What’s the secret to really disturbing horror? “It’s about tapping into things that make you personally squeamish or uncomfortable,” said writer/director Danny Philippou, co-creator with twin brother and director Michael of supernatural shocker Bring Her Back.
In their debut film, Talk to Me, much of the sense of repulsion revolves around eyes, and that’s personal to Michael. “I don’t like anyone being anywhere near my eyes,” he said. In Bring Her Back (out now from A24), one of the most memorable and disturbing scenes involves a piece of cutlery being misused in the most disturbing way. “Metal on mouth is a big thing,” Michael said. “The idea of biting into a fork makes me go ‘eurgh.’”
However, it’s not a gross-out scene for grossness’ sake. Instead, Danny said, it’s part of the film’s underlying text expressed through body horror and the act of eating: “Grief is all consuming.”
It’s a movie of firsts. It’s the first horror role for Sally Hawkins as the two-time Oscar nominee plays Laura, a foster mum with a sinister plan, and it’s the first acting role for Sora Wong who plays Piper, the newly-orphaned girl upon whom Laura’s machinations are centered. Michael said, “Sora had never acted before, but she just came in and we did an improv scene, ‘This is the scene, this is your character, this is what you’re feeling,’ and she knocked it out of the park. By not acting there was this authenticity about her. She just put herself in the scene.”
However, it’s the second film for the Philippou brothers. It arrives on the successful heels of their cult debut, which came with its own pressures. On that film they were seen as YouTube guys daring to make a movie: now they had to avoid the sophomore slump. Their solution? Try not to think about it. “It was about signing on to it and not thinking about it,” said Danny. “I could feel the pressure rising and overthinking the next project that I wouldn’t make anything else ever again, so I was like ‘Run into it and start the process so you can’t get off the train.’”
“You have to separate yourself from expectations,” Michael added, noting that they got used to drowning out external voices on Talk to Me which was almost made with a different production company. They were guaranteeing a theatrical release, he said, “but they wanted to change things, and we wanted to stick to our vision. So it’s kind of like choosing the story you want to do next. and committing to it, and trying not to be influenced by what people expect.”
This time, their big challenge was subverting the expectations of the audience: not running into another teen horror but pushing into more mature waters. While dealing with similar issues of grief and loss, Bring Her Back feels like it takes place in a bigger universe, with a more complicated cosmology, than Talk to Me. The brothers’ first film had a mystical MacGuffin, a cursed hand that allows people to channel the dead, but Bring Her Back is threaded through with mystical elements. For Michael, world-building like that is much the same as building backstory for character. “You need to have this backstory of how they got here. This is who they are, this is why, this is their personality, these are the key moments in their lives that affected them and made them this way, and you need to have that for the lore as well.”
“That’s always one of the funnest parts of the process,” Danny said, “building out the mythology bible.” For Bring Her Back, they created a whole backstory of angels and cultists, and filmed the entire magick ritual that opens the film, all of it inspired by research. “I spoke to a bunch of occultists and people who have written spell books, and people that are in that field, some people that I was scared of so I dressed up as a character and talked to them as a character.”
Just as the universe of Bring Her Back was bigger so were the logistics that the script demanded, making this a much more complicated shoot than Talk to Me. Yet Danny explained that they pushed back against making a bigger film. “Actually, I want it to be smaller.”
To keep that more intimate feeling, sometimes he would even get to set at five in the morning, just to work with Hawkins on her solo scenes. “It would be us and the camera guy and nobody else, and let’s film Laura in those environments, and let’s get the real light coming through the trees, and Sally was down for that.”
However, not everything could be shot Dogme 95 style, and movie-making logistics were undeniably part of a learning curve for the filmmakers, especially since they wanted to rely on practical effects and location shooting as much as possible. Danny explained, “Even the idea of shooting outside in daytime with rain is a very tricky thing because you can’t fake those shadows, and we didn’t have the budget to block out the sky, so we have to wait until the sun is behind the hills and we only have an hour to shoot.”
“We’re never going to shoot in the rain again,” added Michael.
Moreover, Danny explained that they made life even harder for themselves by deliberately designing the production schedule to keep as close to story order as possible “so that Sally can experience what her character is experiencing in as much of chronological order as possible, and we want to build up to those heavier scenes for Sora because it’s her first time acting. … Don’t throw her into the deep end.”
Bring Her Back is in theatres now. Find showtimes here.
This article appears in June 6 • 2025.
