As if winning all five of the major Oscar categories earlier this year and complying with SAG-AFTRA’s demands – which subsequently saw it receive interim agreements to film more movies – wasn’t enough to mark A24 as the people’s peerless dignitary of the film industry at the moment, it simply had to go the extra mile and distribute Talk to Me, the boldly-crafted supernatural horror (and these days, that’s saying quite a bit) that dared to carry forth the genre’s good fortunes that have been all but blossoming since last year.
Expertly blending possession horror and social satire, Talk to Me follows a group of adolescents who happen to stumble upon a severed hand that allows them to bring ghosts back over to the land of the living. Rather than running in the other direction like any sensible person not in a movie, they instead embrace it as the next social media phenomenon, and it goes over about as well as one would expect.
And while horror might not be as susceptible to the franchise bug as the likes of action or superhero films, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if a story like Talk to Me did get a follow-up or two, especially considering that directorial brothers Danny and Michael Philippou (Danny also had a hand in penning the script), seem to already be cooking in that department.
Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, the Philippou siblings opened up about the urges and questions that come with sequel territory, including potential set pieces and whether or not it should focus on the same group of characters as its predecessor.
“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.”
“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.”
It’s unlike A24 to slip into franchise territory, of course, but it’s not totally out of the question considering the very worthwhile plunge it took on Ti West’s X trilogy, so who knows; maybe we’ve just witnessed the birth of the Talk franchise without even knowing it.
Talk to Me is currently playing in theaters.