I would absolutely touch the hand in Talk to Me

I can't deny it, I would be high-fiving that thing.

An artist’s rendition of me touching the hand in Talk to Me

After you’ve gotten your face blown off by Oppenheimer, and cried glittery sentimental tears over Barbie, be sure not to overlook the new Australian horror film Talk to Me, a nasty piece of work about what happens when a bunch of bored teenagers treat a cursed object like a party game (the answer is, you probably guessed, nothing good).

I have no doubt that many adults will find it implausible that the characters in Talk to Me would initially treat something that allows you to communicate and even be temporarily possessed by the dead so cavalierly. It seems highly unlikely that anyone would watch their friend become overcome with spirits, speaking in a voice that isn’t their own, as if it’s nothing to be scared of, let alone want to try it themselves.

Well, I’m here to tell you: when I was a teenager, I would have absolutely, without a moment’s hesitation, touched the hand.

I’ve written here about my experience with a Ouija board, back when I was an impressionable adolescent. I have since refused to play with or even be around a Ouija board, not because I’m afraid of it, but because I won’t be able to resist fucking with it. As frightening as the experience was, it made me even more fascinated by the supernatural than I already was. As I saw it, I had gotten thatclose to seeing beyond the veil, and the pull to learn more was overwhelming.

It overlapped with my inexplicable addiction to scaring myself, usually by repeatedly watching or reading things I knew would be frightening. I thank the good lord that Copypasta didn’t exist when I was young, because I unquestionably would have become alarmingly obsessed with it. Even in a pre-internet era, I sought out as much information on the paranormal as I could find, treating long debunked books like The Amityville Horror and Ed and Lorraine Warren’s The Demonologist as legitimate texts on the subject. When I couldn’t convince any of my family members to buy me the Time-Life Mysteries of the Unknown book series, I simply waited until each new volume showed up at my local library.

One of the best days of my young adult life was discovering Weird N.J., a magazine collecting stories about folklore and various haunted places in my home state, including several right near where I grew up¹. Sure, these things scared me, but I frankly enjoyed the thrill², and also I sort of wanted them to be true. By the time I was a teenager, I was having a lot of complicated feelings about God and religion, and I reasoned that if ghosts and demons were real, then that meant that we didn’t just disappear into nothing when we die. Doing things like exploring an abandoned brickyard near my home, which was rumored to be a site for demonic worship³, made me feel alive, in a time when not much else did.

I did have some hard limits: I never read The Satanic Bible, because that seemed a little too risky⁴, and other than the Ouija board experience I never again tried to actually contact any spirits, although I certainly spent a fair amount of time convincing myself that I felt their presence. Even now, as someone who suffers from occasional sleep paralysis (once believed to be caused by demonic visitations), I can’t unequivocally say such things don’t exist⁵. I don’t know, and you don’t know either, and that’s what makes it exciting.

So yeah, I would have 100% without hesitation (well, maybe a little hesitation) touched that hand. Maybe I would have communicated with the ghost of Amelia Earhart, or maybe the ghost of Sawney Bean, the patriarch of a Scottish family that reportedly killed and ate over 1,000 people during the 16th century⁶. But the idea that somebody might be there would have been irresistible.

Hell, I might have even been the first one to volunteer and prove I wasn’t a coward, since God knows I was a giant pussy about everything else in my life. I had all the information to protect myself, I knew that to get a spirit to leave you alone you burned sage and simply asked it to leave (not in an angry tone, they’re apparently sensitive). Plus, hadn’t I already successfully performed an exorcism, after the Ouija board incident? I would be fine. 90 seconds of otherworldly possession, what’s the big deal, I would have taken that over another goddamn math test any day of the week.

1. Atlantic County, home of the Jersey Devil, baby.

2. Interestingly, that enjoyment doesn’t carry over into amusement park thrill rides, though I chalk it up less to being too scared and more to not wanting to interrupt my day with vomiting into a trash can.

3. The evidence was a bunch of cigarette butts and “SLAYER” written in spray paint on a wall.

4. Imagine my surprise when I later discovered that it was a bunch of masturbatory garbage that ultimately sounds a lot like what Libertarians believe.

5. It’s interesting to note that while I still enjoy fictional depictions of hauntings and demonic possession, I find supposed reality shows about ghost hunting dreadfully boring, mostly because they consist of a bunch of assholes lit in night vision green repeatedly asking each other “Did you hear that?”

6. Famous cannibals were also a subject that deeply fascinated me as a young person. I no longer lament not having a lot of friends growing up, it was pretty easy to see why.