If you got duped into playing a
game that unleashed an evil witch into your world, what would you do?
This story has layers…in that it’s really four short films framed by a fifth, all
revolving around the notion of death not being the worst thing that could happen to you. No
duh. That disease that locks you inside your body like a prisoner is definitely worse.
But, because I love surviving the seemingly impossible, we’re gonna do it with all
the shorts here, both the imaginary ones these posers read from The Red Book – the
satanic vessel of a old witch – as well as their story in which the witch breaks them
body and soul for her own purposes.
I’m going to break down the mistakes made,
what you should do, and how to beat the THE BOOKWORM WITCH in THE RED BOOK RITUAL.
Our story begins with all the footage that got cut from Sumara’s video in the Ring. A witch
cuts her hand, presses it to a book, draws on the walls in her own blood, and then unalives
herself—you know, a typical Tuesday night.
It’s a satanic ritual that ties her soul to
the book, allowing her to…sort of become a less cool version of The Babadook crossed
with those women on TikTok who are obsessed with the smuttiest literary smut to ever smut.
We cut to a parlor where three morons are messing around with the occult. BEA is the gullible final
girl who SOPHIE and JUSTIN like to torment with scary stuff. They convince Bea that they
should play a game called The Red Book.
Sophie muddles the rules with the setup, so I’m
gonna streamline it for you. Go into a quiet room, light a candle, and select any red book without
illustrations. Close your eyes. Place your hand on the book’s cover. Verbally ask “Red Book,
may I enter your game.” Then open the book to a random page and see what the book has to say.
That’s what the game is. You ask a question with your hand on the book, then open the book
to see the answer. Sophie’s only warning is that you have to ask permission to play and then
permission to quit or the game will punish you.
The book Bea happens to have is the ACTUAL
red book marked by the witch. She doesn’t know what it is, it came with their house.
So did the gray cat roaming around the room.
Now, it’s not entirely clear if they’re making
it up or telling her some fabled version of what they actually heard about Bea’s house, but
Sophie and Justin tell Bea that her house used to belong to a witch who vanished and the cat is her
familiar who likes to possess the house’s owners.
With that, we cut into the first
story, told by Sophie and Justin, and it ISN’T one from the red book.
We meet a WW1 soldier returning home. He’s injured with a steady limp in his step
as he stumbles onto his dreary sepia-toned farm. He finds a strange, blood-covered dress
on the fence and rushes inside looking for his wife BONNIE. The house is a wreck and he finds
Bonnie naked in bed with a color-changing cat.
He asks Bonnie what happened, but she’s nonverbal,
exhausted, and dirty. There’s no food in the cupboard, the electricity doesn’t work, and
Bonnie’s taken to hunting game with a crossbow.
When she wanders into the woods, the
soldier reconnects with his dog who won’t enter the house and eviscerates
Bonnie’s cat at his first opportunity.
He buries the evidence, but Bonnie definitely
notices when she comes home with dinner.
I mean…she’s still riding that fine line
on the hot versus crazy index, so…maybe.
It doesn’t take long for Bonnie to freak
out. Or for her to realize that he knows what happened. He tells her it was
the dog, and she grabs the crossbow.
The soldier follows her to the barn where
he sees her cat is still alive and grabs the shovel to…apparently ruin his effed up marriage
in the worst way possible. Bro, the first time was an accident—there is no coming back from
intentionally hulk-smashing your wife’s pet.
But he never gets the chance, taking
a sudden bolt to the shoulder.
He tussles with his wife, takes the bow
and shoots the cat, only for it to vanish like smoke and p*ss off his Mrs. even more.
He survives by clocking her with the shovel and realizes she’s possessed as the cat
rematerializes and Bonnie’s eyes shine. In the end, he leaves home for good.
So…decent mental health services are a VERY recent thing. For example, it
wasn’t until 1967 that there was a law preventing the institutionalization
of patients against their will.
This soldier is on his own, is what I’m saying.
I know he just got home, but if he has family or a minister to turn to, that could help,
but at the time, his only other option would probably have been carting her away.
You and I would be calling a therapist and an exorcist…but since nobody but
the cat actually died, it’s survivable by doing exactly what he does – leaving
her to live her best witch puppet life.
Back in the parlor, Sophie and Justin laugh
at Bea’s fear, then they all begin the process with the red book, reciting the initial
question: “Red book, may I enter your game.”
They each take turns asking questions
and the answers are…figurative at best. But close enough to actual answers that
paranoia sets in. When Bea asks for proof that someone’s there, someone screams.
They freak out and Sophie asks how they can leave the game. Her finger slides
across the page like it’s possessed pointing out words like “danger” and “don’t
go” until a dark entity appears behind her.
Bea thinks the book is HELPING them for
some reason. She asks the book how many spirits are there and it says 3. Sophie
asks how they can leave the game and the book tells them to read it, turning by
itself to our first actual red book story.
This one’s short and kinda pointless
honestly. A couple, NICK and CHLOE, are driving through the desert after suffering
a miscarriage that’s emotionally drained them. In the middle of nowhere, they encounter a
strange feral child standing in the road.
They get out to investigate when a man pulls a
shotgun on them, warning not to touch the boy. Chloe assumes the man must’ve hurt the kid,
the guy calls the kid a demon, and Nick tries to play peacemaker. But Chloe feels like playing
hero tonight and the armed guy is trigger happy.
Chloe’s shot in the ankle, Nick beats the
old man half to death. The old man begs them not to touch the kid, Nick does anyway and gets
possessed. Chloe gets one look at the kid’s face and realizes she’s made a huge mistake.
Not that we know what that mistake is, since we never see the kid’s face, but maybe
this is the epilogue to When Evil Lurks.
In a scenario like this, the best
option is going to be the sucky one – just leave. See if you have service
on your phone. Record your location and go to the police. It’s a tough call – the
kid could be dead by the time you return.
But if you have to play hero, read the room
and try talking with the armed guy. If he’s not interested in talking, you could do
the brash, stupid thing of getting back in the car and running him over when he
thinks you’re going to drive away. It’s risky and you’ll be going to jail if this is
just a family squabble, but it’s your call.
When Justin finishes reading the story,
the book takes a single drop of his blood and he suddenly sees a figure appear in
the room, but he doesn’t tell the girls, so Sophie just hops right into the next story.
In Korea, a little girl GIA wakes to find a ghost sitting at the edge of her
bed repeating spooky crap.
It was a nightmare about her father. Gia’s mom
comforts her but won’t let the girl go check on her sick dad who mom says is sleeping in the
other room. Mom is about seven screws short of a functioning plane hatch. When her brother
in law calls to check on Gia’s Dad she lies about being away from home, then hides with
her daughter when he shows up at the door.
She tells Gia that daddy is sick and her
uncle wants the insurance money they’ve received to help, but the girl remembers
other times when her father was sick and they received money for that too.
The mom’s fine with the girl’s interest in her father up to a certain
point, but once it crosses that line, a strange jealousy settles around them. She calls
her daughter a bitch and holes herself away.
Gia’s curiosity gets the best of her
and she ventures into her dad’s room, where he’s strapped to the bed using some sort
of polyester twine. When he wakes he begs her to call her uncle when mom’s not around.
Gia hides under the bed as her mom enters, takes eye clamps and pries her husband’s
eyes open. She grabs a brooch pin and straddles him, preparing to blind him.
He’s saved by Gia’s sudden gasp. Mom tells Gia to come out then spins an abuse tale as old
as time. Mom says they’re basically running an insurance scam because dad can’t work and
he asked her to do this so they could pay for Gia. When Gia doesn’t believe her, mom
says she’s happy to let Gia take his place.
She drags Gia toward her tools of torture
and brings a knife to her daughter’s face, until the girl is forced to beg her
to continue hurting her dad instead.
Gia escapes the room, only to hear
her dad’s tortured ghost call her back. She discovers her dad dead and her mom
acting crazy nearby, and the story ends.
Definitely heavy crap. This one is unsurvivable
without a lot of preparation, which this family didn’t have time for. Teaching your kids how
to not only identify but RESPOND to strange and threatening behavior takes years, and it
has to be done in a way that doesn’t ruin their developing minds. And it takes a long time for
kids to realize they’re being abused because this household behavior is all they really know.
We learned earlier that this wasn’t the first quote-unquote scam her mom has done using
him as a canvas for her painful art. How much earlier is unclear too, but if there was
downtime in between, the responsibility rested on the dad to seek help then. Or to teach
her to call his brother whenever he asks.
My advice – teach your children a safety
protocol that can be used in most scenarios, as well as a safety phrase that triggers that
protocol. For example, tell them any time they hear you say flamingo breakdance, to immediately
pick up the phone and dial a trusted relative or the police for help. OR, if a phone isn’t
available to walk to a neighbor’s house.
And if you’re a parent in an abusive relationship
with your spouse – remember your kid is absorbing everything, neurons are firing, and futures
are being rewritten. Reach out to domestic violence charities and lawyers. Build your
support structure. And record everything.
This time, the book takes a drop of
Sophie’s blood as the Korean ghost joins the party and Sophie bolts in fear,
getting ejected from the game entirely.
Bea asks the book where Sophie is. The
book just tells them to keep reading.
The next story is… meh honestly, so we’re not
going to dwell on it for long. A guilt-stricken doctor named KARLA has been using some sort of
drug on her vegetative brother that’s keeping him alive, but not exactly living. Her sister
in law begs her to consider taking him off life support, but she won’t listen.
When she learns the hospital has run out of his meds, she’s forced into the East
Wing of the hospital, the Silent Hill wing that every major medical center has. When
she grabs the meds, spooky sounds begin, her stethoscope vanishes, a ghost appears, and
the door back to the working hospital is locked.
She looks around for another exit
as the lights flash, a record player starts working on its own and she discovers
a haunted bathtub. Her stethoscope suddenly reappears and she has a close encounter.
She drops the drugs and hides, but when she looks back the meds are gone. She wanders deeper
to retrieve the vial and the ghost terrifies her.
It’s her brother. He motions for her to let him
go and she finally does, leaving the drugs behind, returning to his room, and pulling the plug.
Yeah, you know what I’m gonna say. Ghost bro wanted one more scare for himself cuz none of
this was necessary. Could’ve just appeared as himself and told her, so…moving on.
The book takes a drop of Bea’s blood as she explains that the hospital was
apparently about her mom. She suddenly sees Karla wandering off and follows.
Justin hears Sophie call for help and follows the sound, where the witch reaches
out of the dark and breaks his neck.
I mean, they’ve all technically broken the
rules at this point, because I’m gonna guess there’s a technicality about not leaving
the table, which they’ve already done.
Bea notices the wallpaper above where she
found the book is torn and tears it further, revealing part of some sort of blood magic on
the wall as we transition into another story.
In England circa World War 2, a woman
name Ella prepares communion wine before her father THE PASTOR confronts their
homogenous congregation and a creep named JOHN ogles her from across the dais.
We learn that there’s recently been a scandal in the house of the lord. Ella has a
female lover and John caught them together. He and another church member broke into the
woman’s house and kidnapped her, carrying her to a stake in the woods where they tied her up
and humiliated her, making Ella do the same.
Back in the church, the congregation
takes wine and the pastor assures them their sins are behind them…as everyone suddenly
succumbs to the poison Ella put in their drink.
After they’re dead, Ella heads to where her lover
is being held captive by the last church member and slits his throat from behind – NOT announcing
her presence. You see how that’s done folks?
And she and her lover escape
to live better elsewhere.
Yeah, so, I heartily give my NerdExplains seal of
approval. Screw those people. I mean, obviously, if you can escape without mass murder, probably
better, but we play with the cards we’re dealt.
Only a few notes – since you basically just
merked the entire village, I might suggest grabbing any cash and unmarked jewelry you can
before leaving. Also, grab that last guy’s body, put it in the church and set it on fire,
so they think EVERYONE died and don’t even think to come looking for you.
Also, they’re very lucky this is a humiliation church and not a murder church
otherwise her lover would already be dead, which is why it’s probably ideal to leave
BEFORE the mob pulls out their pitchforks.
Back with Bea, she discovers more of the blood
magic in the room right before a noose drops down and chokes her for seemingly no reason. She
returns to the salon where Sophie is holding her little brother hostage with a knife. She slices
the kid’s finger to feed the book pure blood, then recites some witchy crap
before sacrificing herself.
Bea sends her brother to hide
as the book begins to bleed, giving birth to the witch from the beginning.
Witch is lookin’ crusty, but she’s been saving all her power to take over her new
puppet…which turns out to be Bea. She grabs hold and pukes in her mouth.
The witch uses Bea to lure her brother out of hiding.
And the Movie ends.
How do we avoid this less than stellar
fate? It’s easy – pick a red book you already know by heart OR one that is
actually useful for answering potential questions…like the dictionary. Seriously,
webster’s sells a red copy for $5.
Once we’re in the game and we start noticing
crazy crap happening, we’re immediately asking Sophie if she knows HOW to quit the game. Then
we’re doing that until we’ve annoyed this bish into waiting for an easier target. We’re pulling
a Doctor Strange – we’re sitting at that table all night asking to quit over and over until she gets
so frustrated she either kills us or lets us go.
If you use a creepy book for
this, well you’re probably S.O.L.
As for the stories we get – only one is very
likely inescapable – the Korean child abuse story…and even then it’s because she’s sweet and
stupid. There are plenty of kids who would’ve bounced the second their mom called them a bitch.
For those reasons, I think the movie was MOSTLY BEATEN.
And remember – don’t play games you can’t win.
