With exorcists warning about the dangerous increase in occult activity occurring around the world today, the situation is about to get worse after a popular Halloween movie has made the Ouija board one of the most popular Christmas gifts of the season.

The Daily Mail is reporting on the new commercial success of the Ouija board since the release of the movie, Ouija, this past Halloween. Google is reporting sales of the board are up 300 percent, leading to what some are calling a new renaissance in the board's popularity.

This sales boom is exactly what the toy giant, Hasbro, had in mind when it helped finance the movie earlier this fall. Even though the film was largely panned by critics, teens were intrigued with the thriller and the boards are now flying off the shelves.

"To some, the Ouija board represents a harmless form of enjoyment, a pretend-scary rite of passage for teenagers in search of thrills on a stormy night," the Mail reports. "But to others, churchmen included, it is a danger to be avoided, a trigger for psychological harm — or something worse."

For instance, a Catholic priest and exorcist who is based in Dublin warned that playing with the board can lead to horrifying results.

“It’s easy to open up evil spirits but it’s very hard to get rid of them,” he told the Independent. ”People, especially young people and teenagers who are likely to experiment with Ouija boards on a whim, can be very naive in thinking that they are only contacting the departed souls of loved-ones when they attempt to communicate with the dead using the boards.”

As a result, the demonic spirits they contact end up infecting their lives with all kinds of trouble.

"It’s like opening a shutter in one’s soul and letting in the supernatural,’ says Peter Irwin-Clark, a Church of England vicar who is familiar with the occult. "There are spiritual realities out there and they can be very negative."

He remains adamantly opposed to the sale of Ouija boards as toys.

"It is absolutely appalling. I would very strongly advise parents not to buy Ouija boards for children."

Some of the manifestations that can occur as a result of use include "having strange dreams, strange things happening to them, even poltergeist activity," he said.

Exorcists claim that some of the worst cases of possession begin with Ouija boards, as evidenced by the case which became the basis for the blockbuster film, The Exorcist.

In his article on the Ouija board, John Ankerberg cites the work of Carl Wickland, M.D., who wrote about ‘the cases of several persons whose seemingly harmless experiences with automatic writing and the Ouija board resulted in such wild insanity that commitment to asylums was necessitated."

The late Reverend Tom Willis, a Minister of Deliverance for the Anglican Archdiocese of York in the UK for half a century, corroborated Wickland's findings.

"In the Sixties, the Ouija board caused so many problems — people ending up in mental hospitals because of what they have experienced," Willis said in 2012.

Concerned parents have joined forces in the past to launch boycotts of the boards, such as this boycott of a new pink Ouija board directed at young girls which occurred in 2010.

But sales continue as dabbling in the occult arts becomes an increasingly popular past-time for youngsters, many of whom were raised on Hollywood's version of the occult, such as Harry Potter and Twilight, where magic spells and evil forces never seem to harm anyone except the bad guys.

In real life, nothing can be further from the truth.

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