(2014. dir: John Pogue) It's a new Hammer Film, and it's "inspired by true events." In fact, accompanying the end credits, we are shown old photographs of what we are to assume are the original players in the real-life game. Very crafty.
The incident by which this was purportedly "inspired" is famous in Fortean circles, known as "the Philip Experiment". A group of Canadian intellectuals gathered in Toronto in the mid-70s with the aim of creating a ghost, or, more exactly, a tulpa, or collective thought-form, which would behave in the manner of a ghost. They began by creating a fictional character, an old Elizabethan named Philip Aylesford, gave him a life-story with details, even a portrait. Once they knew him very well, they began "table-tipping", trying to rouse him into communication. After a good year of very little happening, Philip came to life with a vengeance: not only rapping answers to questions on the table, but making it dance and levitate, lowering lights and temperatures at request.
Such stuff, although interesting in context of real life, is not particularly cinematic. The movie gives us something more traditional: a troubled girl locked in a room and tortured "for her own good" so that she will psychically manifest apparently supernatural phenomena. A professor of abnormal psychology at Oxford sequesters a small group of students in a spooky mansion to monitor the girl using the latest technology, bombarding her with loud music (Slade's version of "Cum on Feel the Noize", which had to sound just dreadfully vulgar in 1973), pulling her out of her cage now and then to strap her up with wires and berate her until she contacted "Evie", the evil alternate personality they were hoping to conjure. (The philanthropic idea was to get her to project the malignant personality into a foreign object, a doll, then destroy it along with its container, thereby freeing the girl from her madness. Brilliant, right? What could go wrong?)
In short, none of the movie bears any resemblance to anything that's probably ever happened outside of a horror film studio. It's well done, though, with Jared Harris leading the pack, a few shocks and chills along the way, a disappointing end, but a brilliant feel for the time and place.
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