A few years ago, sibling directing duo Danny and Michael Philippou made the leap from viral YouTube videos to the Hollywood A-list, with A24 picking up their breakout feature Talk to Me. At the time, the brothers teased their sequel ambitions, and a follow-up to the horror hit was officially greenlit in August of 2023. Now we have news of more Talk to Me on the way, but it’s not the cinematic sequel fans have been waiting for.
According to Variety, the Talk to Me universe will expand with a series of six half-hour episodes “created exclusively for Meta headsets and shot fully in 3D, making for a fully immersive XR experience that will allow horror fans to feel like they’re living out the terror.”
That terror, of course, will draw on the movie’s premise: a disembodied hand with the power to possess anyone adventurous or foolish enough to grab ahold of it. A brief jaunt into the spirit realm may be thrilling, but it can also be extremely dangerous, as the Talk to Me characters learn when their party game takes an irresponsible turn. “Trapped in a hell dimension” is not a great way to spend your prime years, kids!
It sounds like that lesson will be learned anew, as the series will follow “a group of young travelers chasing the ultimate party on a European island until they discover the Hand, a supernatural high deadlier than any drug.”
While the Philippous are aboard as executive producers, a new creative team is guiding the Meta and XRTV series collaboration. Darren Brandl came up with the concept with Trent Atherton, with Atherton writing all six episodes; Craig William Macneill (Castle Rock, Westworld) is the director.
Brandl is the co-founder of XRTV, and in a statement to Variety, he explained why Talk to Me was an ideal project for “extended reality,” or XR.
“The promise of XR is this idea that we can now map the story into your own space so you feel like you’re inside it … its superpower is presence: that awe of being transported, the unsettling feeling that a demon is with you—in your room,” he told the trade; as for genre bona fines, he’s also part of Eli Roth’s CryptTV, which creates digital horror content.
“Talk to Me is the perfect immersive IP because it’s about young adults who seek the Hand to experience the euphoria of possession but end up tormented by breaking through to the spirit world. It made possession fun, and the scares unforgettable.”
In other words, the Talk to Me series aims to make you feel like you’re actually possessed, which is certainly intriguing.
However, we’re still holding out hope for Talk to Me 2 to hit theaters eventually, bringing a far more accessible (if less immersive) continuation of the story to fans. And that seems to still be in the cards; when the Philippous released Bring Her Back earlier this year, they spoke about the sequel in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter.
“When we submitted Bring Her Back to some of the funding places, they were like, ‘What about Talk to Me 2?’ So there was pressure from people,” Danny Philippou told THR in May. “[Talk to Me 2] was going to be the next project, but I was like, ‘I really, really want to make [Bring Her Back]. Is it okay if I make this one?’ So A24 was on board, and they allowed us to.”
Michael Philippou added, “To go straight into Talk to Me 2 always felt like it would just be capitalizing on hype, as opposed to what’s the right story we want to tell next. We needed a break from Talk to Me 2 so we can revisit it with fresh eyes.”
As of yet, there’s no release date or title for the Talk to Me series from Meta and XRTV.
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