Australian twins Danny and Michael Philippou, known as RackaRacka to their 6.74 million YouTube followers, are – in their own words – “overstimulated”. They’re in the middle of a whirlwind press tour for their feature directorial debut, Talk to Me, the horror film that unleashed a competitive bidding war at this year’s Sundance film festival and landed them a high seven-figure deal with A24, the Oscar-winning independent film studio behind Moonlight and Everything Everywhere All At Once. Since then, the pair have seen their success rise beyond YouTube fame to new, thrilling Hollywood heights.
“We’re just so overwhelmed. And the whole thing feels really surreal,” Danny says from their hotel room in San Diego, where they’ve just wrapped up their Comic-Con panel. “Sometimes we’re doing 30 interviews a day,” Michael adds.
With a fresh, unrelenting energy, psychological tension and moments of shocking viscerality, Talk to Me plays a lot like the brothers’ own kinetic, borderline-chaotic dynamic. Set in Australian suburbia, it follows a bunch of teens who play a twisted party game with an embalmed hand that, when touched, allows the holder to be possessed by the dead – for 90 seconds tops, or risk being consumed by supernatural forces.
As unlikely as it may sound, there are notes of the Philippou brothers’ own upbringing in the Adelaide suburb Pooraka, where they spent their early teenagehood making comically violent and stunt-heavy home videos in their father’s house. Many of these videos went viral on the internet.
“We went back and shot Talk to Me at my old high school,” Danny recalls. “I was hanging out at that [same] bus station of the bus I used to always catch. The surroundings really inspired it. There was no way that we weren’t going to shoot it in Australia.” The atmosphere they wanted the film to have was similar to Danny’s memories of a car accident he was in when he was 16: “I was super disoriented and the world seemed to slow down.”
The first time the film’s protagonist – 17-year old Mia (played by Sophie Wilde), still struggling with the anniversary of her mother’s apparent suicide – says the words “Talk to me”, she’s immediately addicted to the ritual. And every time, the teens who gather to watch instantly capture each possession on their phones, touching on gen Z’s obsession with social media spectatorship.
The scares are delivered with a sophisticated suite of disturbingly real practical effects, bloody prosthetics and impeccably detailed bone-crunching sound design. Michael believes some of the execution can be attributed to “so much trial and error from the YouTube ways”. Understanding the nuts and bolts of pulling something off with few tools gave the first-time feature film-makers confidence. This included knowing how to shoot and get the “right coverage” for certain shots that seemingly wouldn’t work on paper – but later succeeded in the edit.
“There was a certain energy on set on days where we had to get an impossible amount of shots, so we had to go a little rogue. ‘We need to get these shots, we have no time to do it.’ We [were] literally run-and-gunning,” Danny says.
The brothers’ DIY approach complemented their clear-eyed decision to protect their creative control by refusing to sign their film away to a studio. To avoid “too many cooks in the kitchen”, they chose to take the riskier path: making an independent film. It was produced by Causeway Films’ Samantha Jennings and Kristina Ceyton, the team behind The Babadook. This meant, for example, having to reduce the shoot time from eight weeks to five because of budgetary constraints. The twins, along with their Australian cast and crew (whom they repeatedly describe as “awesome”), were “happy to help with compromising and coming up with creative ways to shoot things”.
“If we shot it in America … I don’t think the crew would have been able to pull it off,” Michael says.
“I think we have such a history in Ozploitation,” Danny adds. “We are a bit more raw with our film-making – which is really exciting.”
The brothers were surprised to find that the distinctly Australian qualities in the film have travelled well internationally. Kangaroo roadkill features prominently, the humour is dry and dark, and the Australian accents are strong. The twins consciously let their actors mumble certain lines – an Australian dialect tic that’s made even more naturalistic and youthful with the sheer amount of swearing in the film.
“I didn’t realise it had over 100 swear words,” Michael notes with a grin. “And the film isn’t afraid to take it a bit too far, which I think is probably an Australian thing too,” he adds, cackling with Danny.
The resurgence of the horror genre over the past decade has grown with it a new and younger generation of cinema fans getting behind original and artistically driven films, with writer-directors like Ari Aster (Hereditary, Midsommar) and Jordan Peele (Get Out, Nope) leading the charge. Many of the biggest horror films are also A24 films; its acquisition of Talk to Me has in turn caught the attention of the company’s young and enthusiastic international cult following.
The pair are mega A24 fanboys themselves. “They’re so film-maker first and they tell unique stories. Nothing feels it’s manufactured as a product, everything feels like art,” Danny says.
“A24 gave us their merch and clothes, and sometimes they come up to me and say, ‘You don’t always have to wear it’,” Michael adds, with the brothers bursting into laughter.
Slowing down doesn’t seem to be in the pair’s vocabulary and now their film-making idols, from James Wan and Steven Spielberg to Peele and Aster, are reaching out to them to watch the film. They recorded their delighted reactions in a YouTube video, with Peele even FaceTiming them to tell them their work had inspired him. In April, it was confirmed the brothers will be directing a live-action adaptation of the 1987 arcade game Street Fighter.
How are they dealing with it all? “This world is new to us. We didn’t even know what a sales agent was, so learning about this side has been really interesting,” Danny says.
“Even when you get a break, you can’t rest because Guillermo del Toro has tweeted about the movie,” Michael adds. “It’s like a nonstop dream.”
Talk to Me is released in cinemas in Australia on 27 July and globally on 28 July
