This summer’s Talk to Me, the directorial debut of RackaRacka YouTubers Danny and Michael Philippou, was a grisly and gutsy revelation, a hugely profitable low-budget horror flick from Australia that keyed in beautifully on the modern teen experience and all the horror that entails. As we put it in our own glowing review at Paste, “Fierce, fun, and steeped in youthful energy, it’s a film that’s willing to go to some truly dark places in its exploration of grief, death and what it means when we reach too far into the beyond, but it’s also never afraid to laugh along the way. That juxtaposition alone is enough to make it one of the year’s must-see horror films, an addictive thrill ride that never loses its own playful spin on some classic horror ideas.”
And as anyone who has seen Talk to Me knows, the film wouldn’t be half as memorable without its important key prop: The severed, enameled hand! In the movie, the hand is like an urban legend artifact with an unknown history–it is implied to have passed from person to person, wrecking lives as it goes when teenagers (it’s always teens, somehow) disregard the rules of its safe use when speaking with the dead. Simply grasping the hand and speaking the words “talk to me” opens a bridge, allowing the hungry spirits from the other side to temporarily possess one’s body and communicate with the living.
