Part of the pleasure of watching horror movies is taking wagers on who's going to die first. It's impossible to know what they're really about until you see what kind of person is first victimized. Classic slashers movie were about the dangers of thoughtless conformity. Personal favorite Event Horizon is a highly religious film that suggests human knowledge should have boundaries. Horror movies are usually not good if they're not slightly conservative cautionary tales about something, ANYTHING really. I haven't watched a solid horror movie in some time though and had a lot of hopes riding on It Follows. While it wasn't exactly a transcendent experience in terror, I really appreciated the cerebral, yet uncompromising nature of this movie.
The scares of It Follows are not cheap peek-a-boos. They will follow you after the film is over. See what I did there?
Jay (the underrated Maika Monroe) is dating a mysterious young man named Hugh (Jake Weary) who has random spells of erratic behavior. When she finally decides to have sex with him, Hugh chloroforms her ass and kidnaps her for no apparent reason. Is he a sadistic sexual deviant? No, It Follows is not this kind of movie. It's much cooler than that. Turns out Hugh caught a curse like a STD after random drunken sex and got rid of it by passing it on to Jay. The curse consists of being walked down by a supernatural entity only visible to them. If they ever catch up, their target will be consumed and die a horrible death.
Why the kidnapping then? That's the beautiful part. Hugh's a douchebag, but a loveable one. He didn't leave without instructing Jay on how to pass it on to someone else because if the thing ever kills her, it's going back to him! After a romantic evening of Olympic level, Hugh drops off Jay in underwear and tied-up in front of her house. Hugh's not Hugh by the way. His name is Jeff, but he made this entire crazy scenario just to pass his horror cooties to a poor unsuspecting girl who now has to deal with this. I loved that guy.
Way to go, Jeff. Great job.
The scariest things all happen in the edge of human imagination. The unknown is terrifying when it remains the unknown and that your imagination fills the blanks with the worst possible things. That's why people are afraid of the dark. Because not only it would leave you vulnerable to your worst case scenario, but it would leave you vulnerable to any disaster scenario you can come up with from home invaders to demonic aliens. This is why It Follows is scary. Writer and director David Robert Mitchell created a monster without a mythology. Something dangerous and terrifying that's feeding off beautiful and promiscuous young adults.
We live in times obsessed with giving everything mythologies and origin stories, so It Follows is terrifying because it doesn't have that. Therefore your guess as to what the sex-obsessed monster is would be as good as mine. Video game series Silent Hill once was terrifying. Its edge dulled over the years and mediocre iterations of the game that overanalyzed its complicated mythology until it didn't make sense anymore. It Follows CLEARLY is meant to become a series, but David Robert Mitchell needs to tread carefully because he's got a good thing going: an anonymous monster who lives in the mind of young people as an urban legend. It's an easy story to write, but a tough one to write properly.
The wheels of It Follows slowly started coming off as it trudged along and the movie fortunately ended before it could sabotage itself. It obeys narrative conventions of mainstream cinema seemingly almost against its will: the monster is an enemy, it needs to be eradicated to let the pure-hearted protagonist live in peace. That idea lead to physical confrontations between the monster and Jay and her friends. The scene were ugly and clumsy because her friends cannot see the monster unless infected. David Robert Mitchell swings for the fences in a spectacular final scene, but it doesn't work. The idea is ambitious, but comes off as a weird, slapstick brand of horror. Whenever Jay's friends get involved with the plot, It Follows stops being scary. It's as simple as that.
I thought It Follows was intense and ominous and that it understood the nature of horror. It had a handful of cheap music-based scares, yet it never strayed really far from the path it established for itself: an unexplained nightmare vision that hounds the young and sexually reckless. The protagonist is never fed any answer, so the viewers aren't either and that's when it gets scary. When the gears are turning and the mind makes up atrocities that aren't bound by reality. It Follows was a slightly conservative cautionary tale about sexually irresponsible behavior. The first victim comes very early and I don't think she's wearing any proper clothes to speak of. It Follows might not be perfect, but it's a REAL horror movie. One that leave a vision of terror lingering hours after your viewing.
We live in times obsessed with giving everything mythologies and origin stories, so It Follows is terrifying because it doesn't have that. Therefore your guess as to what the sex-obsessed monster is would be as good as mine. Video game series Silent Hill once was terrifying. Its edge dulled over the years and mediocre iterations of the game that overanalyzed its complicated mythology until it didn't make sense anymore. It Follows CLEARLY is meant to become a series, but David Robert Mitchell needs to tread carefully because he's got a good thing going: an anonymous monster who lives in the mind of young people as an urban legend. It's an easy story to write, but a tough one to write properly.
The wheels of It Follows slowly started coming off as it trudged along and the movie fortunately ended before it could sabotage itself. It obeys narrative conventions of mainstream cinema seemingly almost against its will: the monster is an enemy, it needs to be eradicated to let the pure-hearted protagonist live in peace. That idea lead to physical confrontations between the monster and Jay and her friends. The scene were ugly and clumsy because her friends cannot see the monster unless infected. David Robert Mitchell swings for the fences in a spectacular final scene, but it doesn't work. The idea is ambitious, but comes off as a weird, slapstick brand of horror. Whenever Jay's friends get involved with the plot, It Follows stops being scary. It's as simple as that.
I thought It Follows was intense and ominous and that it understood the nature of horror. It had a handful of cheap music-based scares, yet it never strayed really far from the path it established for itself: an unexplained nightmare vision that hounds the young and sexually reckless. The protagonist is never fed any answer, so the viewers aren't either and that's when it gets scary. When the gears are turning and the mind makes up atrocities that aren't bound by reality. It Follows was a slightly conservative cautionary tale about sexually irresponsible behavior. The first victim comes very early and I don't think she's wearing any proper clothes to speak of. It Follows might not be perfect, but it's a REAL horror movie. One that leave a vision of terror lingering hours after your viewing.