Summary

• Ouija: Origin Of Evil's shocking ending explores untreated trauma and grief within a family unit, leading to a destructive outcome.
• Mike Flanagan's direction elevates the Ouija franchise, highlighting his knack for modern horror storytelling and unsettling endings.
• The film delves deeper into the origins of the demonic spirit, intersecting personal loss, fake psychic practices, and vengeful ghosts.

The Ouija: Origin Of Evil ending showed that Blumhouse made a good choice by handing the franchise over to Mike Flanagan. The director remains one of the horror genre's best modern-day filmmakers, with hits like The Haunting Of Hill House, Gerald's Game, and Doctor Sleep. Blumhouse chose him to helm 2016's Ouija: Origin Of Evil, a prequel to Ouija. While the original was a box office success, it was also critically panned. Flanagan was given free creative reign to do what he wanted in the sequel.

The first Ouija film focuses on a group of friends who are haunted by a demonic spirit after messing around with an Ouija board. Origin Of Evil is set over 40 years earlier and explores how the demon from that movie came to be. Unlike the first movie, Flanagan decided he wanted to do something more than create another demonic Ouija board movie, and he instead looked at the ideas of demonic possession and horrors befalling a family, which led to a shocking ending that eclipsed anything the first Ouija movie tried to do.

What Happens In The Ouija: Origin Of Evil Ending

The Demonic Spirit Can't Be Defeated

Ouija: Origin Of Evil focuses on a fake psychic named Alice and her two daughters, Lina and Doris. They bring an Ouija board into their act, but Doris, who actually has psychic abilities, ends up possessed after reading it on her own. With the aid of a local priest named Tom, the family realizes Doris has been taken over by the vengeful spirit of an immigrant who was captured and experimented on by a German scientist in the house's basement years before. They try to save her by burning the board, but the possessed Doris kills Tom.

Ouija: Origin Of Evil ends with Lina in a psychiatric hospital.

Lina realizes she has to sew her sister's mouth shut to stop the spirit from speaking. Lina manages to sew Doris' mouth closed, but this ends up killing her, and Lina herself is later possessed and stabs her mother, Alice, to death, too. Ouija: Origin Of Evil ends with Lina in a psychiatric hospital, who makes her own Ouija using her blood to write letters and symbols. A doctor later observes her through a window, unaware the evil spirit of Doris is silently running across the ceiling towards him.

The Ouija prequel is littered with small connections to the original, with the most clear link being the post-credits scene. This modern-day scene reveals Lina is Paulina (Lin Shaye) from the first Ouija. She is still in the hospital and is told by staff that someone claiming to be her niece has come to visit, which is Olivia Cooke's character from the original film.

What The Ghosts Represent

The Ghosts Represent Trauma & Grief

One thing that the Ouija: Origin of Evil ending looks at is the ghosts that torment, haunt, and kill this small family. When Alice brings in the Ouija board, Doris is possessed because she legitimately has psychic powers, whereas her mother was always just faking it. Through the Ouija board, a spirit named Marcus possesses her, and he wants revenge. This is because an evil doctor tortured and experimented on Marcus, a Polish immigrant, and his spirit has been waiting for revenge ever since.

The ghosts represent Doris's untreated grief.

What the ghost represents is not Marcus's pain, though. This ghost represents Alice's pain. It also represents the pain she put her daughter Doris through because this young woman is pretending the dead can communicate with their marks. However, she is just as traumatized as her mother, as she wants nothing more than to talk to her father again, and she fakes all this while burying her own trauma deep down. The ghosts represent Doris's untreated grief.

The Real Meaning Of The Ouija: Origin Of Evil Ending

The Movie Is About Finding Help

The real meaning of the Ouija: Origin of Evil ending has to do with what happened before the movie started. Alice has struggled to deal with her husband Roger's death, and she has to find a way to her two girls while also emotionally moving on. This leads her to start a fake psychic business, where she and her daughters can make money by preying on the weak and desperate. They think they can lie to make people feel better, which excuses them from blame when conning them out of their money.

...the one person they can connect to is Doris, who has untreated trauma and grief that her mother ignored...

However, this can only go so far when dealing with the trauma of their pain and the grief of their loss. Things change when Alice brings in the Ouija board to use in their scam, and she realizes all too late that supernatural forces are out there. They are not happy with the mockery that these women have been conducting in their business. More than that, the one person they can connect to is Doris, who has untreated trauma and grief that her mother ignored to get them through life.

The ending has three things happen. Lina sews Doris's mouth shut to silence her, Doris starts to reveal there is a problem, and Lina doesn't want to hear it and tries to silence her. However, when Doris dies, Lina is now forever lost, and she kills her mother, the one person who wouldn't let them move on and kept them enthralled with the discussion of death and loss. Their inability to get help and move on destroys their family, which is what the Ouija: Origin of Evil ending conveys.