RAISING HELL
WITH TALK TO ME, DANNY AND MICHAEL PHILIPPOU WENT FROM YOUTUBE UPSTARTS TO HORROR HEROES. AS THEY RETURN WITH BRING HER BACK, WE MEET THE DIRECTOR DUO WHO CAN’T STOP CAUSING CARNAGE
WORDS BEN TRAVIS
Clockwise from main: Foster child Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips) is not happy. Cat’s mood unconfirmed;
MICHAEL PHILIPPOU IS stood on a platform roughly the height of a double-decker bus. A big, burly man throws him over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift. A crowd watches on, breaths held, phones poised. The man leaps off the platform, plunging Philippou through the air, down into a plate of glass — on actual fire — propped between two fold-out chairs. Shards fly in every direction. The crowd yells in unison: “Ohhhhhhh!”
Over a year later, Michael has a confession. “I wasn’t technically on Bring Her Back. They couldn’t insure me, or something,” he says, as his identical twin brother Danny puts away the phone on which he’s just shown Empire that bonkers footage. Such is life when you’re a rising director with a side-hustle in ‘deathmatch wrestling’. Welcome to the world of the
Philippou brothers, aka RackaRacka, aka one of the most exciting filmmaking duos in the world right now.
Fittingly, watching the films made by the 32-year-old Australians, who rose up making mayhem-fuelled YouTube videos, feels somewhat akin to being pummelled through a flaming glass plate — full-throated features that slam you head-first into grief and demonic possession. In 2023, they unleashed the soul-rattling Talk To Me, in which hard-partying Aussie teens are terrorised after toying with an embalmed hand that channels deceased spirits. Now they return with Bring Her Back, another hair-raising possession tale that goes even deeper and darker.
It’s a film that challenged them like never before. And not just because Michael was enrolled in a deathmatch (“They use thumbtacks, barbed wire, they get really bloody,” he explains) in Detroit just days before shooting. “Our producer sat us down,” recalls Danny. “She’s like, ‘If your brother dies, you’ll
have a couple of days to grieve — and then you have to shoot Bring Her Back.’” The pair cackle at the absurdity of it. What can you do but stand up, brush off the glass, and head into the fray?