Kathryn Newton's character Faith brings new emotional baggage in the highly anticipated sequel (Photo by Jeff Spicer/Getty Images for The Walt Disney Company Limited).

Jeff Spicer/Getty Images for The Walt Disney Company Limited

So much of what works in horror is the unknown. A movie may explain its rules and help us understand the characters’ peril, but often the scariest aspects come in our imaginations wondering what exists just beyond those details. However, this means there comes a risk when building a horror sequel. Because how do you maintain an air of the unknown, when a sequel demands expansion of the lore?

This is the question I posed to Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, the directors of this year’s horror sequel Ready or Not 2: Here I Come.

The first Ready or Not film struck out as a massive hit in 2019. The original concept featuring actress Samara Weaving’s bride, Grace, frantically evading her cursed and murderous in-laws on the night of her wedding brought in $58 million on a $6 million budget. So, in time, the creatives began talk of a sequel.

Ultimately, the core of that sequel came from two directions. Because, as Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett explain to me, the seeds of where the lore might expand were already in writers Guy Busick and R. Christopher Murphy’s script for the original. That earlier screenplay featured an additional scene, at the film’s end, showing a larger group of cursed families all gathering upon the shocking events of the film. And the idea was to imply that even after Grace’s triumph, many more potential tormentors remained at large.

“I think it was a little bit of—there’s more of them out there. Sort of in a classic kind of horror tropey way of like, you thought it was over. It’s not over," said Bettinelli-Olpin.

But the directors never filmed that moment for the first movie (citing budget restraints). But happily, that left the idea open for the sequel. And that’s where writers Busick and Murphy dove in.

But from there, when producer Tripp Vinson called the directing duo to ask them to come back for this sequel, Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett had another creative addition, something they framed as a non-negotiable.

After working with Samara Weaving on the original film, and after working with actress Kathryn Newton on their movie Abigail, the directors had the idea that these actresses would be fantastic as a sister-protagonist duo. And so from there came their idea for a monster-horror TV series in that vein.

However, when they got the call for Ready or Not 2, knowing that Weaving was already crucial to it, they thought of a pivot.

“Our big pitch to add to the script at that moment was, hey, what if we took this Samara, Kathryn sisters idea and kind of put it into this world?” said Bettinelli-Olpin.

Everyone involved immediately loved it. And so, Kathryn Newton came on as Grace’s sister Faith.

But after defining those core structures, the question comes: What truly makes a film an authentic part of this nascent franchise? The directors tell me that is something they thought over a great deal.

“We talked about that a lot. There are some pillars of what, to us, feel like make the first Ready or Not what it is. And so going into this we discussed what those were, the big one obviously being Samara," said Bettinelli-Olpin.

But while Samara Weaving was indeed back in play and these directors were careful to match aspects of lore, tone, and atmosphere from the first film, they also tell me they weren’t afraid to color outside of those lines either. Rather, they described taking opportunities to subvert expectations that viewers of the original might have.

As an example, they point me to the very first subversion of the sequel. Because a beloved aspect of that first film is Grace’s cathartic cigarette break after surviving the horrors of her night, a relief the audience feels with her.

But this new movie, in beginning right after the events of the first, takes that feeling immediately away as it throws Grace into yet another round of chaos.

“The idea that the next stage of the game would immediately start, that the news of her survival would travel instantly to the people that were a part of pulling the strings for this next terrible, terrible chapter of her life, and that though she’s survived, it’s not over yet—we love the ‘it’s not over yet’ feel of that," said Gillett.

And in that tense bridge between films we find the ways in which the lore expands without breaking the mystery.

With the idea of a larger cabal of violent, cursed families we meet not only another cast of the devil’s adherents, but also learn more about how this version of the occult works. And that mostly comes in the form of Elijah Wood’s delightfully eerie lawyer character.

“It’s really having a character that is a representation of that supernatural genre force that you know nothing about. Like he doesn’t even have a name! You don’t know how old he is. You don’t know where he comes from,” said Gillett.

They emphasized that while the lawyer and the new characters fill in a few more details of this universe, all this also expands the scope of what’s implied beyond the film’s edges. Gillett points out in particular the lawyer character’s massive book of satanic legalese, something that in-truth they did flesh out further, but they didn’t have time to go into on-screen. But that choice now renders it into another effective horror mystery for the audience’s imagination.

All that is what allowed them, at a technical level, to overcome the challenges of expanding a horror without giving anything away. But, they tell me, for them the emotional center, or the point of the story, really came in the relationship they built between these sisters.

“It was really the way that we found the heart of the story for ourselves, and what we could really latch onto at the core of everything,” Bettinelli-Olpin told me.

In the first film Grace built up the faith in herself to power through her ordeal. And in this one, once it’s revealed how the sisters’ have hurt each other in the past, their journey is one of forgiving each other, offering grace, and coming together once more. So beyond the fun of the concept and its horrors, this growth in character is why the movie needed to exist as a story at all.

Ready or Not 2: Here I Come is already a critical success, and so I asked the directors, as many fans are bound to, what might be in store for a third entry.

And to this Tyler Gillett smiled and told me that while writers Guy Busick and R. Christopher Murphy have ideas, it brought him joy to say they don’t yet have anything set. Because their style isn’t to intentionally build up a saga in pieces, but rather to offer a finished story in each entry.

“To be very clear in the conclusion, that this is a singular satisfying, hopefully, experience. And that any sort of ellipsis, narratively or emotionally, is something that we hope is more about giving an audience something to be thoughtful about and less about, ‘Ooh, I can’t wait to see what happens next,’” said Gillett.

With a laugh, though, the two directors floated the idea that maybe a third entry finally gives Grace and her sister some respite and offers them a relaxing getaway.

“Just sisters getting to know each other on vacation somewhere, no supernatural elements,” said Bettinelli-Olpin.

“Nothing bad happens,” Gillett added with a smile.

If only Grace were so lucky.

Ready or Not 2: Here I Come released in theaters on March 20th, 2026. The film stars Samara Weaving, Kathryn Newton, Sarah Michelle Geller, and Elijah Wood.

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