I don't think I can provide accurate words to describe my love of It Follows. Easily the most cerebral horror film since Insidious (2010), and rather similar in terms of conceptual structure, It Follows takes old genre tropes and turns them on their heads. Without even a single wink to the audience (which we've come to expect from horror in the post-Scream years), this film re-works John Carpenter's Halloween (1978) into a supernatural suburban thriller that delivers with every shot. And director David Robert Mitchell frames each shot with such edgy immediacy that the whole thing quickly becomes a meditation on dread and anticipation.
Okay, I'm making a lot of claims and references here, so let's break things down a bit. It Follows uses a basic horror narrative in which our female protagonist is, well, followed by a supernatural being after having a sexual encounter. This being -- the titular "It" -- pursues its victim without speaking or changing pace, just infinitely walking in whatever direction it must. To complicate matters, it does not rest, and only its victim can ever see it approaching, though it can change its appearance and so look wildly different at a given time. There is apparently no killing this monster, though a target may transfer its attentions by having sex; immediately after doing so, this new person becomes the monster's new target. But the danger never passes, for if the monster kills its current victim, it will turn its violent attentions to its previous target, and so forth.
Are you following me? (Sorry, it's so hard to avoid these things.) So, besides this rather fresh and intriguing concept for our antagonist (that might be a little gimmicky, but, hey, it is a horror movie), as well as a plot that seems crafted to extend into a franchise, why is this film so important? Well, let's consider the sexual ethics of horror films in the last half-century. The sexual nature of villains and violence during the Hays Code was kept to a minimum (arguably pushed most by the 1960 genre-changers Psycho and Peeping Tom) until the Code's death in 1968. Horror filmmakers were finally able to give graphic images to their biting portrayals of culture, reaching an early peak with the still-controversial The Last House on the Left (1972). In most of the slasher films of the '70s, audiences saw young people choosing sex and drugs before being punished for these sins by unspeakable monsters.
Having seen this new, "millennial" meditation on these things, it only makes sense that it takes the next logical step in modern sexual ethics. We're not watching the wrath of God (or conservative parents) being enacted upon sinful teenagers; we're watching the horrific potentialities brought to a metaphoric reality. You can have sex with someone, but do you really know their reasons for having sex with you? Do you know what they might really give you in that intimate encounter? Will you choose to continue to spread the thing you contracted? And what if that thing returns in a week, a year, ten years in the future? Now I don't know about you, but it makes perfect sense to me to have a horror film about the sexual ethics of STDs. What is "It"? I don't know, but it's kind of hard to watch the movie and not think about a literal embodiment of an STD.
Why do I say it's a modern update of Halloween? Because Mike Myers and our "It" are silent stalkers who butcher their victims and apparently can't be killed. Because you might delay or hinder their progress but there's no guarantee they won't return. Because both take place in lovely suburban areas (one in Haddonfield, Illinois, and the other filmed near Detroit, Michigan) that strike at the hearts of most middle-class Americans. Just look at all the lovely sunlit sidewalks Jamie Lee Curtis strolls down, much like what we see repeatedly in It Follows, though here they are mostly shrouded by twilight. Oh, and if we're comparing films, I really think the score of this is damn good, and it seems to be a close translation of Carpenter's Halloween score in its own right. Of course, I say this is a "modern update", but It Follows is also strangely timeless. The characters use landlines to call each other, not cell phones. The climax takes place in an indoor pool, and we see generic (but older) televisions and lamps around it. The cars are nondescript, the houses aren't striking; point being: this isn't Gothic, it isn't 70s, it isn't really 2015, so what/where/when is it? My answer (and, I suspect, David Robert Mitchell's answer): Does it matter?
And all this is to say nothing of the film's technical excellence. Mitchell intelligently avoids gimmicks and grandeur with this low-budget thriller. He keeps the action as intimate and minimalist as the story and its villain, creeping along with steady pace that never reaches frenzy but never relents in its terror for even a moment. Longshots force the actors to face their own demons, and force us to share in the immediate sensations of fear and limited awareness. Case in point: Our protagonist wakes up from her Sex of Doom (can that be a thing?) tied to a chair, told that she has to witness what follows...literally. But the camera stays trained on her face as she is wheeled around, shown the monster, and frantically pushed away to safety. Another moment: Our protagonist escapes the monster in her house and flees to a wooded part at night. Her friends follow her there, but all we see (from her point of view) is their silhouettes walking toward her. In moments like these, we are never really sure if one of the people in the background is the monster. It's a simple solution that adds more atmospheric elegance to this film than all the computer-generated fog or shadows in any horror film of the last decade.
IMDb: It Follows
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