After Linda releases herself from the hospital, she is attacked by Malfeitor. The next day, Jim finds their home in disarray, before a possessed Linda attacks him. Dewhurst enters to accuse Jim of the murders, but Linda strikes him with a fire poker. Jim takes his revolver, where Linda tells him that he is the “portal”, taunting him into committing suicide. He shoots the board before he is pushed through a window and lands on a car. After the events, Jim and Linda resume their lives and marry each other. Their landlady, Mrs. Moses, finds the board and wonders if it still works. The board is thrown into a box, where its planchette moves to the word “yes” by itself. Tenney was writing the script while a student at the University of Southern California. Inspired to write a horror film based on a Ouija board, he began to research the concept of "progressive entrapment," an element that figures briefly in "The Exorcist" (1973), in which an individual becomes progressively "entrapped" by a spirit. As some elements of the script were based on incidents he had heard of while researching the experiences close friends and others had with Ouija boards, he believed the viewers would "resonate" from this being based in the facts, despite it being fictitious. Though Tenney never believed in the board himself, he admitted the board was "creepy." One of the central themes of the film was the "bromance" of Jim and Brandon, whose friendship was compromised in a love triangle with the character of Linda. Tenney viewed the film about the board, who he sees as a character, forcing Jim to reflect on his relationships with Linda and Brandon, the latter whom he had a falling out with. Once he knew this was the story, it was easy for him to work it around with the stories he had researched about. In writing the characters, he drew from his own background to make them "three-dimensional", and thought it would be interesting to see Jim's disestablished friendship with Brandon come back together. The character of Jim was based on Tenney himself, and wrote him to be a construction worker from when he, his brother Dennis Michael Tenney, and their friend James W. Quinn worked in construction before moving to Los Angeles. He stated in interviews that despite it being a horror film, he sought to create a character-driven film. When Tenney's friend, Rolan Carol, had to drop out of university due to financial issues, he got a job at a commodities' firm where the owner, Walter Josten, was getting bored of commodities.