Ouija: Origin of Evil is a film I consider to be “wild”. It was directed in 2016 by Mike Flanagan and stars Elizabeth Reaser, Lulu Wilson, Annalise Basso, and Henry Thomas. It was a horror/thriller movie in which a family buys a Ouija board to help run their business of contacting the dead. Their usage of the board happens to invite a spirit which possesses the family’s youngest daughter, Doris. The family investigates and learns of Doris’s situation after realizing her behavior is not characteristic of her, but the spirit ends up possessing the whole family and killing them all except for their other daughter Lina. Lina is sent to a mental hospital after being suspected of murdering her mother and sister, where she stays at the end of the film. I believe this film to be “wild” because of the incorporation of spirits which posses the characters and cause them to do things that would widely be considered unusual. This film was designed to incite feelings of horror in the audience, which it is able to accomplish by depicting scenes that are so “wild” that it strikes us with fear.
One specific scene that portrays this film’s wildness takes place at the end of the movie as Lina is being kept in the mental hospital and seeks to summon Doris’s spirit. She tears the carpet in the room with her bare hands and uses her own blood to create a makeshift Ouija board on the wooden floor. Lina’s actions in this scene were so primal and so far beyond what most would consider to be “socially acceptable” that I believe them to be a perfect example of the wildness present in this film.
-Avinash K