SPOILERS are ahead for Talk To Me, now playing in theaters.
This past weekend, one of the scariest horror movies in recent memory, Talk To Me, came out in theaters, and it’s becoming a hit already – against the odds of Barbie and Oppenheimer, no less. It boils down to a really effective concept: a group of Aussie teens come across a supernatural appendage and play with entering the spirit world for viral moments and cool points. Could the winning idea manifest into future sequels? The directors have thoughts.
Talk To Me was helmed by twin brothers Danny and Michael Philippou, who have made a name through their popular YouTube channel RackaRacka for the past decade. The A24 movie is their debut feature film, which premiered at Sundance earlier this year before the independent film studio picked it up for distribution. When asked by The Hollywood Reporter about the potential of a second Talk To Me movie, Danny said this:
Part of me is like, 'Yeah, maybe it is done.’ The other part of me is like, 'Oh, my God. Give me a sequel, please.' I've got these set pieces that I'm like, 'Oh, my God, I so badly want to shoot this. This is the coolest thing ever.' So, if A24 came to me and said, 'You know what? We'd like a sequel.' I wouldn't be able to resist. I'd want to do it so bad.
When Talk To Me hit theaters over the weekend, it became the second-best opening weekend for A24 behind Ari Aster’s Hereditary, which is thought of these days as a modern horror classic. Considering the indie movie’s early success, along with incredibly high rating, including CinemaBlend’s Talk To Me review, which gave the movie 4.5 out of 5 stars, we wouldn’t be totally surprised if the horror movie’s storyline doesn’t stop there. Michael Philippou answered the question with these words:
I guess a question would be, would you continue the story around Mia and those characters, or do you go to another part of the world? That's a debate.
Now if we can get into spoiler territory for a moment, Talk To Me’s ending sees its main character, Sophia Wilde’s Mia, dead and among the spirits that those with the hand can now “talk to.” With a movie like this, the filmmakers could very well continue to follow Mia in the spirit world, perhaps trying to get messages in from the other side rather than from the side of the living, as the first movie had it. It sounds like as the filmmakers currently contemplate themselves if they’d do a sequel, they would have to decide between bringing back Mia or perhaps following the hand as it gets into the hands of a completely different setting and group of people.
What’s particularly interesting about the idea of a sequel is indie movies like Talk To Me rarely find themselves becoming franchises. How cool (and violently terrifying) would it be if Talk To Me got to continue to horrify us with a sequel? Now, A24 has accomplished something like this recently for the first time with Ti West’s X trilogy. Shortly after X came out early last year, the filmmaker put out a chilling prequel called Pearl, and its sequel MaXXXine is among upcoming horror movies set to arrive that will round out the trilogy.
Whatever happens, we’re so excited to see Danny and Michael Philippou’s filmmaking career. Before a Talk To Me sequel can be in the works, the directors already have a Street Fighter film adaptation lined up.
