It’s difficult to believe that anyone would have the guts to make as hoary a device as a Ouija board the centerpiece of a horror movie anymore, but we do seem to be living in a “back to the basics” age when old-fashioned pictures like “The Conjuring” and “Insidious” have found big audiences. “Ouija” isn’t, however, likely to follow in their footsteps—not because the premise is stale, but because the realization of it is, quite simply, terrible.

Not technically—on that score “Ouija” is slick enough, with more than capable work from production designer Barry Robison, set decorator Kristin V. Peterson and cinematographer David Emmerichs, whose widescreen compositions have a degree of elegance. But in every other respect the picture comes off as a threadbare attempt at a frightfest—dumb, turgid and ultimately tedious.

The screenplay, for starters, is unbelievably thin and filled with lunatic touches. After their friend Debbie (Shelley Hennig) commits suicide following a solo session with a Ouija board she found in her attic, a quintet of her high school buddies—BFF Laine (Olivia Cooke), her foul-tempered younger sister Sarah (Ana Coto), Laine’s boyfriend Trevor (Daren Kagasoff), waitress Isabelle (Bianca Santos) and Debbie’s boyfriend Pete (Douglas Smith)—decide to find out what really happened by contacting the dead girl via the board, in the very house where she died. (Her parents have conveniently gone off somewhere, leaving Laine to look after the place.) Their efforts contact not their deceased friend, however, but a couple of other spirits, who turn out to be a girl named Doris and her mother, who lived—and died—in the house back in the fifties.

These two prove to be a troublesome pair, though which of them is truly evil and which the victim is a matter that Doris’ sister Paulina (Lin Shaye), long institutionalized after her family’s violent end, can’t really be relied upon to elucidate. What’s certain is that our heroes begin being picked off one by one in a variety of gruesome ways, though there’s no evidence that the authorities are ever brought in to investigate. Instead Laine and Sarah are instructed in the means of dealing with the forces they’ve unleashed by their grandmother (Vivis), and in a final face-off defeat the murderous ghost.

There are scads of obvious questions the narrative never answers, most notably the fact that Debbie’s family, who have apparently lived in their house for years, never bothered to clean out the attic until recently (it still contains loads of stuff left from the fifties—dolls and photographs, for example—in addition to the Ouija board), or noticed that a basement room contains a decaying corpse—a true example of dreadful housekeeping. At one point, moreover, a spirit morphs into a duplicate of one of the live characters to lure another to his death, though there’s no explanation why it should possess such a power (or, if it does, why it doesn’t employ it more often). Of course all the sitting-duck high schoolers act stupidly, wandering alone into darkened rooms, tunnels, and other forbidding locales to invite the “gotcha” moments on which the picture depends for its shocks. This is one of those movies in which virtually every supposed scare is generated by sudden cuts, ordinarily accompanied by loud bursts on the soundtrack. Real suspense, however, is in short supply—something that the phlegmatic pacing of director Stiles White and editor Ken Blackwell frankly italicizes—and the effects, while decent enough, never get past adequacy by today’s standards.

Then there’s the acting, which is atrocious. One might be tempted to damn Cooke, Kagasoff, Smith, Santos, Hennig and Coto by saying that their performances are of the quality one might find in the ensemble of a CW show, but that would actually be too kind; they more closely resemble what passes for acting on teen-centered shows on ABC Family. The grownups come off no better. Matthew Settle, as Laine’s disappearing dad, and Robyn Lively, as Debbie’s mother, have basically single-scene cameos. Vivis is hilariously earnest. And Shaye goes for wide-eyed ghoulishness with lip-smacking intensity. It’s only in her over-the-top turn that any humor creeps into what’s far too serious an effort.

White and his writing partner Juliet Snowden were apparently aiming for a “Nightmare on Elm Street” sort of vibe in “Ouija,” but they miss the imaginative jolt of Wes Craven’s movie by a mile. The one thing that their picture might manage to do is frighten impressionable youngsters off dental floss, which is put to some unpleasant uses here. That would hardly be a beneficial accomplishment, but then there’s nothing about this movie that could be called beneficial.