Please understand – when I say pretentious A24 lovers, I mean me. I swear by A24. When I play those filmmaking sims where you start a production company, I name all my films after A24 movies. They have produced or distributed many of my favourite films of the last few years, like Hereditary,Everything Everywhere All At Once, Moonlight, and The Lighthouse.
Their horror, in particular, has tended to be unique, striking and deeply discomfiting, just the way I like it. There have been very few A24 horror movies that haven’t hit the mark for me – they just have impeccable taste. I still haven’t recovered from Hereditary, which I’ve forced several groups of friends to watch with me so we can all be horrified together. The very last shot of Saint Maud still appears in my dreams. Beau Is Afraid has been my most anticipated movie for months.
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Alas, no longer. Talk to Me is my best friend now. The first trailer for the film came out this week and it looks vile. I say that with the utmost respect. The movie follows a group of teenagers who have a weird hand statue that connects them with spirits of the dead – they use it to, more or less, get high off the feeling of being possessed by ghosts, and then one of them uses it for a bit too long and shit hits the fan.
Talk to Me premiered at Sundance 2023 to rave reviews and was soon purchased by A24 for distribution. Created by a pair of twin Australian YouTubers called RackaRacka, the film was made with Australian production company Causeway Films, who also made The Babadook. There’sa very cute TikTokof the film’s cast and crew finding out that the film had been purchased by A24, who won a bidding war over the film and ended up shelling out a “high seven figures” for the rights.
I can’t explain what it is about this film that seems so scary from a single trailer – I think it’s the last shot of the film, where the protagonist’s eyes turn black and she speaks in a creaky wheeze to the people around her, in a voice that certainly is not hers. But I think it’s also the seeming themes of grief and loss – the protagonist has lost her mother and is using the hand in an attempt to reach back out to her on the other side.
A24 has had a huge hand in the resurgence of art-horror in recent years, as well as an evolution of the larger horror genre. Gone are the years of people automatically writing off horror as B-movie shlock, and thank god for that – people are finally beginning to take the genre on its own terms and appreciate it as a vehicle for good stories, instead of assuming it only brings cheap scares and mediocre acting. I believe there’s some kind of link between the rise of the contemporary horror movie and the nonstop remakes of horror games we’ve seen this year. Maybe with so much to fear in the world, we’re hungry for visual metaphors that externalise that terror. That’s part of the reason I love complex, layered, narrative-driven horror – but Talk to Me will probably scare the shit out of me anyway, and I’ll love it for that too.
