What better time to talk to dead people for fun than the festival to celebrate the birth of Jesus? Ouija boards are flying themselves off shelves and under trees this Christmas, according to trends data released by Google. The company has recorded a 300 per cent increase in searches for the spirit-bothering devices, fuelled by a terrible movie that was effectively a feature-length ad for a board game, an appearance on The Archers, and the Victorian belief that if the dead could speak, they would use a plank of a wood and the alphabet.
Ouija, released in October in time for Halloween, was, by all accounts, a cliché-ridden turkey about a group of teenage girls who experiment with a board and get scared. It has a disastrous 7 per cent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, the review aggregating site, but became an occult hit, to the delight of its backers. Hasbro, the toy company behind Monopoly, pushed for the revival of the film, which had stalled in development, and partnered with Universal to make it happen. Its Ouija Game, including a glow-in-the-dark version, is ”“ sure enough ”“ the biggest seller online.
Read it all from the Independent. One C of E clergyman is concerned: ”˜It’s like opening a shutter in one’s soul and letting in the supernatural,’ says Peter Irwin-Clark, a Church of England vicar who has witnessed the dark side of Ouija. ”˜There are spiritual realities out there and they can be very negative.’
Talk to anyone in any denomination that is involved in dealing with the demonic or exorcisms. They will tell you to stay away from this stuff.
There continues to be an interest — among Millennials, especially — in the supernatural. I’m unsure if this is a product of the continued move through post-modernity or something else entirely, but we’ve certainly witnessed a significant interest in Wicca over the past two decades.