Why Gen Z horror 'Talk to Me' (and its embalmed hand) is the scariest movie of the summer

"The Exorcist" brutally terrified kids for a few decades. Now the social-media generation is getting its own nerve-jangling, goosebump-inducing possession flick.

The indie horror movie “Talk to Me” (in theaters Friday) centers on a group of teens who get high through the conjuring of otherworldly spirits via an eerie embalmed hand and livestream the chilling results. This past January, the directorial debut of 30-year-old Australian twin brothers Danny and Michael Philippou was the latest in a series of horror breakouts from Sundance Film Festival – following in the influential footsteps of “Hereditary” and “Get Out,” with no less than Stephen King wanting to see it – and now arrives in cinemas as a relatable fright fest for the Gen Z crowd.

The goal was to make a film depicting "how kids would react today if there was possession,” Michael Philippou says. “We weren't setting out to make a statement on social media. But maybe we did.”

Here’s why “Talk to Me” is the scariest film you’ll see this summer (and maybe all year):

‘Talk to Me’ puts a contemporary spin on the possession film

On the anniversary of her mom’s death, Mia (Sophie Wilde) attends a party with some friends known for their viral videos of people seemingly being possessed. When she’s there, Mia decides to volunteer and finds out the rules of the challenge: You have to “shake” this wickedly weird embalmed hand, say “Talk to me” and allow the spirit inside you. Also, an important caveat is you must break the link before 90 seconds are up or it’ll want to stay.

“They're messing with a homemade bomb and they don't know what they're doing,” says Danny Philippou, the film's co-writer who was partly inspired by seeing footage of a neighbor boy trying drugs for the first time. “He was having a negative reaction to what he was taking, he was on the floor convulsing, and all the kids he was with were just filming him and laughing at him. And no one was helping him."

The Philippous capture the pitfalls of social media

Teenagers on the Internet is “just a world that we understand and it's the world we come from,” adds Michael Philippou, who with his brother are the brains behind the chaotic RackaRacka YouTube channel (which boasts 6.7 million subscribers). “Kids grow up with social media and you're still learning, your moral compass is still developing. There's positives and negatives and it's easy to fall to the negative side on social media. It's a strange time.”

The filmmaker points out a scene where Mia’s ex Daniel (Otis Dhanji) takes a turn with the hand and he’s more concerned that friends took a video of him making out with a dog while possessed than him bringing a strange entity into his body. “If you did something embarrassing back in the day, it would be spoken about then forgotten. Whereas now everyone's got a phone (and) 4K video in their pocket. That stuff can be immortalized and come back to haunt you. Kids aren't able to make mistakes these days because of that kind of stuff, which is frightening.”

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Connection is as much a part of the horror film as demons

The teens bond over the high they feel of being possessed during these social livestreaming parties. But Mia has a spirit stay in her for too long and begins to see visions of a figure that may be her late mom, and in trying to communicate with her, a seriously bad instance occurs and the situation spins out of control for the young characters. 

That search for connection in the film is “the most important thing,” Danny Philippou says, “even down to the phrases that they're saying with the hand. ‘Talk to me. I'm lonely. I need someone to talk to. I'm letting you into my body whether or not you're good or bad for me. Whether it's drugs or alcohol or sex, I'm letting you in.’ Thematically it's tied all the way through the film.”

The teens of ‘Talk to Me’ become something else entirely

The movie’s main characters face their demons, figuratively and literally: After they say, “Talk to me,” they’re forced to confront a spirit (and usually they look rather creepy) before letting them inside. “Each of those spirits are drawn to different emotions that the kids are going through and they're connecting to what they're thinking mentally,” Danny Philippou says. 

And the body is transformed once a supernatural passenger is on board. For example, Mia’s features become sunken and shadowy, a hellish voice emerges from her mouth and the pupils of her eyes become black. Danny Philippou says they wanted to capture the feeling of “when you see someone as a kid drunk or on drugs for the first time, that is that person, but at the same time you feel like you're staring at someone else."

That embalmed hand is the coolest new horror-movie accessory

Freddy Krueger’s clawed glove. Jason Voorhees’ machete. The annals of horror are rife with signature objects, and the “Talk to Me” hand – which has odd scribbles on it and gets passed on to naive new owners – is the latest in that freaky canon. In the first draft of the script, it was labeled as a nonspecific “haunted object,” Danny Philippou says, but with “hands and connection” being such strong motifs, “it just made sense.”

Why is it left-handed, though? That fact, its origins and even whose hand it is are secrets left up for interpretation. “Even things that are written on the hand are hints towards its mythology,” Danny Philippou says. “But we just wanted to sort of hint at it and let people see if they can figure it out.”