Witchboard (2024) Review and Ending Explained
Witchboard (2024), directed by Chuck Russell, isn’t just another possession flick—it’s a strange, gothic, and blood-soaked descent into how history, addiction, and vengeance bleed into the present.
What starts as a seemingly familiar horror premise (haunted object, doomed couple, ancient evil) spirals into a layered narrative about ancestry, curses, and the inescapable hunger for control. It’s messy, it’s ambitious, and honestly, it’s way more interesting than I expected.
Story Recap, Synopsis, and Review
Let’s start from the top.
Emily is our central figure, and right away she’s framed not as your typical horror heroine but as someone already burdened—a recovering heroin addict. Horror films have a long tradition of mapping personal trauma onto supernatural threats (think The Babadook or Hereditary), and here Emily’s sobriety and guilt hang over every scene.
When she stumbles across the spirit board, it doesn’t feel like random chance; it feels like fate is dangling temptation in front of her again.
At first, the board seems harmless—even helpful. Emily finds her lost engagement ring, which is a great touch because it plays into that horror trope of the gift before the curse.
Many haunted-object films (from Christine to The Monkey’s Paw) start with the object giving something the characters want, before turning malignant. But then the deaths start piling up—Richie’s gruesome accident in the kitchen, Jessie’s rooftop plunge—and we realize the board is less about wishes than about control.
What’s interesting here is how Emily rationalizes it. She thinks the board is letting her connect to her subconscious, which almost reads like a metaphor for addiction: “It’s just me, I’m in control, this isn’t dangerous.”
But horror loves proving addicts wrong—the more she embraces the board, the more it consumes her, until she’s basically a vessel for Naga Soth, the 17th-century witch.
Now, Naga Soth is fascinating. She’s not just a random demonic entity pulled from thin air; she’s a persecuted witch from 1690s France.
This brings Witchboard into folk-horror territory, reminiscent of The Witch or Sleepy Hollow, where history itself is a kind of curse. Bishop Grogan, who condemned her, wasn’t some noble crusader against evil—he wanted to exploit her power for himself. This twisted hypocrisy echoes real witch trials, where misogyny and fear of female autonomy drove much of the violence.
And then enters Alexander Babtise, the New Age pagan who’s all charm and mysticism on the surface but is actually a manipulative cult leader.
His connection to Bishop Grogan ties everything together: he’s the descendant of the persecutor, Emily is the descendant of the persecuted. This ancestral curse dynamic has deep horror roots (see Candyman or The Grudge), where the sins of the past refuse to stay buried.
I have to give the film credit: it doesn’t just throw jump scares at us. The set pieces—Richie’s mutilation, the mushroom-poisoned dinner party, the time-slip possession sequence—feel theatrical, almost operatic.
And that fits with Chuck Russell’s style. Remember, this is the guy who made The Blob remake (1988) and The Mask (1994)—both films that take big swings visually and narratively.
The dinner party massacre is the film’s centerpiece, and it’s one of those scenes where you can tell Russell wanted to flex.
The idea of hallucinogenic mushrooms causing people to murder each other is brilliant—it combines body horror, psychological horror, and historical repetition (it mirrors Naga Soth’s original curse on her village). It also makes Emily’s role deeply tragic. She’s not actively killing, but she’s the conduit for the violence, trapped in Naga Soth’s vengeance cycle.
From here, the story accelerates toward its third act: the cult, the ancestral estate, the fiery destruction of the board.
Christian, the fiancé, becomes less of a partner and more of a tragic bystander. His attempt to burn the board—classic horror logic—fails because Alexander is too devoted to his bloodline obsession. And when Christian dies, it lands as both inevitable and heartbreaking, because he’s been powerless from the start.
Ending Explained
Okay, now let’s dig into the ending, because this is where cinephiles will have the most fun.
First, we get the time-loop resolution with Naga Soth. When Emily’s soul is pushed back into her body, Naga Soth reclaims her original form in 1690s France. Instead of being a passive victim, she overpowers Bishop Grogan and drags him into the flames.
What’s clever here is how the film reframes the witch-burning trope: instead of ending with the silenced woman, it ends with the silenced man. Grogan, the so-called judge, becomes the condemned.
This is the movie telling us outright: witchcraft wasn’t the evil—patriarchal abuse of power was. It’s a statement you rarely see so bluntly in supernatural horror, which often takes witches as villains at face value.
Here, Naga Soth isn’t entirely innocent—she did curse her village—but the movie positions her rage as righteous.
Back in the present, Alexander snatches the board from the fire, proving his devotion to preserving his ancestral control. But Emily, finally freed of Naga Soth’s possession, shoots him.
What’s poetic here is that Emily breaks the cycle not by banishing Naga Soth but by killing the man who embodies Grogan’s legacy. Christian dies, yes, but Emily survives, which feels deliberate: the survivor is the addict, the persecuted, the “tainted” one society doubted.
And then comes the sting in the tail—Alexander’s body bag moment. His eyes open, which implies two things:
(1) he’s still bound to Naga Soth’s curse, or
(2) his obsession with the board gave him a kind of eternal life.
Horror franchises love these ambiguous teases (see Insidious or Annabelle), and this one is ripe for sequels.
But the real kicker is the Vatican coda.
Brooke and Emily hand over the board and bone pendulum to a Catholic priest, who immediately starts communicating with it. Then Naga Soth appears behind him. This is classic Devil’s Advocate territory—suggesting that the church, which historically persecuted witches, might now be just as corrupted and power-hungry as Grogan or Alexander.
If the sequel happens, I’d bet it pivots into Vatican horror (think The Nun but smarter), with Brooke as the audience’s skeptical anchor.
Why This Ending Matters
Here’s why the ending isn’t just a cheap setup:
- It reclaims the witch figure. Instead of being a faceless villain, Naga Soth is contextualized as a victim of systemic abuse. The ending suggests her violence is revenge, not evil.
- It critiques institutions. Grogan’s hypocrisy, Alexander’s cult, and now the Vatican priest—these are all examples of male-dominated institutions exploiting or suppressing female power.
- It reframes Emily. She doesn’t just survive—she embodies survival. As a recovering addict, she already knows how to resist temptation. Destroying Alexander is an extension of that resilience.
If you compare this to something like The Witch (2015), which ends with Thomasin embracing the coven, Witchboard takes a different tack. Emily doesn’t fully embrace Naga Soth—she resists her—but the film still validates Naga Soth’s rage. That ambiguity is what makes the ending resonate: it’s not about “good triumphs over evil.” It’s about who defines evil in the first place.
So, is Witchboard perfect?
No—it’s messy, sometimes overstuffed, and a little too in love with its mythology. But that’s also what makes it fascinating. It swings for the fences, giving us a possession movie that’s also a folk-horror, a revenge tragedy, and an anti-institutional critique.
The ending leaves us unsettled not because Emily lives or dies but because it suggests that power always finds new hosts. Alexander opens his eyes, the priest embraces the board, and Naga Soth endures. It’s a cycle of control, abuse, and vengeance that feels less like fantasy and more like a mirror to history.
If you’re a horror fan who loves movies that chew on big ideas while still delivering gory spectacle, Witchboard deserves your attention.
And if you’re a cinephile, the ending is where you’ll find the real meat—because it doesn’t just close the story, it reopens centuries of questions about who gets to write history, and who gets burned for it.
