With Talk to Me scaring up a success in theaters, A24 has announced that directors Danny and Michael Philippou will return to develop a sequel to this instant classic.
To those who haven’t seen it yet, the film follows teenager Mia when she and her friends communicate with the dead using a magical embalmed hand, which naturally leads to unfathomable terrors. While the world waits for the sequel to come out, audiences can pass the time with these three similar movies that are available to stream on Netflix right now.
Ouija: Origin of Evil (2016)
It’s not often that a prequel is so much better than the story it’s based on. When a fake medium purchases an Ouija board to use in her business, she actually summons a malevolent spirit that takes control of her young daughter, Doris. Just like how Talk to Me shows how its young cast messing with the supernatural, director Mike Flanagan‘s prequel proves that the occult is not a game.
The latter film similarly takes possession to the extreme as it shows the Zander family deteriorate at the hands of a literally unspeakable evil. At the same time, Ouija: Origin of Evil shows how grief can send people on the road to self-destruction, as Doris seals her fate attempting to speak to her dead father just as Mia tried to talk to her mother’s spirit.
The Ring (2002)
Much like how Talk to Me came out of New Zealand, director Gore Verbinski’s modern horror classic was based on the popular Japanese film Ringu. This American remake follows a journalist who investigates the death of her young niece after she watched an allegedly cursed videotape that kills its viewers after seven days, only to become a target of the curse herself.
Though this is a very different premise from Talk to Me, the film does depict the fallout of people delving too deep into a deadly supernatural force that manifests through Samara’s VHS tape. And while A24’s horror movie addresses people’s isolating addiction to their smartphones, The Ring addresses the dangers of modern technology as Samara’s ghost torments and secludes her victims through the hypnotic glow of a TV screen.
Lights Out (2016)
In director David F. Sandberg’s feature-length debut, the depressed Sophie and her two children find themselves stalked by a deadly spirit that can only appear in the darkness. Based on the viral short film of the same name, Lights Out takes the audience’s fear of the dark and uses it to create a unique and inventive horror experience that deals with issues of mental health.
This theme comes in the form of the spectral villain Diana, who does whatever she can to break Sophie’s mind and stay with her forever, comparable to how the evil spirits torment Mia by driving her loved ones away. All in all, both films are really about the isolating and harmful effects of depression, but they still present dark and thrilling ghost stories that will make any viewer want to sleep with the lights on.
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