Fantasia 2024 Review: WITCHBOARD, Chuck Russell Returns to Horror With This Stylish Series Update

Genre film legend Chuck Russell returns to horror after a twenty-year hiatus with his take on the classic ‘80s franchise, Witchboard. In reimagining the concept, Russell adapts the story of a Ouija board with a grudge into a bigger, flashier adventure now set in New Orleans and exploring the history of the spirit board going back to the 17^th century. Though it doesn’t reinvent the wheel, Russell’s Witchboard is a perfectly decent – if a little long – stab at the haunted item subgenre that should satisfy fans of the earlier franchise.

Christian (Aaron Dominguez) and his fiancée, Emily (Madison Iseman) are out gathering wild mushrooms in the run up to the grand opening of their new Creole restaurant in New Orleans when she stumbles across an ancient looking relic in the forest. A circular board with strange symbols around the edges, neither of the two know exactly what it is, but Emily feels an inescapable pull toward this mystical object that is bound to get her in trouble. When it turns out to be a 17^th century French Wiccan spirit board, Emily goes a little nuts and before long it isn’t her playing with the spirits, it’s the spirits playing with her. Bodies start to drop in horrifying ways, and if she can’t get a handle on it, the carnage is going to get a lot worse.

Kevin Tenney’s original 1986 Witchboard was a fun little shocker starring Tawny Kitaen as a woman obsessed with and taken over by a Ouija board possessed by the spirit of a dead child. Russell replaces the familiar image of every preteen girl’s favorite sleepover toy with the ancient mystical pendulum board, opening up possibilities for the film to dig deeper into the past. It’s an interesting update that- pays off in a grander scale than the earlier films were able to pull off.

While Emily is busy fighting with the board, Christian is trying very hard to free her from its sinister grasp. In doing so he enlists the help of his antiquities expert ex-girlfriend, Brooke (Mel Jarnson), and her wealthy Wiccan buddy, Alexander Baptiste (Jamie Campbell Bower). Little does Christian know that their interests may not lay in line with his own as the history of the board and the players in this mystery start to reveal themselves.

Though the film struggles a bit with the tone, occasionally leaning into an overearnestness that tips over to inadvertent comedy, there’s still a lot to like about Witchboard. The addition of the 17^th century set pieces adds significant scale and production value that provides a glossy sheen to the film that really worked for me. There are a number of creative kills sprinkled throughout the film that also really hit the spot, though I wish the scourge of digital blood splatter wasn’t as ever present as it is here. It’s a minor quibble, but horror fans have been suffering through this CG plague for two decades now and it is never not annoying.

The leads put in solid performances in spite of the above-mentioned overearnestness of the script, and though it’s Dominguez and Iseman at the top of the cast list, it seems as though Jamie Campbell Bower is really the performer who understood the assignment. His Baptiste appears to have stepped right out of a Subspecies film – in a good way – he’s sleazy, manipulative, slightly effete, and eerily menacing in such a way that it feels like he’s in the movie I wish I was watching the whole time. A B-movie at heart, Witchboard’s reach sometimes exceeds its grasp, and Baptiste is the one character who seems to always be operating in the world of the film.

At nearly two hours, Witchboard feels a bit overindulgent, and though I loved a lot of the impeccably designed flashbacks, there are perhaps a few too many of them, slowing down the narrative. However, there’s some great gore, stylish direction, and a few moments of inspired violent chaos that really gave me a smile. Witchboard may not quite hit the career horror highs of A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (the best in the series), or The Blob, but this is a respectable return to the genre for him and I hope it’s not the last we get from him.