Nightmare Fuel / Talk to Me

"They're not gonna stop..."

As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

• The film's opening scene. Consisting of a long single take, we follow a young man named Cole searching a house party for his brother, Duckett, who has locked himself in one of the house's bedrooms. Cole breaks the door down and finds Duckett in an almost delirious state and raving about their dead father talking to him. As Cole tries to take his brother home, Duckett stabs Cole in the chest with a kitchen knife in full view of the partygoers, walks outside, and then violently stabs himself in the face.
  • Even worse? While Duckett's self-inflicted wound was fatal, Cole survived the stab he got.
  • The circumstances surrounding how Duckett was able to get that knife. Once him and Cole get into the house's kitchen, Cole's path is actually blocked by a group of partygoers filming the two of them with their phones. When he yells at them to put their phones down, they just keep filming. We hear Duckett take the knife as Cole is distracted with the crowd, and Cole is stabbed the instant he turns back around. Not only is this a realistic depiction of the way teenagers can react to serious situations in counter-productive ways (sometimes only caring as much as they can have something crazy to post online), but it also hints at the behavior people have towards the main "game". Before we see it for ourselves, we're shown snippets of other possessions on social media, where we see the possessed surrounded by people laughing at them.
  • Listen closely to what Duckett says as Cole retrieves him. After Cole breaks the door down, Duckett says, "Can you see them? They're in here." After Cole tells Duckett he's going to take him home, he says, "Pop said you're gonna hurt a lot of people." Once Cole has helped Duckett up and begun moving to the exit, he tells Cole, "You're not him..." This likely implies that the spirits had manipulated Duckett into believing that Cole was actually a hallucination that he needed to kill, which is exactly what happens later in the film with Mia and her father.
  • When Cole finds Duckett, he has no shirt on and there are bruises all over his back. These are never explained.
• The nature of the "game" the characters play, which is the main focus of the story: it is a summoning ritual using an embalmed hand of unknown origin that can conjure the dead. Step one: light a candle to "open the door". Step two: grab the hand and say "talk to me", which will instantly conjure a ghastly spirit in front of you. Step three: say "I let you in", which grants the spirit full possession. Step four, the most important one: someone else in the room needs to blow out the candle to "close the door" and remove the hand from your grip before 90 seconds of possession. What happens if you go past that limit? We are only given a vague but menacing warning: "They'll want to stay...and if you die while they're in you, they'll have you forever."
  • For the possessed person, the experience apparently feels like the equivalent of a drug high, as described by Mia after her first go with the hand. But watching as a bystander is an entirely different story. The behavior of each possession is unpredictable, but there is a consistent malevolence to it all, with the possessed doing things like making threats, shrieking with maniacal laughter, making sudden lunges at those near (we learn quickly why those who participate are strapped into the chair with a belt), and being aware of personal information of the group and unveiling it in a way to cause emotional harm.
  • The spirits that are conjured are horrifying to look at, and the worst part is that who is conjured is different every time, but each one has a face and body that is twisted in grotesque ways, from emaciation to rot to bloating and waterlogging.
  • Part of what makes the "game" more nerve-wracking is that it becomes clear that the teenaged group participating are not fully aware of what the spirits can do. Even witnessing the first possession, there is physical phenomena such as doors being opened and slammed (which the group has never seen, judging by their reaction), lights flickering, and worst of all, the spirit can grip onto the hand to attempt to get you to go past 90 seconds.
    • The latter especially. Usually in horror films, the "rule you don't break" is not broken until later in the movie. Here, it's broken the first time we see the hand used, with Mia's spirit refusing to let go well past the time limit. Despite this, the group happily continues on when it seems like there wasn't a negative effect, and it's made abundantly clear that they, and we, have no idea what they're fooling around with or what it can do. We know immediately that one of these possessions is going to end in disaster, and it's not a matter of "if", but "when".
• The first possession scene. When Mia volunteers to use the hand, the spirit she makes contact with ends up being a decayed, bloated and waterlogged corpse of a woman. One honestly can't choose what's worse — the ghost itself or the awful guttural, gurgling noises that goes along with her as she appears. This heavily implies that the cause of death was either drowning or something more grisly.
  • When Mia is possessed by the spirit, she starts laughing manically in the most unsettling way possible. She then turns to various corners of the room and points out various spirits the audience can't see, with one particularly malevolent spirit apparently taking a liking (or intense murderous rage) towards Riley, the youngest member of the group, which is enough to send the poor kid to tears.
• Daniel's possession. The leadup to the possession is already suspenseful, as the earlier possession had the spirit lunge at him when he spoke — the spirits do not like him. When he lets the spirit in, the initial moments of possession are noticeably more aggressive, with him being choked for a good while, until the modest, clean-cut, religious boy ends up being possessed by a particularly horny spirit and starts pleasuring himself sexually in front of the entire group before making out with the family dog. This doubles with Nausea Fuel; seeing the hairs and dog slobber all over his face afterwards is enough to make even the hardest of viewers gag.
• Riley’s initial possession begins with what sounds like Rhea's voice speaking to Mia, causing her to prolong the possession past the 50 seconds the group agreed on for his sake. This leads to them exceeding the time limit, resulting in Riley smashing his head violently against several tables and nearly gouging out his own eye before the rest of the party intervenes.
• The scene where a spirit manifests in Mia’s bedroom and begins sucking on Daniel’s foot, only for the film to reveal the spirit was possessing Mia and she was sucking his foot, is a mix of this and Nausea Fuel.
• For a brief moment, Riley breaks out of his comatose state while getting a sponge bath, only for him to start biting his own bandaging, violently slamming his head against the shower wall and slurping up his own blood.
• At one point, Mia uses the hand to see if she can communicate with Riley’s spirit, and what she sees is nothing short of horrifying:
  • We get multiple flash cuts to what appears to be limbo, with several spirits surrounding & touching Riley, who is clearly in pain.
    • While never stated, it can be interpreted that the spirits are sexually abusing Riley. This echoes the spirits' first address to Riley when Mia's playing with the hand — calling him "pretty boy" and repeating "He'll split ya!". Riley's only fourteen and (with one exception) all the corpses we see are grown adults.

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