10 More Horror Movie Sequels That Had No Right To Be This Good
8. Ouija: Origin Of Evil
Whereas some sequels on here weren't expected to be as good due to how utterly brilliant their predecessors were, nobody held out any hope for Ouija: Origin of Evil due to how outright awful the first Ouija film was. If an original movie is trash, it's hard to drum up any sense of enthusiasm for a sequel to said trash. Thankfully, Origin of Evil caught us all off-guard by being actually, y'know, good.
Of course, it helps that Mike Flanagan was on board to direct, with him later going on to helm the likes of Gerald's Game and Doctor Sleep, plus develop TV terror gold with The Hauntings of Hill House and Bly Manor, Midnight Mass, The Midnight Club, and more recently wowing with The Fall of the House of Usher.
Actually a prequel rather than a direct follow-up to 2014's Ouija, this 2016 effort is a far more nuanced, intelligent film than that first feature, with plenty tonally in tune with something like 1980's vastly underrated The Changeling or even Billy Friedkin's The Exorcist.
As for the plot, Ouija: Origin of Evil takes Lin Shaye's Paulina character of the initial movie and goes back to a time when Paulina was 15 years of age. With all of the charm that a 1960s setting so often brings, we find Paulina and her sister Doris tormented by spooky Ouija-driven shenanigans thanks to their mother Alice's dabbling as a medium. As detailed in the first Ouija, this is the story of how Doris and Alice wind up dead, and how Paulina is left in the institutionalised state we find Shaye's iteration of the character in.