Note: This article was written prior to A24's announcement of a sequel to Talk to Me.
Talk to Me is a new horror movie with a great horror premise: a group of teenagers gain access to an embalmed hand and when they touch it and say "Talk to me," a dead person appears in front of them. When they say, "I let you in," they become possessed by that person's spirit until they let go. The group has a rule that they keep it to 90 seconds of contact to be safe.
In one of the reviews of the movie I read after seeing it, I was surprised to see the suggestion that there would probably be sequels. That's obviously common in horror. Most classic films in the genre have spawned sequels. Halloween, Jaws, Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Thing, The Blair Witch Project, The Exorcist, The Omen — all have given rise to follow-ups.
But it's less common in the age of A24 horror. The indie distributor behind Talk to Me has released many horror movies — Hereditary, Midsommmar, The Witch, Under the Skin, Tusk, It Comes At Night, Men, and others — but only Ti West's X has been sequelized. Its prequel, Pearl, was shot right after X wrapped, and a sequel MaXXXine is forthcoming. That’s it.
That likely has to do with A24's auteur driven approach. Directors like Ari Aster who have worked with the company on multiple films speak to its hands-off approach to talent. Aster's Beau is Afraid was an extremely uncommercial film that A24 nevertheless gave him a $35 million budget to make and released on IMAX screens. That's possible because A24's budgets are much, much smaller than that on average. Prioritizing filmmaker freedom and keeping (most) budgets small means that potential horror franchises tend to lay fallow. Would another studio have insisted on making sequels to hits like Hereditary, Midsommar, and The Witch? Probably. But that isn't A24's priority.
So, while Talk to Me seems sequelizable, Talk 2 Me (let alone Talk to 3) probably won't happen unless co-directors Danny and Michael Philippou are excited about it. Luckily for A24, that doesn't seem like long shot. The brothers have already shot some kind of prequel fleshing out Duckett, the victim in the film's prologue, told "entirely through the perspective of mobile phones and social media." In the same interview with The Hollywood Reporter, both Philippous expressed an openness to making a sequel. So, if it does happen, where could the story go from here? I see a few paths forward from where Talk to Me ends, but to discuss them we need to get into spoiler territory.
New Cast, Same Hand.
Talk to Me has a great central artifact with the embalmed hand and clearly established rules about how it works. There’s an electric montage early on that shows each of the kids at the party taking a turn in the chair. Things turn dark pretty early though, and the movie leaves a lot on the table. Talk to Me makes it clear that anybody can turn up when you touch the hand, just as long as they’re dead. That leaves a lot of room for different stories and future Talk to Me movies could even experiment with different genres. A new cast could take a trip to Graceland when the spirit of Elvis possesses one of their bodies. Or a famous serial killer could return to the world using the hand, opening the door for a Talk to Me slasher. Or a bank robber could possess a teen to go out for one last job. There are no real limits on where the series could go with this approach. Where there’s a hand there’s a way.
Anthology
John Carpenter originally wanted Halloween’s sequels to be a series of unrelated films, only connected by taking place on Halloween night. Halloween 3: Season of the Witch is the only movie in the franchise to depart from the slasher genre and the only one to abandon Michael Meyers altogether. It was a commercial and critical disappointment, but it’s still an interesting idea, and the Philippous could drill down on the bare essentials of what makes a Talk to Me a Talk to Me movie and invite other filmmakers to take a swing.
Other series have taken the anthology approach in a different direction, like V/H/S, where each new movie is a collection of horror shorts by up and coming filmmakers. A24 could use something like that as a horror incubator, preparing the next generation of talent to take the reins of a low-budget feature down the line.
Direct Sequel
Given where Talk to Me ends, this option seems the least likely, but that’s also what makes it exciting. As credits roll, a new group of people at a party have summoned Mia using the hand, making it clear that Mia is dead. People often joke that it would be fun to see a series where the lead character has died but returns for a new entry in hell. I share that desire to see a filmmaker commit to the bit, and would love to see a movie where Mia is dead and attempting to solve a mystery in her home town from beyond the grave or trying to make it back to the land of the living.
Whatever A24 and the Philippous decide to do I’m interested in seeing what the company and the brothers put out next. And, given that A24 is one of the only studios whose business model revolves around original work, maybe it’s better if we never see the spooky hand again.