Apologies for spoiling a six year old movie, but “Truth or Dare” ends with most of the principal characters having met their fates, save two (played by Lucy Hale and Violett Beane). The duo are able to delay their doom by passing on the curse of the evil Truth or Dare game via an online video watched by others, thus bringing them into the game, too. According to Variety, when director and co-writer Jeff Wadlow was approached about a sequel, the filmmaker didn’t want to simply make a follow-up involving a group of new characters getting caught up in the deadly game, saying that the idea “seemed kind of boring.”
As it happens, the principal cast of the first film had become fairly close friends in real life, and started taking vacations together. It was during one of these trips that Tyler Posey (Lucas in the first film, and the star of MTV’s “Teen Wolf” series) came up with the notion that the sequel could be something meta, where the cursed game happens to the actors who would now be playing themselves. After Posey pitched the idea to Wadlow, the director became very excited at taking the series in a direction reminiscent of “Wes Craven’s New Nightmare” and “Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2.” As he elaborated:
“So we wrote this script — ‘Truth or Dare IRL’ — and it begins with Markie and Olivia, Lucy and Violett’s characters. They’re in this scene, and it feels like our ‘Final Destination’ kind-of ‘Truth or Dare’ scene, and Markie starts laughing in the middle of it. You hear, ‘Cut!’ and the director walks on the set, and we do the ‘New Nightmare’ treatment where we reveal that Lucy and Violett are still friends. They’re going to go on this trip with the other actors […] Everyone who was in the first film, they’re all buddies, and we find out what happened is the writers of the first film had researched a real demon. Just as Calux can haunt a game in the film, he’s now decided to haunt a movie in the real world. It was scary and surreal and funny and played a lot with subjectivity.”