Talk to Me is one of the best horror films of the year. It is quietly scary… and yet the directors are the biggest pair of goofballs I have ever met. Identical twins Danny and Michael Phillipou got their start with RackaRacka, their YouTube channel with almost seven million subscribers. Many of their videos are surprisingly silly, but some have a darkness that hints at where their first feature film would take them.
Talk to Me follows a group of high schoolers who have found that the newest high involves letting dead spirits talk through them. They light a candle, grab a ceramic hand, utter the phrase, “Talk to me. I let you in,” then have 90 seconds to disengage their hand and blow out the candle or risk having the spirit stay. Unsurprisingly, things go wrong.
We spoke with Danny and Michael about their highly anticipated film, Talk to Me. Apparently they didn’t even know what the seance object was going to be–it was just “haunted object” in the first draft of the script. We also discussed what it was like to get picked up by A24, especially for these two A24 fanboys. Warning: the pair gets silly.