I saw Witchboard when it first came out, but I have not watched it since. I remembered the Ouija board, obviously. I remembered Tawny Kitaen. I remembered that it was one of those movies that seemed to be everywhere on video shelves for a while.
Witchboard (1986)
Jim (Todd Allen) and Linda (Kitaen) are throwing a party at their new place when Brandon (Stephen Nichols), Jim's friend and Linda's ex-boyfriend, produces a Ouija board. He wants to show how he has been in touch with "David", the spirit of a ten-year-old. Linda can’t take her eyes off it; Jim is far from as enthralled. After Jim has a word or two of insult for the spirit, the tires on Brandon’s car are found slashed in response. One would think that was the moment to put the board away and be done with it.
Yeah. Then we wouldn't have a movie, now would we?
Left to her own devices after Brandon forgets the board, Linda begins to use it. At first, David is amiable, if not a little too helpful. He will answer her questions, tell her things she could not possibly know, and even lead her to a missing engagement ring. We also learn that Linda is pregnant.
And then the deaths begin.
We learn that Linda has really been talking to a spirit with the impossible name of Carlos Malfeitor (seriously, just call him "Gary Evil" while you are at it).
Brandon dies. Jim and Linda defeat Malfeitor and live happily ever after. Until their landlady finds the Ouija board in the trash and wonders aloud if "it still works."
Kevin Tenney wrote and directed this one, and had penned the script at USC under the working title Ouija, but legal and production issues forced a name change to Witchboard. The film is built on what Tenney calls "progressive entrapment": the notion that a person is worn down by repeated contact with a spirit until possession becomes possible.
That concept at the heart of the movie. It is not as if Linda is taken over with a single touch of the board. The spirit goes about its work. It is of service to her at first, then it becomes something of a confidant. She starts to depend on it, using the board in private and growing more isolated. Her behaviour alters; she is left physically and emotionally drained. By the time those around her notice the trouble, the spirit has made itself at home.
It is a more compelling approach than to view the Ouija board as some kind of supernatural telephone. The board is the bait, and Linda is the one who keeps answering.
This movie was made before Tawny Kitaen's famous Whitesnake video appearances.
Jackson Connection: The Spirit in the Room
There is an odd fascination with the Ouija board as a tool of horror, given that one can hardly find anything to be scared of in its design. It is simply a board with its letters and numbers, the words "yes," "no," "good-bye,"and a planchette. Nothing more. You will not find any skulls or human bones here, nor some Latin tome bound in dubious leather and put there by a curse. On the face of it, it is a game.
Perhaps that is the source of the unease it engenders. I have been in conversations with people well on their way to sixty who will recount a fright they had with a Ouija in their youth. Or they will begin to. They stop short. Something happened, they will say, and they are under no illusion that they will ever put one to use again. But the details of the story are not for you to know.
As a rationalist I do not make the mistake of thinking a piece of plastic and a factory made board from Parker Brothers (now Hasbro!) can call up the dead; the ideomotor effect is explanation enough for most Ouija sessions, and it is easy enough for someone to spook themselves in a dark room if they are primed for it.
Horror does not care for such logic though. The fear is what counts.
Take four teenagers and an Ouija board at midnight. Extinguish the lights and light a single candle. Pose the question: "Is anyone here?" and let them wait on the planchette. The scene is set. The screaming will start soon enough.
I am reminded of a slumber party happening at a house in my neighborhood. A bunch of preteens were out in their yard after dark using an Ouija board (my wife and I had walked by) and by the time we got down the street a bit they were all screaming. We had to laugh.
The film has this down. Witchboard is smart in that it need not make Linda out to be a fool for the spirit to gain her confidence. David appears to be nothing but a harmless child who will answer your questions and put his hands on things. Which makes the truth of the matter all the more jarring.
David is not who he seems. Malfeitor is the one in contact with Linda, a murderous type wearing the dead boy’s name to work his will. The whole affair has been an elaborate deception to put him in position to take her over. That is the stuff of good occult horror. The peril is not in the existence of ghosts, but in the fact that what is on the other side is capable of lying.
I can lift this whole cloth and drop it into my Jackson setting with hardly an edit.
Again, this movie follows my established theme of horror coming home.
Kinda wish I still had an Ouija board around; I'd pull it out as a prop for the game night.
October Horror Movie Challenge 2026
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