Anyone who knows me well knows I’m a big fan of horror movies. Because I’ve watched so many, I always have certain expectations from trailers of movies, and I had high hopes for “Ouija: Origin of Evil”. Though I’m used to being let down by trailers, I was pleasantly surprised when I actually enjoyed the movie.

“Ouija: Origin of Evil” is a movie about a widow, Alice Zander, played by Elizabeth Reaser, with two daughters who makes money by conducting a séance business in which she tricks people into thinking they are receiving news from people “on the other side”. Alice decides to add an Ouija board to her act, which leads to trouble for the family when her younger daughter Doris, played by Lulu Wilson, decides to play by herself to try and talk to her deceased father.

Doris continues to use the board, believing she has made contact with her father. However, she has actually made contact with a spirit named Marcus. One night, Doris looks through the planchette and sees a figure. She then makes her way over to a mirror and clearly sees the figure before it possesses her body.

One of the scariest scenes of the movie is the possession scene. In this scene, the way the possession is depicted is something viewers will remembers for days after watching the movie. The demon, Marcus, is shown entering her body through her mouth, which expands unnaturally wide as she is bent over backwards from the force of the possession.

At the end of the movie, Father Tom, the principal of Doris’s school comes by her house to talk to her sister. Her sister Paulina, played by Annalise Basso, expressed her concerns to Father Tom when she saw Doris hastily scribbling on paper without even looking in its direction, supposedly possessed by Marcus to do so. While Father Tom talks to Paulina and Alice, Doris disappears. They eventually figure out that Doris is in the basement, which was the site of many brutal murders in Marcus’s time. During the exorcism, Father Tom is killed, and Paulina is knocked unconscious. After waking up, she is in a vision in which she sees her father, and she figured out that she has to sew Doris’s mouth shut to stop the evil.

It was during the sewing-of-the-mouth scene that I realized that the movie is a prequel to “Ouija”, a movie that come out in 2014. “Ouija: Origin of Evil” does a good job of making sure there are no gaps between it and the sequel. In fact, “Ouija: Origin of Evil” is even better than the movie that come out first, and allows “Ouija” to continue the plot line of the movie.

The movie received generally good reviews, with a rating of 80% on Rotten Tomatoes, and score of 65 out of 100 on Metacritic.

Though the movie in better than the sequel, the scares are similar to that of any other movie. For example, the movie includes many scenes with jump scares, in which there is not music, alerting viewers that something is about to happen. However, the scary scenes are well-placed and add to the overall scare factor of the movie.