“We’re Feral. It’s Just Who We Are.”
After racking up over a billion views on YouTube, Danny and Michael Philippou, the daredevil twins from Down Under, have set their sights on Hollywood with a horror movie that’s garnering rave reviews“We’re Feral. It’s Just Who We Are.”
After racking up over a billion views on YouTube, Danny and Michael Philippou, the daredevil twins from Down Under, have set their sights on Hollywood with a horror movie that’s garnering rave reviews
It starts as an innocent Nerf battle. Inside their dad’s suburban Adelaide home, twins Danny and Michael Philippou, then 21, stand beside the living room couch and fire foam bullets into their best friends’ faces. After some gentle retaliation, however, Michael pauses to calm things down. “All right, stop,” he says. “Someone’s gonna get hurt.” But this wouldn’t be one of the brothers’ signature hyper-violent YouTube videos without some comical and catastrophic escalation; a few seconds later, the five of them redraw their yellow pistols and unleash a deafening barrage of visually enhanced bullets on one another, ducking behind cabinets, breaking down doors, smashing windows, and piercing a gas canister that firebombs the entire patio. It’s a John Woo war zone, gushing with fake blood and a melodramatic final showdown. “Every single time they told me about an idea they had for a video, I would genuinely laugh out loud,” says Remy Brand, a friend who stars in the Nerf madness. “We were approaching these shoots with reckless abandon and just going hard because we loved it.”
Despite the absurdist carnage, “Most Epic Nerf War in History!” is one of the tamer concoctions from the Philippous’ channel RackaRacka—a play on the name of their hometown, Pooraka—which began in 2013 and now boasts 6.7 million subscribers and more than 1 billion views. Across their dozens of short-form, award-winning videos, the twins and a rotating cast of friends have engaged in fake “fail” videos (a knife trick goes wrong), backyard wrestling death matches (Ronald McDonald slams an old man onto a barbed-wire table), and stunt-based comic action sketches (a brawl between Marvel and DC superheroes), turning their quiet residential block into a nexus of viral content that’s frequently turned up on local news. “We had so many kids the same age in the neighborhood that we’d get together and just make stuff,” Michael says on a recent Zoom call alongside his brother. And with little supervision, Danny adds, “it just turned into Lord of the Flies.”
The domestic shenanigans might be easier to write off if not for the brothers’ surprisingly sharp DIY filmmaking skills and their videos’ elevated production value. The pounding sound design, timely music cues, inspired practical stunts, and precise visual effects have a professionalism and authenticity that contradict the juvenile nature of their zero-to-100 skits, which the Philippous, now 30, began developing at the age of 6 when they first picked up their dad’s camcorder. Throughout their teens and 20s, they monetized and honed their craft, becoming (mostly) self-taught filmmakers, stuntmen, editors, and effects artists. Eventually, as the shorts grew better and more ambitious, the brothers started to hear the same question over and over again: “Why don’t you guys make a goddamn movie?”
Ten years after launching RackaRacka, Danny and Michael have done just that. Talk to Me, which opens this week, is a supernatural horror distributed by A24 that combines the Philippous’ visceral filmmaking skills and stunts with a panic-inducing premise. Set inside their native Australian suburb, it follows a group of Gen-Z thrill seekers who discover how to conjure spirits and invoke demonic possessions by clasping the embalmed hand of a former medium. Hungry for engagement, they document their supernatural experiments on social media, pressuring friends at parties to try a dangerous ritual that soon spirals out of control. “I remember reading the script and being scared,” says producer Samantha Jennings. “You don’t often get scared reading something on paper.”
Having already earned raves at Sundance—and a nice chunk of change from the buzziest production company in Hollywood—the twins are about to unleash their unique brand of entertainment on the world. “We’ve been living and breathing filmmaking for as long as I can remember, so it was scary to pull the trigger,” Michael says. “But when you’re all in, you’ve just got to take the leap.”
As for most kids in early grade school, the Philippous’ introduction to horror came through R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps book series. In the midst of building out their collection, the two often hijacked their dad’s video camera and began filming book reviews, recreating scenes with their action figures and eventually developing their own movies, which had hand-drawn VHS covers. “I think it came from Toy Story, where Andy would play with toys and make a movie in his head,” Michael says. “But ours were always a little more grotesque.” The books inspired Danny to start writing his own adventures, while the camera became an early way for Michael to “get a reaction out of people.” Soon, they’d merge their individual interests into a preteen partnership.
Along with their older sister, Helene, they spent the majority of their childhood and adolescence raised by their grandpa and splitting time between separated parents. In effect, their dad’s house became a sort of unsanctioned coliseum—there, the twins were allowed to set up a wrestling ring and practice “death matches” with like-minded neighborhood kids of a similar age. “The wrestling was leading to a lot of injuries and stuff because we were kids hitting each other with fluorescent tubes and barbed-wire bats and kicking each other with thumbtacks,” Michael says. “It was crazy.” Oftentimes, the chaos moved inside. “I can’t remember what stunt they were doing, but someone had fallen through the roof and the whole ceiling was missing. I was like, ‘What the hell is going on?’” Helene says. “I’d see all this mess and destruction, and I’d just walk out and leave. I’m not going to get into trouble for this.”
In between roughhousing, Danny and Michael continued fostering their love for filmmaking and movies, sneaking into hard-R horror flicks like Freddy vs. Jason, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and House of Wax and then returning home to conceive their own pulpy stories. “We were more obsessed with film than with wrestling,” Danny says. “We were like, ‘Let’s pivot a bit.’” As teenagers, they started writing their own television shows—first a Chucky rip-off called The Evil Flamingo, then 10 pretend seasons of Tamuffy, a Buffy the Vampire Slayer parody that they eventually turned into a movie and screened for family and friends at a local theater. Without much mentorship, they leaned on Nelly Bernadette Taateo, the older sister of their friend Timani, who encouraged their rapidly growing skills with the camera. “We were unsupervised and we were delinquents and little criminals,” Danny says, but Nelly “really nurtured that [creative] side of us and pushed us in that more positive direction.”
As digital cameras and editing technology became more accessible, the twins eventually made their public debut, turning pranks and fake mishaps (shoving knives down a toaster, for example) into viral content on Danny’s Facebook page. Soon, Jimmy Kimmel and Conan O’Brien were sharing their videos, gawking at two Australian kids who had a lot of time on their hands and zero regard for their own safety. “One video we posted had only 3,000 views, and we woke up the next morning and it was at 500,000, and at the end of the day it was at 1.5 million and the news wanted to talk to us,” Danny says. Eventually, in 2013, after some nudging from a friend, they decided to create their own YouTube channel to properly store their videos, which had been circulating online uncredited. “We’re like, ‘What happens if we actually go do this for a while and put energy into it?’” Danny says.
Most of their early videos share DNA with the Nerf gun sketch: They introduce a basic premise—friends lounging, playing video games, and chatting at home—before a disagreement turns into weaponized mayhem. That’s never more apparent than in “Harry Potter VS Star Wars,” a three-minute action skit that became the twins’ mainstream breakout (and has since earned 34 million views). In it, Harry Potter, played by Michael, duels with a rat-tailed Jedi. Beyond the comical references and quips, the video stood out for its choreography, VFX work, and sound effects. It also spawned a number of similar “versus” spinoffs, each highlighting the brothers’ self-taught digital postproduction work. “There were some people who were doing visual effects–type things, but no one that was really doing practical film scenes,” says Danny, who sharpened his skills with various media courses along with Adobe and a tutorial website called Video Copilot. “You just keep making stuff and honing your craft.”
“They would go through shows and find stunts, and Danny would mark them as time codes in his phone and see how they’re done,” Brand says. “We would obsess over Smallville because they’d have these B-grade stunts that we’d almost achieve. We’d be watching episodes of them religiously and then write down any corny lines. We loved that shit.”
To finance their bite-sized exploits, Michael got a job as a production runner for Australian movies and television series, where he met young actors and collaborators like Brand and pitched their eventual longtime stunt coordinator, Judd Wild, to help enhance their channel’s action. A bigger daredevil than his brother, Michael also took on stunt jobs for extra dough, getting accredited under Australia’s strict grading system. “Michael was already an extremely good stunt performer in the early years doing backyard wrestling,” Wild says. “I entrusted him to be in those hot-seat positions because he just had such great kinesthetic awareness.” Of course, a variety of freak accidents still occurred. When Michael broke his nose and needed surgery after performing a RackaRacka stunt, Danny jokingly showed up to Michael’s production gig pretending to be his brother so that he didn’t lose the job. “I’m way skinnier than Michael,” Danny says with a laugh. “They’re like, ‘Ooh, did you lose a little bit of weight, Michael?’” The identical pranksters had tried that gimmick in school, Helene recalls; because the pair have the same voice and frantic habits, the only way to decipher them was by Danny’s dyed hair. “I would even get confused between the two,” she attests.
At the same time, Danny got a job working at a professional VFX house but was fired after two weeks. “I realized I probably can’t hold a normal job,” he says. As a workaround, he enlisted in experimental drug trials, getting paid $180 per day to test new pharmaceuticals. “It was basically to take these drugs that weren’t on the market yet to see what the side effects were for like one to two months at a time,” he says. “It was the only job I could hold down because it wasn’t a job.” The payouts allowed him to buy his first HD camera, and the hospital ended up being an ideal place to write without distractions. Still, the side effects—which once included jaundice—often freaked out his friends and family. “He would start to get sick, and you could hear it in his voice, like he wasn’t doing very well,” Helene says. “I tried to talk him out of it, but when Danny has his mind on something, he’s like, ‘Nope, that’s what I’m gonna do.’”
Though neither of them wanted to monetize their channel, fans kept begging them to increase their budgets. “We just love filmmaking, and we never thought a career in this was actually possible,” Michael says. But once the twins hit 1 million subscribers in 2015, they took their new earnings and invested them back into their increasingly complex productions. “Every single dollar we made went towards that,” he says. “How does it make this better? Oh, we can buy more props now, we can afford this blood rig.” Soon, they received funding from government agency Screen Australia for a superhero video series and hashed out other branded and sponsored sketches that retained their signature scrappy aesthetic and pop culture roasting. They also continued to cast their longtime friends and stunt performers. “They just needed friends to get beaten up and do stupid stunts and some shitty acting,” Brand says. “We’d go pretty hard sometimes. I’d be lying if I said I felt safe 100 percent of the time.”
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“There’s always been something in me to push things physically and do stuff that’s dangerous,” Michael says. “When we do bigger stunts or whatever, I’d always put my hand up because I didn’t want anyone else to get injured.”
In 2017, at the height of their YouTube popularity, the twins moved out of their dad’s house and rented a palatial home in nearby Adelaide. Much like a TikTok collective, “House of Racka,” as they called it, became a creative and expansive playground for their friends and intensifying productions. “They had this gigantic Racka banner in the front yard,” Helene remembers, along with giant statues of Mike Tyson, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and orcs from The Lord of the Rings. The new locale made it easier for them to collaborate with online personalities like Logan Paul. Mostly, though, it offered them the freedom to try wilder stuff—to keep their self-described “bogun” (Australian for “country bumpkin”) spirit alive as they considered bigger opportunities. “We’re always authentic to ourselves,” Michael says. “We’re feral. It’s just who we are.”
After several years of platforming the twins’ graphic videos, YouTube administrators gradually began pulling down RackaRacka’s content. Without warning, the website demonetized, age restricted, and sometimes fully removed videos on account of their violent sequences and profanity, forcing Danny and Michael to record vlogs appealing for their work’s reinstatement. “I think what separates them from a lot of people is that nothing that they’re creating is ever malicious or harming people,” Brand says. “It’s only harming themselves.” The censorship frustrated fans, but it helped expedite the pair’s growing interest in making a full-length movie. “We always spoke about them going into films. I was like, ‘Get out of the kiddie pool and jump into the ocean.’ But they were making good money on YouTube,” Wild says. “That transition pushed them into film so they could do their gore. It’s the platform they had to step into.”
During their early YouTube days, the pair worked as crew members on Jennifer Kent’s 2014 Australian indie horror The Babadook, learning about life on set and making a valuable connection with the movie’s production company, Causeway Films. Three years later, they took a long-form writing course for influencers from one of Causeway’s founders, Samantha Jennings, who was already familiar with their work. “We loved the notes she was giving,” Danny says. “She was so smart and sophisticated and amazing.”
“I found them really inventive,” Jennings says. “They worked with their friends, they had a very strong sense of who they were, and they had this really infectious energy about them.”
In 2018, in the midst of writing and developing a few script ideas, Danny received an email from Daley Pearson, a friend and also, notably, the executive producer of the massively successful children’s show Bluey. Pearson had a concept for a comedy short—about a group of teenagers looking to escape boredom by conjuring ghosts—that he wanted Danny to review and flesh out. The material hit close to home. He and Michael remembered a former neighbor who’d experienced a negative reaction after experimenting with drugs for the first time. “He was on the floor and he was convulsing, and then all these kids were filming and laughing at him,” Danny says. “They uploaded it to Snapchat, and I remember seeing that footage and it really bothered me and stuck with me. So that was a thing that was already in my head.”
Within a few days, Danny pivoted the story from comedy to horror and banged out 80 pages of a script on spec. “I sent it over to my cowriter Bill Hinzman, and then Daley allowed us to run with it,” he says. Shortly after Danny sent the script to Causeway, Jennings and her producing partner Kristina Ceyton agreed to finance Talk to Me, taking a gamble on the YouTubers and this story full of authentic Gen-Z characters, a uniquely suburban setting, and readable scares. “Most contemporary Australians live in cities or suburbs with a real multicultural life, and you rarely see it in Australian films,” Jennings says. “The script needed development, but it was something fresh and new.”
As Danny refined the script with Hinzman, he struggled to think of a profound object to induce the spirit world. Then he remembered a terrifying incident he experienced as a 16-year-old, when he split his head open and nearly broke his spine in a car accident. At the hospital, his body kept shaking uncontrollably for hours until Helene rushed in and grabbed his hand. Almost immediately, “the shaking just stopped,” he says. “That power of human touch and connection was just threaded all the way through the film. … It just felt right [for the hand] to be the icon and figure of horror in the second draft.” But as the Causeway team shopped the project around Hollywood, they struggled to find buyers. One studio finally opted to back them, but its creative notes—moving the setting to America, for starters—turned the Philippous off. “You hear those stories of films getting taken away from directors because people are pulling in money and they control it,” Michael says. “We care too much about what we’re making. That’s why going the independent route felt right.”
The decision was a risk. Causeway hustled to make deals with private financiers, applied for Screen Australia’s state funding, and was forced to shrink the filming schedule from eight to five weeks. But for everyone involved, this was the only route to take. “It meant we could really protect the vision of the film, especially because it was their first film,” Jennings says. “It needed to feel like it was a true reflection of their intentions and who they are as filmmakers.”
In some ways, Jennings’s bigger task was helping the twins transition from a chaotic YouTube environment to a more controlled film shoot, where they could lean on a cinematographer, a production designer, and multiple assistants. “This film was about harnessing and channeling their energy into a more planned and composed process,” Jennings says. “They have this incredible energy, and it’s nonstop. There’s not a day they’re in a bad mood.” Because of the shortened schedule, Danny and Michael still worked at a breakneck pace, mimicking their early RackaRacka days with an intuitiveness and camaraderie. At one point, to get actors comfortable with contorting their bodies, the twins made everyone—including Jennings—perform a possession before shooting. “We all had to be possessed, we all had to pretend to embrace or imitate a dog, and it automatically put all the cast at ease and created an environment where they were all supporting each other,” she says.
Despite slightly scaling up, the Philippous never abandoned their RackaRacka filmmaking style, evident in Talk to Me’s ambitious shot compositions, Emma Bortignon’s shudder-inducing sound design—an earsplitting bathroom tile scene might be the most disturbing of the year—and blood-splattering makeup and effects. The movie begins with a one-shot that starts outside a house party and slowly weaves through clumps of stoned friends before it narrows its focus on a disturbed teenager who emerges from his room, stabs his brother, and then kills himself with the same knife in front of shrieking peers. Filming the scene, which the twins shot about 10 different times, began around 3 a.m. on the last night of shooting and became a testament to Jennings’s commitment to getting the movie’s chilling opening just right. “She was like the calm to our storm,” Michael says. “She always put the film above time constraints and budget. The creative always came first.”
Even for the self-described “wannabe filmmakers on a rampage,” the entire shoot was a surreal dream. “Being on set was the most overstimulating experience ever because we’re in love with every aspect of filmmaking,” Danny says. “It just felt like we were building up to it our entire lives.”
Talk to Me began its international journey at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, where Causeway screened a primary reel and sold distribution rights to a number of territories. But even as some offers came in for North America, Jennings felt they should wait for a better opportunity and pin their hopes on getting accepted into Sundance, which the Philippous assumed was a long shot. “We always felt Sundance would be a perfect festival to launch the film,” Jennings says. “But it was the first in-person Sundance since COVID-19, and they had a huge amount of submissions.” All throughout the editing process, she and the twins had critiqued shots based around the same aesthetic question: “Is this Sundance? Is it smart enough, good enough, sharp enough? And then when we finally got the yes from Sundance, we were so over the moon,” Jennings says.
After the movie made its premiere in the Midnight Selection, the Philippous geeked out over watching real audiences experience their movie. “It is surreal going from digital, where you just see comments and likes and numbers,” Michael says. “We have 6 million subscribers, and that doesn’t feel real. ... [But then] 500 people are attending this screening, and there are 500 people there in person all reacting together.” Over the next 24 hours, they fielded a handful of calls and offers from boutique studios, ultimately settling on A24 for its reputation within the genre and work with directors like Ari Aster, who, along with Jordan Peele, has already reached out to the brothers with congratulatory messages. “Having those people that we’ve looked up to for so long reach out to us personally—it was the most surreal, incredible experience,” Danny says. “To have all of our cast and crew there as well, it was the best week of our lives.”
In true RackaRacka form, the brothers later posted a recap video of their overwhelming Park City experience, clipping together a nostalgic montage that juxtaposes their childhood videos with behind-the-scenes negotiations and buzzy reactions inside theaters. As Talk to Me has traveled to subsequent festivals and conventions, the Philippous have been eating up their press tour assignments, citing Bong Joon-Ho and The Exorcist as inspirations and providing other kinds of referential catnip. “With their debut feature they’ve let rip with a blast of wild punk energy and gleeful anarchy with this terrific scary movie,” wrote The Guardian, and according to The Hollywood Reporter, the movie “marks a welcome splash of new blood on the horror landscape.” In just the last few months, Danny and Michael have signed a production deal with Legendary Pictures to adapt a Street Fighter movie and already finished writing another horror script. And because Talk to Me leaves the door ajar for sequelization, the twins haven’t ruled out the possibility of fleshing out a deeper mythology for their embalmed hand. “We’ll lead different projects in preproduction, but we’ll make whatever it is together,” Michael says, before joking, “because Danny needs me.”
At this point, the twins plan to spend increasingly more time in Los Angeles. The directions their careers could take are seemingly endless. But they both have a desire to keep making movies and videos in Australia, catering to the fans and friends Down Under who helped give them their start. “Australian cinema has plateaued a little bit,” Brand says. “But these guys have brought so much energy and they’re so passionate about it that it’s just really refreshing.”
And even though the brothers are now in rooms with Hollywood executives, with their names adorning a movie that could be one of the best horror films of 2023, they haven’t left the RackaRacka life. Last week, Wild remembers, about 15 minutes before they were scheduled to be interviewed by George Miller at San Diego’s Comic-Con, Danny and Michael were busy figuring out a stunt in their hotel room. Wild got nervous as they pressed against time. “We were doing stunts up until 30 seconds before,” he says. “They’re like, ‘We’ve got to get this done.’” Thinking about their improbable career and journey together, he can only laugh now. “They don’t pantomime for anyone. They’re just who they are.”
Jake Kring-Schreifels is a sports and entertainment writer based in New York. His work has also appeared in Esquire.com, GQ.com, and The New York Times.