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This article appears in the new issue of DEN OF GEEK magazine. You can read all of our magazine stories here.
The future of horror is spontaneously combusting bodies! You heard it here first.
Arriving seven years after Ready or Not saw Samara Weaving’s new bride engage in a deadly game of hide and seek, the sequel Here I Come ups the ante with more blood, more kills, more locations, and higher stakes that include no less than the future of the entire known world. And yes, there’s another exploding body or two.
Back in the dress to see it all is Weaving’s Grace, who we catch up with seconds after the gloriously gory ending of the last film, with the newly widowed bride sitting on the steps of the mansion where she was hunted. She’s won the game, but there are consequences to her survival.
Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, who work as part of the Radio Silence collective, also return in the directors’ chairs with Guy Busick and R. Christopher Murphy once again on scripting duties. The Radio Silence team say they had an appetite to take a second dip into the Ready or Not universe after the first film became such a hit with audiences, but only if they had the right story to tell.
“The idea that we could expand the mythology and build another story in that same universe and in that same tone was really exciting to us,” explains Gillett. “It was exciting because it wasn’t premeditated, we didn’t go into the first movie planning on something else, and so there was a feeling of freedom in that.”
Since the first movie, the helming pair had been off making raucous vampire-ballet horror, Abigail (with Kathryn Newton), and Scream 5 and VI (which briefly, but memorably, also featured Weaving). Meanwhile, Weaving was making, among other things, the sequel The Babysitter: Killer Queen, high-end TV show Nine Perfect Strangers, and Damien Chazelle’s Babylon opposite an all-star cast. The planets would need to align to get the gang back together.
The Story So Far
Shot in 2018 and released in 2019, Ready or Not saw former foster child Grace marry into the affluent Le Domas family. On her wedding night, she takes part in a family tradition—an initiation ceremony where she must pick a card from the box of a mysterious figure named Mr. Le Bail. Grace’s card reads “Hide and Seek,” but far from a fun kids’ game, this is a deadly cat-and-mouse chase. The Le Domas family must hunt and kill Grace to fulfill their demonic pact with Le Bail. If she survives till dawn, they all die. Sure enough, Grace does, and the Le Domas family explodes into a morning red mist.
The Radio Silence team considers themselves fortunate to be able to brazenly pick up seconds after the last movie, despite it being more than half a decade later since they were on that set. “Obviously, we lucked out that Sam literally hasn’t aged a day in seven years, which I know we certainly can’t say the same for ourselves,” Gillett laughs. Grace is in fact still sitting bloodied and broken on the steps outside the Le Domas house as the interior burns. Merging the first movie seamlessly with the second in that opening shot was a complicated affair that could fill an hour-long “making of,” according to Bettinelli-Olpin, and involved all departments.
“The linchpin that holds it all together is Samara,” he says.
Again in that blood-splattered gown, Weaving’s Grace is about to suffer another 24-hour ordeal.
“I had to remember what I was doing all those years ago,” says Weaving, chatting to us from LA. “It was tricky because where, emotionally, does she go from here? I thought in the first one I’d been stretched and seen a rainbow of emotions, and now, how do we make this interesting for the audience so it’s not repetitive at all? I think Kathryn [Newton] is so helpful in that.”
Sister Act
Enter Faith, Grace’s estranged younger sister played by Newton. Grace is cuffed and in the hospital when Faith walks back into her life, mad as hell because Grace abandoned her as a teenager. But all that drama will have to be dealt with later since Grace’s survival has had major repercussions for the elite group of families who have made deals with the literal Devil for untold power and influence over the world.
It hasn’t escaped the cast and directors how horribly current that last plot point is with the movie coming after the staggered release of the Epstein files: “They’ve always been a satire, but I don’t think we imagined that they would be quite as sharp a satire as the two Ready or Not movies currently feel,” says Gillett.
Newton’s been an actor since she was four years old but describes working with Radio Silence on Abigail as giving her “a new sense of wonder all over again.” So when the duo approached her to play Faith, she “was jumping up and down and screaming.”
Radio Silence say they “Parent Trapped” Newton and Weaving, inviting Newton along to a Ready or Not reunion screening and encouraging the two to bond and hang out. It clearly worked. On screen, their chemistry is infectious. Not only do the two look like siblings—“If you think we look alike, I’ll take it!” laughs Newton—but they easily slip into a rhythm.
“She is one of my favorite people, I’m obsessed with her,” Weaving smiles when we ask about her co-star. “We very quickly fell into a sisterly relationship where I just was making fun of her all day and doing impressions of her on set, embarrassing her. I was like texting boys for her because I don’t understand how she doesn’t have a boyfriend. We need to remedy this…”
Newton is equally enamored of Weaving, saying she started to copy her tastes and habits.
“She’s way cooler than me,” Newton says. “She’s a little older than me, she’s a little more worldly. I’m still growing. I’m still kind of in eighth grade in a lot of ways, especially when it comes to boys and stuff, but she’s just really cool. Sam made it really easy for me to be myself and to shine in my own way, which only makes her shine too.”
The Dark Council
Handing off the Scream Queen baton is no less than Buffy the Vampire Slayer herself, Sarah Michelle Gellar. Not a final girl this time, she’s Ursula, one half of a pair of evil twins with Shawn Hatosy’s Titus as her brother. The two are the offspring of patriarch Chester Danforth (played by legendary horror director David Cronenberg), holder of the “high seat.” But after the demise of the Le Domas clan that claim is contested. Titus and Ursula will have to compete against other powerful families to be the first to destroy Grace and claim back the most powerful spot in the world.
Ursula is beautiful, cold, callous, and violent, and Gellar looks like she’s having a blast in the role of villain. While she might be best known for playing Buffy, she’s been on both sides of the spectrum plenty of times.
“It’s so funny because I first got some notoriety in my career when I was a teenager and I was on All My Children, and I played this very bad character,” she says. “I thought that’s what my future was. It took me a while to convince people that I could be Buffy. I was originally cast as Cordelia. Then Buffy was such a success, and when I wanted to do Cruel Intentions, everybody kept trying to talk me out of it and say, ‘Don’t you want to play [good girl] Annette?’ I’m so incredibly grateful to be accepted in both roles.”
With the various different factions competing to murder Grace first, it was a large ensemble cast, and Gellar says it was a joy how much everyone wanted to be together between takes. Newton describes Gellar as a massive influence in her career and recalls a special moment.
“We were sitting on set one day [in costume], I had the ball gag in my mouth… and she’s like, ‘Hmm, this looks familiar,’ and she pulls up this picture of her as Buffy, and she had on a denim shirt, hair up in a bun just like mine with the bangs and a sword. I had chills, like full-body chills.”
Seeing Gellar, Weaving, and Newton share screen time is a treat, even when they are trying to kill each other.
“Her doing this movie is such an honor because she’s a scream queen,” says Newton. “Now we have Samara, I’m a baby scream queen. We’re all coming together, and she’s opening the door and continuing that legacy.”
Factions and Families
Other families competing for the “high seat” are clans from London, Spain, China, and more. The rules of the game are thus:
The head of the family must be the first to attempt to kill Grace. If they die, the next in their bloodline must take over.
Members of the council are not allowed to kill each other, a crime punishable by death.
Each family must use a weapon contemporary to when their blood line first made their pact. Grace, meanwhile, must simply survive until dawn again.
The person to enforce these rules is Elijah Wood’s character, known only as “the Lawyer.” He works for Mr. Le Bail, and while his backstory isn’t conveyed in the film, Wood and Radio Silence discussed what it could be at length, leaving the audience with tantalizing questions.
“It’s toeing that line between being someone who is neutral, to articulate the rules, but also giving him some personality in regards to what he is observing internally,” Wood says. “He’s probably seen this process through multiple times, and maybe even has his own opinions about these individuals that are ultimately irrelevant in regard to what his task is.”
Though it’s a relatively small role, Wood relished working with Cronenberg’s Chester Danforth. While Gellar says she was tempted to ask for tips from her on-screen father—“It was funny, after every take, I would say, ‘What do you think? Do you have any notes for me?’ And he would look at me and he’d be like, ‘I’m not the director.’”—horror nut Wood, who has his own genre production studio, SpectreVision, was nervous to ask for stories from the genre auteur.
“He was incredibly forthcoming, really lovely, and such a sweet individual,” Wood says.
Gore Galore
With the players in place and the rules established, the game is afoot. What results is massive carnage, including notable setpieces dubbed “death by washing machine,” “bride on bride,” and what Radio Silence refers to as “the paffening.” No spoilers here, but there are complex stunts and a lot of gore. Specifically, 325 gallons of blood, with 100 gallons for the “paffening” alone, which required 14 huge pneumatic cannons, according to Radio Silence.
The two say that they are sticklers for practical effects, meaning the set becomes hard to be in after some of the major moments (“you don’t wear your nice shoes to work,” jokes Gillett).
Weaving and Newton bear the brunt of the onslaught, but both knew what they were getting into after Ready or Not and Abigail.
“You just have to be in acceptance. Otherwise, why are we doing a second one?” Weaving considers. “I think a big reason why we wanted to do another one was that we had so much fun. It’s camp, you’re gonna be cold and sticky and uncomfortable, but it’s also gonna be fun.” Indeed, Weaving lost the security deposit on her apartment after the first film due to the blood stains she left behind.
“They must have thought some serial killer had lived there!” she laughs. “The bathtub was stained pink from all the blood coming out of my hair, and there were just trails of fake syrup blood everywhere. Fair enough, by the way, it’s really hard to get out. They were going, ‘You’re not getting your deposit back because that apartment is pink now.’ Yeah, sign of a good time.”
Fun with Frights
At the end of the day, on top of the politics and kills, Ready or Not 2 is a really good time. It’s the kind of good time that Radio Silence have developed as their calling card over the last decade and more.
“We want to put our characters through something really tough, and we want to see them make it out the other side having learned something about themselves. The world is a scary place, and I think we want our movies to be an escape from that,” Gillett says.
It’s an emerging trend in horror where stories can be taken seriously while also being gory, funny, and wild.
“There’s nothing silly about this movie,” Newton says. “That movie is hilarious, the original, but it’s also very grounded. So we had to be careful not to go too big.” The actor even recalls one of her main notes from Radio Silence was not to be “too funny.”
The GOAT Goat
The final showdown in Ready or Not: Here I Come is as massive and outrageous as anything Radio Silence has done, with most of the cast gathered together, decked out in spectacular costumes, not least of which include the Lawyer’s incredible hat and Grace’s new dress.
“It’s one of the best dresses I’ve ever worn,” Weaving says. “The train was so long, though, and I had to work with a goat.”
Ah, yes, the goat. Adding to the general melee is a farm animal, which has to kneel on command.
“The goat was terrified of the dress, thought it was like a long snake or something,” Weaving continues. “So it was a little tricky when it was 4 a.m., and the sun was coming up, and we had to get this shot, and this goat was not a fan of this dress at all.”
Crowd Pleaser
At the time of our interviews, the cast and team hasn’t yet seen the film with a theatrical audience. The movie premieres at SXSW, and the gang cannot wait to witness the reactions of the crowd. Bettinelli-Olpin equates it to being in a band.
“When you’re in a band and you play a live show, that’s the moment. It’s not the recording, it’s the interaction with the audience, and I think that we’re always searching for that feeling with our movies. Hopefully they play great at home, but they play much differently in a theater when you’re surrounded by people having the same experience, and where there is a very real moment-to-moment interaction with the audience.”
Contemporary and grounded, but also exploring ancient mythology, there could even be scope for a third installment.
“We didn’t save any good ideas to use later,” says Gillett. “We want the audience to feel like they are getting a complete and satisfying story from beginning to end, and there’s no tease or tag, or ‘to be continued.’ [But] given the way we expand the mythology in this one, there’s certainly a bonkers, absurdist way of continuing the saga, and we’re here for it should it happen.” For now, sit back, enjoy, and let the combustion commence.
Ready or Not 2: Here I Come premieres at SXSW on March 13 and opens wide in theaters on March 20.
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