It Follows belongs in the pantheon of great suburban horror films like Halloween and A Nightmare on Elm Street. It’s an impeccably crafted movie that haunts as much as it unnerves. What lingers isn’t just the paranoia established from the outset or the constant sense that our heroes’ lives are in danger, but something far more thoughtful.
Writer/director David Robert Mitchell uses 1980s genre tropes to examine teenagers as the cusp of adulthood. Many of the characters are obsessed with becoming adults or at least appearing mature, and yet they’re also afraid to leave the comforts of youth and suburbia. To dig deeper into this material, Mitchell does advanced math with one of the most simple horror movie equations: “sex = death”.
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It Follows
Director: David Robert Mitchell
Rating: R
Release Date: March 13, 2015
Jay (Maika Monroe) hooks up with a guy named Hugh (Jake Weary), which wasn’t such a good idea since he’s the latest link in a chain of doomed sex partners. After having sex, the most recent partner becomes stalked by a supernatural presence that shambles mutely forward. Think a zombie or Michael Myers from Halloween. If the presence catches up with you, you die, and the previous sex partner is stalked next. All you can do is pass it on; sex is a kind of transmittable death sentence.
It sounds silly on the surface, and this sort of set-up might lead to exploitation territory in other hands, but Mitchell focuses on the characters and how the immanent threat of dying enters their sheltered lives. Like Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook, It Follows is concerned with emotional stakes rather than just cheap scares, which is thanks to both the screenplay and the cast. By getting the audience to invest in this group of teenage friends and care about Jay’s well-being, the horror is more palpable.
In slasher movies, sex usually signified a sin that needs to be punished or the horrible repercussions of pleasure, but there’s more to sex in It Follows. Sex is both a rite of passage into adulthood and a kind of memento mori. In this film, “sex = death” is not a puritanical equation about the virtues or pragmatism of teenage virginity, but rather an acknowledgment about the inevitability of both sex and death in everyone’s lives. Sex, like death and like the presence that’s after Jay, is an unstoppable force.
All the rich metaphorical material would be mere garnish if Mitchell hadn’t made a film that’s so well put together. It Follows is shot with care, augmented by its original synthesizer score (a la classic John Carpenter) and the menacing sound design. In the opening shot of the film, we’re given an extended take from a fixed spot on the street of a suburban neighborhood, panning to catch someone helpless and possibly insane. Something’s not right in the world we’ve entered, which defies being pinned to a specific era, and we never exit this timeless, dreamlike state. That opening shot creates a space to deal with the idea of teenagehood, and it also lets the audience know that the adults can’t help their children anymore. This confrontation with death is something their kids have to handle on their own.
So many of the images in It Follows are beautiful to look at given the way cinematographer Mike Gioulakis plays with color, movement, and negative space to emphasize the underlying emotions of each scene. Clayton Perry, Christian Dwiggins, and Lauren Robinson of the sound department also deserve high praise, foregrounding the dread even before the film’s first shot. It Follows is a great reminder of how effective the most basic formal elements of a movie can be when every choice has a clear sense of purpose.
A bunch of horror and science fiction films of the last decade have tried to get by as successful pastiche and nothing more, as if recreating the past is sufficient. It’s usually not. Most people can restate what’s already been said, but what gives a work a life of its own is when someone says something original or reconsiders what’s been said from different angles. It Follows is brimming with that sense of vitality, which makes everything it says about dying surprisingly potent.