“It could look like anyone. But there’s only one of it.”
Some horror films sneak up on you. It Follows does not (ironic, considering the film’s source of terror). David Robert Mitchell’s film begins where another would end, with a bravura opening sequence following a girl named Annie. We see her skimpily dressed, save for a pair of high heels. This is not an outfit one would plan on wearing; this is a girl who needed to escape and put on the closest shoes she could find. In one fluid shot, Annie runs out of her house, then back into it, then back out again, this time with car keys. It’s early morning; after a cut, it’s dark out. She’s been driving all day. Without explicating it, we know she has no destination in mind. Mitchell gives us a gorgeous shot of Annie huddled on a beach, surrounded by nothing, calling her parents to say she loves them. The next day she is dead, her leg bent at an impossible, horrific angle, as if she died doing yoga. It Follows begins in the middle of a nightmare. That Annie doesn’t figure into the main story is no accident. Mitchell wants his film to feel timeless, like a parable, and this relentless prologue is his first step towards achieving that.
It Follows is set in Detroit, and it’s a period piece or maybe a sci-fi piece. Mitchell obscures the timeline nicely. The cars are from the ’60s or ’80s (although Annie drove a current car and had a cell phone). Phones are landlines, but one character reads The Idiot on a clamshell e-reader that looks like a compact mirror. Details are hazy, the imagery dreamlike. We first meet Jay (Maika Monroe) floating in a pool, and like Jay, It Follows has the consistency of waves.
Jay goes on a date with Hugh (Jake Weary), who takes her to see Charade, a movie about a man concealing his identity. He draws her attention to a girl in a neon dress. Jay looks and sees no one. This is a scene that plays wonderfully upon a rewatch. After a few more dates, Jay and Hugh have sex in his car. Afterwards, he chloroforms her and she wakes up tied to a wheelchair. Hugh is not the villain of this movie.
The driving conceit of It Follows is well-known by now; along with The Babadook and Get Out, this film has probably had the most cultural impact in recent years. Still, it’s simple, and clever enough to get out of the film’s way. When Jay had sex with Hugh, he passed “it” to her. It’s a curse of kinds; Jay will be followed by a malevolent, unnamed entity which can take the form of any person (“It’s very slow but it’s not dumb,” Hugh explains). This is a very clever inversion of the slasher-movie approach – when we see Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees, we know he is the killer. Anyone in It Follows could be the killer. Mitchell frames Jay in wide shots, leaving the background wide open. Once we see the first follower – a nude woman calmly walking over train tracks – our eyes become trained to scan the horizon, skeptical of any and every background actor we see. Mitchell makes us feel as unsafe watching the film as Jay feels experiencing it.
It Follows unfolds with the logic of a nightmare. Looking out the window in class, Jay sees an old woman crossing campus, staring at her, and instinctively runs. Mitchell excels at shots and scenes that take their time to develop. There are no short scenes in this movie. Mitchell trusts his audience, and also wants to torture them. The idea of being followed is terrifying; the idea of no one being able to see what’s following is even scarier. It’s paranoia mixed with loneliness. Jay’s friend group – Yara (Olivia Luccardi), Paul (Keir Gilchrist), and her sister Kelly (Lili Sepe) – are sympathetic but unconvinced, at least at first. No one can help her.
When they meet up again with Hugh – real name Jeff – he tells her to sleep with someone as soon as possible, in order to pass on the curse; if it kills Jay the curse will revert back to him. And yes, that would make sense. So would Hugh sleeping with a prostitute, which is a good way to ensure that the curse won’t come back to him. But people who poke holes in a film’s logic are the least fun people in the world. It shows a fundamental unwillingness to meet a film halfway or abide by its rules. These same people watched Memento and snidely asked, “But how does he remember his own condition?” Films don’t exist so they can be one-upped.
If you meet It Follows where it wants you to, you fall under its spell. This is a film that isn’t afraid to put you in a trance, and at times it comes close to intentionally boring you. But it’s not just atmosphere and mood – the scares here are intense, and you feel them along your spine. Jay’s followers take many forms, none more terrifying than a gargantuan man who barges into a door opened by Kelly. Later, a follower tries to burst in through a door; when Jay leaves through a side door, it’s right there behind her, in a different form. It’s slow but it’s not dumb.
Some viewers take umbrage with the obscenity on display, such as a half-nude woman urinating in the kitchen, but I’d argue that the imagery is meant to make us squirm, to discomfit us in much the same way as it terrifies Jay. (I will concede that the only follower that doesn’t really work is a nude man Jay sees standing on a rooftop.)
There’s an old trope in horror movies that the girl who has sex dies, and the virgin lives. It Follows takes that to its extreme. The parallels with STDs are obvious, but if that was all that Mitchell was gunning for, It Follows would seem like a hectoring morality tale. I think it’s about more than that. I think it’s about the unfair stigma placed on sex, and how people, young women especially, are so often demonized for doing something enjoyable. Jay, like many young women, fears judgment. It should come as no surprise that in its final form, Jay’s follower looks just like her father.
10/1: Dawn of the Dead
10/2: Drag Me to Hell
10/3: Pet Sematary
10/4: The Descent
10/5: Repo! The Genetic Opera
10/6: Desierto
10/7: The Blair Witch Project
10/8: Blair Witch
10/9: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
10/10: A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)
10/11: Prince of Darkness
10/12: 30 Days of Night
10/13: Friday the 13th (2009)
10/14: Slither
10/15: Tremors
10/16: Pandorum
10/17: It Follows
10/18: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
10/19: Poltergeist
10/20: Paranormal Activity
10/21: Creepshow
10/22: VHS
10/23: Nosferatu the Vampyre
10/24: An American Werewolf in London
10/25: The Witch
10/26: The Rocky Horror Picture Show
10/27: Cronos
10/28: The Hills Have Eyes
10/29: The Hills Have Eyes (2006)
10/30: Tucker and Dale vs. Evil
10/31: Halloween (2007)
About Author
