A horror movie with a simple, original and brilliantly unnerving premise, It Follows may not be perfect but it was effective enough to wreck my night’s sleep afterwards.
The concept is a banger. Jay (Maika Monroe) is a university student who is dating Hugh (Jake Weary), when she’s not hanging out with her sister and friends. Hugh seems decent enough, but his behaviour changes drastically after they finally have sex. He chloroforms Jay, ties her up and explains that she has just contracted a sexually transmitted curse that can only be passed on if she has sex with someone else. If she doesn’t, she will be followed by a malevolent supernatural entity that’s out to kill her. What an end to a romantic date.
This shape-shifting pursuer can take the form of anyone, including family and friends, and is only visible to Jay. It will only chase you at a slow walking pace. You can easily outrun it in an open space, and a car ride will buy you even more time, but just like a zombie Terminator, it will never ever stop. Though this is not a movie that relies on gore, its chilling prologue involving another young woman gives a very graphic idea of what could happen to Jay. It’s also a methodical creature: if it succeeds in getting Jay, it will proceed to hunt Hugh and then presumably everyone else down the sex chain.
Teenage sex and horror have of course been a combo for decades, with plenty of knowing commentary and send-up inside the genre itself. I’m not sure if It Follows was ever meant to be a parable about abstinence or sexually transmitted disease, or any kind of commentary on youth and sexuality. Sex in this movie comes with complications, to say the least, but it’s not really a cautionary tale. Above all else, it’s just a killer idea for a horror movie that invites the viewer to put themselves in its young protagonist’s shoes. Just like Jay, you’ll find yourself nervously scanning the space around her, looking out for any slow-moving figure that could potentially be a threat.
The movie makes superb use of its curiously empty suburban setting, escalating tension with the help of moody cinematography and carefully composed shots. The world it creates is strangely timeless, with characters using e-readers while also watching old black-and-white horror movies that seem to be the only thing on TV, and a spare synthesiser score paying tribute to classics like Halloween. It is also almost entirely free of adults, who only appear in photographs or are mimicked by Jay’s demonic stalker.
It Follows doesn’t succeed anywhere near as well when it comes to the characters. To be fair, Maika Monroe stands out as a vulnerable and sympathetic horror heroine, but the rest of the performances are merely adequate and characters overall are bland and forgettable. I felt my interest dip whenever the movie spent too much time on love triangles and teenage dramas, and pretentious literary quotes from Dostoyevsky didn’t help. The movie also felt somewhat inconsistent when it comes to the entity’s interactions with the physical world and what it’s prepared to do in order to get at Jay, especially during the climactic scene set inside an abandoned swimming pool.
While I found the premise incredibly creepy, I didn’t think that the movie scared me all that much, but a restless night is proof enough that it did get into my head after all. Though uneven in certain aspects, it’s definitely one of the more memorable horror movies I’ve seen recently.
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