Witchboard

The board in Kevin Tenney's 1986 cult favourite was a plain Ouija. In 'Witchboard', it's a carved wooden pendulum board made in 17th century France, and that's far from the only change. Chuck Russell, who made 'A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors' and 'The Blob' before moving on to 'The Mask' and 'The Scorpion King', wrote and directed it, his first horror film in over twenty years. Of the original, he keeps little beyond the title.

Emily is a recovering heroin addict living in New Orleans with her fiancé Christian, a chef about to open his own restaurant. Out foraging for mushrooms, she finds a round board with symbols around the rim and an eye at its centre. It was recently stolen from a museum, though she has no idea, and Emily can't stop reaching for it.

Soon she's having visions of a life that isn't hers, in France during the witch trials, where a sorceress called Naga Soth is on the run from a bishop. Back in the present, people around the couple start dying in gruesome ways. Desperate, Christian turns to his ex Brooke, an antiquities expert, and her friend Alexander Babtiste, a wealthy occultist whose interest in the board may not match his own.

Madison Iseman plays Emily and Aaron Dominguez, from 'Only Murders in the Building', is Christian. Mel Jarnson, Charlie Tahan ('Ozark') and Jamie Campbell Bower, Vecna in 'Stranger Things', complete the cast. Russell wrote the script with Greg McKay, drawing, he says, on real French witch trials, and although the story is set in New Orleans, much of it was shot in Montreal in 2023.

It premiered at Montreal's Fantasia festival in July 2024 and opened in 580 US cinemas in August 2025, before Vertigo Releasing put it out on digital in the UK on 2 February 2026. Reviews were mixed. Critics enjoyed its eighties and nineties horror feel, the elaborate kills and Bower's scene stealing villain, but found the tone uneven, the characters thin and the running time, close to two hours, hard to justify.

• Horror
• Horror
• Mystery