By age 9, Talk to Me directors Danny and Michael Philippou had already made their first original horror movie. It was called Pink Flamingo and it starred their sister’s favorite childhood stuffed animal—which, they recalled, got “progressively more and more fucked-up” when they went on to shoot seven sequels, with titles like Evil Flamingo: The Silent Room and Evil Flamingo: Resurrection.
“It was really really shit,” Danny told The Daily Beast’s Obsessed. “We’d pretend that thing (the flamingo) was killing all our friends.”
Without missing a beat, Michael jumped in. “Yeah,” he added with an infectious cackle, “we covered [it] in tomato sauce and stuff, and then when we finished filming, we’d put it back in her room like she wouldn’t know.”
Until recently, the Philippous were best known for their work on YouTube, where they run the channel RackaRacka, which specializes in horror-comedies filled with practical effects. This year, however, they’ve added “feature film directors” to their list of credentials, with the haunting horror film Talk to Me. The film feels like a culmination of years of practice with laughs and scares—a carefully calibrated journey that soothes its viewers with humor just in time to snap them back into hell with a single horrific blow.
Talk to Me follows a group of teenagers as they become enraptured with an embalmed hand that allows its user to speak with the dead. Spend more than 90 seconds playing host, the legend goes, and the ghostly guest becomes permanent. At the core of the film is Mia (Sophie Wilde), who becomes obsessed with the hand and the spirit world it helps her access as she struggles to process the loss of her late mother. Naturally, Mia pushes the limits of the risky game until she goes too far, doing perhaps irreversible damage to a friend. As it so often turns out, the door to the spirit world is much easier to open than it is to close.
At first, the teens seem to be having a blast with the hand, even as some in the group have their reservations. Over time, however, their parties start dwindling into smaller, sadder affairs. At that point, Danny said, “It’s like, it’s not about having fun with this thing anymore. It’s more like, ‘I’m relying on this thing to be happy.’”
Perhaps no one embodies that dynamic more than Mia, whose desperation to reach her mother makes her easy prey for the embalmed hand. For all the powerful performances in Talk to Me (including from Aussie royalty Miranda Otto) Wilde is an undeniable marvel.
The Philippous recalled that they lost out on $1 million in funding for casting a no-name star, but after Wilde’s audition, they knew it would pay off. “We just knew that she was right,” Danny said. “And so like we reinvested our fees to get her; our producer reinvested her fees to get her. We were just like, she’s not a star now, but we know that she will be.”
Based on the final product, that hunch paid off.
In retrospect, the Philippous’ ascent to their directors’ chairs seems inevitable. During their childhoods, the two said they made six films and an 87-episode television series that basically no one ever watched. After high school, Danny began uploading fake “fail” videos to Facebook “just for fun,” and eventually one went viral—prompting a friend and YouTuber to encourage them to try the platform out.
When they created their YouTube channel, the Philippous said, they decided to make a sincere effort. Michael described the project as “a chance to try new things.”
“It was just constantly just building our arsenal and building ourselves up,” Danny said, “so that when it was time to do a film that we were ready.”
Beyond their work on YouTube, the twins said they both worked on various film productions (often for free) in order to learn the ropes. It was during those experiences that they learned how sets are run, and the ways that crew morale can affect a finished product.
During its debut at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, and later at South by Southwest, Talk to Me enthralled viewers with its clean, compelling story and impeccable character work. Although the film doesn’t exactly reinvent the wheel (many a horror-movie adolescent has suffered the consequences of communing with the dead) something about it does hit differently than previous versions of this time-tested premise. There’s a brutality to its visuals and sound, which knocked the wind out of me even when I saw them coming. At the same time, Talk to Me’s core characters feel genuine and instantly lovable, even when they’re being pretty awful to one another.
One of the Philippous’ goals while making the film was to dramatize the double-edged sword of being young and having grown up online. “There’s like a bit of a depression that comes along with social media these days,” Danny said. “People are trying to escape their down times with different—I think that a lot of vices are glorified these days, as well.”
On one hand (sorry), social media allows its users to find like-minded people with similar interests, Michael granted. “That’s why a lot of YouTubers get followings, because they’ve got personalities that maybe at school they’re hated for, but online, they’re not.” At the same time, he added, “there’s the doubt… and that kind of attention-seeking nature that naturally comes with it.”
The Philippous knew that Wilde was their star from the moment she auditioned, and she confirmed it over and over again during filming.
“She was committed to the point where there were days where I asked her to come to set without having slept to sort of help fracture her headspace, and she was committed to that,” Danny said. “There’s a moment in the scene where she hits herself, and that was a moment that caught us off guard because we were in the closet just shouting directions from inside, and she started doing that for real. It made everyone jump—she was just so into it.”
Meanwhile, the directors recalled, casting The Thin Red Line and Lord of the Rings star Miranda Otto was both surreal and monumentally helpful, in that it allowed them to cast even more unknown actors. At the same time, Danny admitted, “It was a little bit daunting, though, directing Miranda Otto. I mean, who are we to direct Miranda Otto?”
When they met in person, however, Danny said Otto was “literally like an auntie” and eager to work as part of the team.“There was never any ego,” he said. Michael added that the two “did a bunch of improv stuff with her, and she's just hilarious.”
As excellent as the film’s human cast might be, a horror movie built around a prop can only be as good as the central object itself—and Talk to Me knocked the creep factor out of the park with its ghoulish hand. Outstretched into a handshake formation and covered in ominous scribblings, the severed gray appendage is about as cursed as they come—and it only becomes more powerful in the hands of the film’s actors, who make such a compelling show of flinging it about. (Or is it the other way around?)
“We wanted to be desperate and reaching,” Danny said. “We knew we wanted it to have a sense of deep history.”
That said, Michael added, “It took so many molds to try and get the shape right... The final one arrived on the first day that we needed it. Because that’s how long it took.”
The time was well-spent—and apparently, there’s even more to the hand than meets the eye. The filmmakers also created a whole world of lore around the object that the film just barely touches. Their hand bible, Danny said, “shows everyone that’s had the hand, all the demons that connected to the kids and why, how they died. The laws of the hand, the person that they belong to—there's so much. It was so thick.”
When asked if they’ve contemplated a sequel, Danny said that if the opportunity arose, they “100 percent would jump on it.” He noted that while writing their first film, they also began writing scenes for a second. If they play their cards right, there might be a lot more handshakes (and disembodied hands, and evil birds, and who knows what else) in their future.
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