to determine the truth about David’s life and death — certain that he is responsible for Brenda’s deteriorating mental state and a rash of violent deaths proximate to the three of them.

Witchboard is a really satisfying horror movie. It plays in the spirit possession sandbox (lots of violence by invisible forces, doors slamming locked, talk of “progressive entrapment”), but it does a great job of subverting expectations — I’m talking about the fate of the medium (she never saw it coming), the boys’ investigation into the truth about David, and the third act twist that exposes how the film had misled us all along…

Sure, there’s an argument to be made that Witchboard is a little cheesy at times, but there’s no denying that it puts an original spin on a well-trodden subgenre, and is a far better film than it has any right to be. Definitely worth a watch!