Ready or Not 2: Here I Come. Photo courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.

There’s a gleeful spirit of subversion that courses through Matt Bettinelli-Olpin’s and Tyler Gillett’s (known as Radio Silence) Ready or Not 2: Here I Come. It’s not just that the follow-up to their 2019 chamber piece is bloodier and more vicious, but that anytime you expect the film to narratively zag, it zigs, and that the characters have a striking interiority that stands in contrast with their histrionic antics. At its core, it delivers the cathartic thrill of seeing the wealthy get their devilish comeuppance, but on a deeper level, it celebrates the power of imaginative resistance. 
Taking place immediately after the events of the original movie’s barn burner (mansion burner?) ending, we witness Grace (Samara Weaving) collapse at the steps of her in-laws’ estate, the only survivor of a deadly game that saw everyone in the Le Domas clan, including her husband, explode in a spectacular and supernatural fashion. She wakes to see her estranged sister, Faith (Kathryn Newton), suddenly there, but they’ve barely had a chance to insult each other before they’re captured. The Le Domas were part of a capitalist Satanic cult, and other families, led by the likes of siblings Titus (Shawn Hatosy) and Ursula (Sarah Michelle Gellar), have the opportunity to take leadership if they kill Grace and her sister, who must try their best to stay alive until dawn.
Filmmaker spoke with Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett for a spoiler-filled chat on the day of the film’s release. They discussed balancing genre thrills with the film’s underlying themes around resistance and corporate greed, the increase in not just the blood budget but also the candle budget, and the origin of one of the film’s best gags featuring David Cronenberg. 
Filmmaker: The final shot of Ready or Not is iconic in its own right. I’m curious what prompted you to want to start the film in the aftermath of such a seminal moment. 
Gillett: I think what people responded to from the first film was Grace’s scrappiness and how, down to the very end, she never gave up. She had every bit of fight in her at the end of Ready or Not that she had at the beginning. We loved the notion of dragging someone through Hell and not giving them a break. Starting from the end was a fun way to suggest that the world of corruption and evil is much more expansive than just one family. The devil won’t wait for you. 
Filmmaker: It’s been about twelve years since Devil’s Due. It seems like exploring questions around how the supernatural manifests in our day-to-day is a common throughline. 
Bettinelli-Olpin: Yeah, that’s also present in V/H/S and Southbound, too. It’s interesting to explore these questions of spirituality through characters who themselves have their own crises of faith. When you look at those movies with a stronger supernatural element, there’s a darkness to them. Ready or Not 2: Here I Come does go a bit darker in terms of the exploration of the divine. 

Gillett: I think if you’d asked us, though, if the supernatural horror sub-genre was something that we loved, we would say that we like watching those movies, but I don’t know if we have a particularly strong interest in making them. What you’re seeing in our work is very much a skewering and subversion of that subgenre. A lot of it is the sense of humor that is derived from colliding our very human world and characters with the high-octane, survive-the-night stakes of our stories. I’m hesitant to say that our movies are entries into that canon. 
Bettinelli-Olpin: We try to treat our stories with a very grounded approach. I say that knowing that in both Ready or Not films, the fucking devil shows up at the end. It’s not subtle. 
Gillett: In the first one, when the Le Domas have Grace strapped to the table and they’re chanting, that is a moment where we felt, “Okay, are we leaning into the tropes?” But I think how we subvert that is by having those characters not really know what they’re doing. 
Bettinelli-Olpin: They’re all cosplaying evil. 
Filmmaker: That does connect well with the kind of atavistic thrills your films provide, namely in the way you merge the modern and archaic. You have David Cronenberg texting in a group chat! His “Approve the ceasefire” line is probably the best joke in the film. 
Bettinelli-Olpin: That is one of the jokes that we’re most proud of, how well that has landed. Credit to the writers and credit to Cronenberg. That was always funny on the page because our question was, “How do you distill this guy’s power into one moment?” After Cronenberg says that line, it’s literally about three seconds before we see the notification that the ceasefire has happened. 
Gillett: But critically, the moment before it says there’s “no end in sight” for the war, and then all of a sudden it gets resolved. 

Bettinelli-Olpin: It’s really the first laugh of the movie, and it helps set the tone for what you’re going to get into. 
Filmmaker: I think back to the first film when we saw the image of Samara with the shotgun, looking regal and badass. But when that scene actually comes up in the movie, the gun doesn’t work, and it’s not as “cool” as the image showed. 
Bettinelli-Olpin: Guy and Ryan are really good at writing those moments where the movie tells you it’s heading towards something you’ve seen in another movie, and then it decides, “Nope, we’re not doing that.” That shotgun scene you brought up was the biggest example of that. Even at the end of the movie, we’re trained to think “Grace is going to fight back and kill everybody.” But she just gets cornered, and luckily, the sun comes up. With Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, there were a lot of those moments where the audience thinks we’re leading them down a clear A to B moment, but we switch it up on them. The laundry machine kills come to mind, namely because the sisters have to deal with that in real time. It’s like, “Oh shit, we’re killing a guy. He’s in real pain.” 
Gillett: You feel uncomfortable because of how drawn out it is and how it doesn’t feel like a horror movie death. 
Bettinelli-Olpin: We’re so used to seeing these characters become superheroes, filled with bloodlust. But Grace is not that. She can protect herself and protect her sister when she needs to, but she’s still very human and she doesn’t want to just go around murdering people. There is a fine line to walk there where you want her to be fun and badass and get that revenge that we love, but also keep her very relatable and human. There’s kindness to her that I think she carries through the whole movie. 
Filmmaker: A lot of ink has been spilled about how much the blood budget increased. I feel like we’re not talking enough about the candle budget. 
Bettinelli-Olpin: I think in the first film we had a total of fifteen candles and three candelabras. 

Gillett: We’d move them into each shot to give them the appearance of candelabras in these long hallways. 
Bettinelli-Olpin: We’d have to then blow them out immediately so that they wouldn’t melt. Otherwise, we’d have to get new fucking candles that we could not afford. We wanted to take what the Le Domas were cosplying in the first movie—with their silly robes and their silly goblets—and say, “Cool, but what if the families in this film know what the fuck they’re doing?” The lighting with the candles contributed to that. 
Filmmaker: One element that stood out to me was tracing the multiple times Titus was slapped: by his father, sister, and Faith. Each moment is significant, and Shawn does a good job of showing how each slap cracks his psyche further. 
Bettinelli-Olpin: Even though Titus is a capital-V villain in this movie, you want to know why he is the way he is. There’s something about those slaps, especially from his dad, where you do feel empathy for him, and you watch that get peeled away throughout the movie. That way, at the end, when he slaps his sister, you just go, “Oh fuck this dude’s off the rails and is not coming back.” Shawn embodies that masterfully; there’s a lightness to him in the first half of the movie that is gone in the second. 
Gillett: I think that those slaps imply that it’s not the first time his sister or his dad has hit him. Titus has probably been kept in line with physical attack for his entire life. Watching those two characters leave his life, and him come into his own, was an interesting idea for us. In a lot of ways, it’s what happens with Grace’s husband, Alex, in the first movie. His brother and mom both died, who are the pillars in his life, and he’s sort of left to just become what he’s always wanted to be. 
Bettinelli-Olpin: It’s funny how Alex and Titus mirror each other because Alex is falling into his family’s brutality begrudgingly, versus Titus who wants to be that fucking guy. 
Filmmaker: The choice that befalls Grace is one that we have to face at some point in our lives. We either have to join the system or die beating it. Through Grace, your film articulates a hopeful, new path. I’m curious how you’ve reflected on the importance of resistance and imagination beyond the binaries we find ourselves in? 

Bettinelli-Olpin: We make fun, silly movies, but we really hope that the thematic stuff we deal with at the heart of our films is real and not goofy. We talk a lot about how it’s easy to dismiss a lecture, but if you can convey a worldview in a way that feels like you’re having a good time, that can really impact somebody. 
To go into that final scene with Grace, there were a lot of versions of that scene, and there were longer ones that explained a lot more, and there were shorter ones that didn’t explain enough. What we landed on was this idea—and hopefully it’s really relatable—that if you’re given this power, do we really only have two options? Do we have to join a corrupt system or be killed? To have Grace take that moment and say, “I don’t believe that. I think there’s another way.” We’re not presented with that option anymore. 
Gillett: In both versions of those scenarios, the bad guys win. I’m fucking sick of living in a world where the bad guys win. We don’t want to express that in our work; we want the good guys to get the shot at victory. It should be complicated, it should come at a cost, it should be bittersweet, but it’s fucking great when the bad guys get what’s coming to them. 
Bettinelli-Olpin: The thing is, though, if you do things with cynicism, the bad guys also win. How do you find a way to victory that’s not cynical, because they’ll always find a way to defeat you if you adopt the worldview of the oppressor? 
Gillett: What you’re articulating such a point of pride and also simultaneously such a point of frustration. I think that our tone gets written off because it’s entertaining and silly and fun. I think people think, “Oh, there’s nothing to see here.” There’s no deeper significance, message, or meaning. I would say that some of the hardest work that we do is actually working to hide all of that nutritive shit inside of something that is hopefully digestible and approachable. I think we’ve learned so much from the art that we love, and the art we’re drawn to makes you feel first instead of think first.