With Halloween just behind us, the cinematic dregs of the period are still stinking out cinemas across the UK.

For every legitimate gem like The Babadook, there’s something like Ouija, which is more than just a bad film. Ouija is something even worse – a thoroughly lazy piece of work that doesn’t even really attempt to deliver legitimate scares to its audience.

Ouija faces stiff competition for the crown of ‘Worst Horror Film of the Year’. Since the beginning of 2014, such travesties as Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones, Devil’s Due and Annabelle have completely failed to conjure up any lasting impressions.

Ouija, however, is almost certainly the worst horror film of the bunch. It currently sits at a dismal 7% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Here are ten reasons why it’s such a turkey.

10. Michael Bay and Hasbro

Beloved by American teenagers, the Ouija board at the centre of the film can be picked up in just about any toy store, courtesy of Hasbro. This greatly diminishes the mystique of Ouija‘s central artefact and makes it difficult to find it scary.

The film also suffers from the inclusion of Hasbro’s favourite filmmaker, Michael Bay, as a producer. Best known for the Hasbro-licensed Transformers franchise, Bay and his production company Platinum Dunes have recently worked on a number of horror properties. Bay’s work as a producer on poorly received horror flicks like A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010) and The Unborn has been heavily criticised and his unsubtle footprints are all over Ouija.

This is a company that clearly does not understand how to pick a decent project to back. Perhaps they’re more concerned with toy tie-ins?

9. Premise

It’s difficult to get away from the fact that the central conceit of Ouija is all wrong.

We’re decades on from the time when anyone believed in the spiritual power of ouija boards. This makes the core narrative concept an enormous leap of logic for almost the entire audience.

If we don’t believe in the ouija board, how are we meant to believe in the demonic force it unleashes?

8. Sound Mixing

As with many horror films, Ouija uses its score and sound mixing techniques to enhance the scare factor of the visuals. Moments of terror are soundtracked by a loud bang, crash or some other form of cacophony, often with no actual diegetic relevance to what is happening on screen.

This is particularly a problem during Ouija‘s myriad “false scares”, where the source of a sharp shock is revealed to be something entirely innocuous, such as a friend appearing from behind a door.

Several of these moments are attached to a truly ridiculous blast of Anton Sanko’s score, knocking the audience for six and relieving all of the tension that has been built. It’s a prime example of the tension release mechanism that, according to YouTuber Chris Stuckmann, is a problem with the modern horror genre as a whole.

7. Performances

In a film so packed with creative flaws, it seems almost unfair to blame the cast for Ouija‘s issues. However, the lazy and unimaginative performances at the centre of the film are a huge part of why it doesn’t work on any level.

When I reviewed The Quiet Ones, I called Olivia Cooke “a shining star” in the midst of a bad movie. There’s no trace of that promise in Ouija, in which she becomes an insipid horror film leading lady who comes with all of the genre’s pitfalls. She’s unwaveringly sentimental, utterly naive to the world and incredibly gullible – a caricature amalgamated from just about every horror character of the past.

The rest of the cast don’t come out of it any better, with most of them doing an unmemorable job as horror movie cannon fodder.

6. Lazy Production

Amongst this year’s crop of Halloween horror films, Annabelle stood out as a blatantly lazy attempt at cashing in on a guaranteed moneymaker – the burgeoning franchise started by The Conjuring. Ouija is so much worse.

Nothing about the technical side of the film is interesting in any way. Stiles White’s direction is just as basic as the script he co-wrote with Juliet Snowden, full of clichés and full to the brim with a yawn-inducing lack of imagination.

Everything in Ouija, from the dialogue to the construction of the scares, sticks rigidly to a cookie cutter, genre-normal format. Stiles White makes no attempt to break the mold, sticking to every rule and producing something near identical to the standard horror movie formula of recent years.

5. Zero Logic

This list entry contains spoilers.

The plot of Ouija is utterly nonsensical at times. As with many films of this ilk, exposition is delivered in huge dumps rather than evenly across the movie.

The twists in the story – of which there are many – are telegraphed way in advance and still don’t make sense when the movie finally pulls the rug. The titular board soon becomes merely incidental to the plot as the malevolent spirit is unleashed into the world without the need for a conduit. In the case of the revelation of the identity and motivations of the spirits, it’s better to just sit back and laugh as the actual narrative is far too much of a mangled mess for a sensible picture to emerge.

There’s something about an abusive mother, a pair of girls, death and black magic. However, none of these elements actually combine to produce characters that make sense, especially given the rather comical inclusion of the ouija board.

4. Pacing

For a film that is under 90 minutes long, it’s quite shocking that Ouija manages to drag quite so often.

After the intriguing, if predictable, opening, the movie settles into the standard horror formula as it introduces its photogenic teen victims. It spends an inordinate amount of time doing this, given how little we learn about the characters and why we’re supposed to care about whether they live or die.

The scenes involving the ouija board itself go on for far too long, leaving the film with very little time to wrap up the many strands of its story. The entire final act feels incredibly rushed, taking the audience on a rollercoaster ride without giving them any time to process it.

3. Dialogue

Stiles White and Juliet Snowden are both capable of writing dialogue. Unfortunately, they must have forgotten all about that during the writing period for Ouija.

None of the characters in Ouija speak like normal human beings. Everything that comes out of their mouth is either some sort of unnatural quip, a boring cliché or a laughable chunk of exposition. There’s no connection between the band of youngsters and any band of youngsters who have ever really lived.

This hideous dialogue causes real problems as it turns scenes that should be scary into comedic set pieces. The whole film feels incredibly awkward as a result.

2. False Scares

The false scare – also known as a ‘Lewton Bus‘ – is a technique that has been a part of horror cinema for almost a century. Used sparingly, it can be an excellent way to pay off tension without having to reveal the film’s ‘Big Bad’ too early.

However, when these scares are overused, they can suck the tension out of a film. Amidst the recent glut of ‘cattle prod cinema’ (see above video), the overuse of false scares is an endemic issue that is hurting the horror genre.

There is one particularly ridiculous false scare in Ouija where the sudden appearance of Olivia Cooke’s friend is met with such a ludicrous sound effect that you can’t help but jump. That doesn’t mean that the film is effective and, actually, it leaves it feeling a lot less intense than it would otherwise have felt.

1. Lack of Genre Literacy

Ouija feels like a horror film made my people who have never seen a horror film.

The best modern horror movies are those that have been made by filmmakers with a real love for the genre, like James Wan and Alexandre Aja. In the case of Ouija, it’s almost as if the filmmakers were simply handed a list of conventions and tropes and told to cram in as many as they possibly can.

Stiles White has been in and around horror movies for his entire career, from working in the special effects department on The Sixth Sense and Lake Placid to writing credits on The Possession and Knowing. However, it seems that he has learnt nothing from those roles, as Ouija is not a film that feels genre literate in any way.

With a bit of self-awareness and a bit of knowledge of the genre, Ouija could have risen above its origins. However, the finished project is nothing like as good as it could and probably should have been.

Do you agree that Ouija is the worst horror film of 2014? Are there any other films that could stake claim to that title? Let me know in the comments section or tweet #GoreGaze.