Movies - TV
Talk To Me’s Haunted Hand Has A Surprisingly Wholesome Origin Story
By SHAE SENNETT
Hands play a deceptive, tender role in "Talk To Me." The film’s haunted appendage was inspired by a traumatic car accident co-director Danny Phillippou was in at the age of 16.
Danny told Roger Ebert: "They thought I might have broken my spine. I was in the hospital, and [...] the doctors [...] couldn't get me warm. I just couldn't stop shaking."
"And then, my sister sat next to me," he said. "She held my hand, and the shaking just stopped. The touch of someone I love brought me out of this state of shock that I was in."
In the film, holding hands is the way characters lift each other out of hard times and get pulled further into darkness, but the hand itself wasn’t involved until the second draft.
Danny explained to Indiewire that, "Thematically, all the way through the first draft, it was all about touch and human connection. Hands were such a recurring motif."
"It just felt right to be our object of horror," he continued. "It felt like once we found that, we were like, 'Oh my God, this has been here the entire time.'"
Given how personal this film was to the co-directors, the familiar horror trope of a disembodied hand allowed them to tap into its raw emotion.