The new horror hit Talk To Me has built a huge head of steam on advanced word of mouth. As A24’s latest offering impressed at the box office, there seems to be room for the spooky stuff to make a dent in a world obsessed with Barbenheimer. And to think that initially, directors Danny and Michael Philippou didn’t have the key element that may have helped this dreadful tale sink its claws into genre fans: that creepy hand.
As seen throughout Talk To Me’s marketing campaign, the off-putting relic that makes this contact with spirits from beyond possible was a concept that took a little time to be discovered. When speaking with our sibling site Total Film, director/co-writer Danny Philippou explained the moment that made it all come together thusly:
There was actually no hand initially until, like, the second draft. We found it in the second draft of the movie and all that sort of stuff. We wanted the hand to have a real sense of history, and to make clear that this thing has been passed around between hundreds of people, and been all over the world.
Thinking back on the trailer, poster and even the short commercials for Talk To Me, try to imagine this movie without its menacing mandible. It’s a complicated order, isn’t it? While it’s still early days for this promising rookie in the horror realm, it feels like the shorthand iconography for the Philippou Twins’ picture is going to be banking hard on “the hand.”
Based on a short film by actor/filmmaker Daley Pearson, the seed for Talk To Me’s idea was passed to Danny Philippou. Involving co-writer Bill Hinzman in the process, the process that wound up landing on the finished concept kicked off, which was also helped along by Danny watching the footage which would inspire the central characters and incident that the movie is centered around. Philippou laid out that piece of the puzzle as follows:
There was this footage that I saw of this neighbor of mine that I watched for a while, and he was experimenting with drugs for the first time. He was on the floor having a really negative reaction to what he was taking, and all his friends that were with him weren’t helping him though, they were filming him and laughing at him. That was a really big inspiration point.
Critical reactions to Talk To Me have labeled the film as “startlingly violent,” and that creepy pedigree was on top of similarly chilling responses to popular fan screenings held by A24. The next couple of weeks will be instrumental to how Danny and Michael’s sleeper hit lands itself in the minds of horror fans all over. Whatever happens, you’ve got to hand it to the team behind it all for developing such an effective scare out of such a simple bodily concept.
If you’ve seen the movie and want to know how Talk To Me’s hand works, those of you who don’t mind spoilers can head over to that educational lesson. Otherwise, you may want to hold off and wait to read that piece, as the film has just hit theaters and can probably be found pretty easily. If you’re curious about the upcoming horror movie schedule, you don’t need a special hand to bring you that information.