“It could look like someone you know or it could be a stranger in a crowd.”
I’m hoping to get back into doing more horror movie reviews for SAW. Let’s not make a thing about it, just in case I screw it up. Anyway, as part of that I’m also going to try and do some occasional reviews of ‘anniversary’ movies – that is, films made 10/20/30+ years ago, that sort of thing. So this first review is of a film that came out in 2014.
Somehow I’ve only rewatched It Follows once. I remember enjoying the hell out of it when I saw it in the theater, but since then, well I always feel like I’ve just seen it. I don’t even know how to explain that, given that it’s been ten years since the movie came out. It happens to me sometimes – I’ll see a movie a hundred times and not get tired of it, or see it once and then be all ‘nah, I’m good’ if it comes up again. I recently had the same experience with The Witch, a film I enjoyed a lot – but that I hadn’t felt the urge to watch again until suddenly the horror movie stars aligned.
To cut the rambling short(ish) – I just haven’t felt like re-watching It Follows… until today.
The Medium
It Follows is currently streaming on Netflix, fubo, Showtime and Paramount+ for subscribers, and is available for rent at the usual places. There’s a Blu-ray that can be had pretty cheap as well, but I’ve just never gotten around to picking it up. I think. Let me check… Yeah, still not in the collection. Gotta remedy that. My only complaint about watching it on streaming is that the smaller TV screen diminishes the experience somewhat. I miss the opportunity to scrutinize the backgrounds at the level of detail that the big screen allowed, and the whole movie feels smaller as a result.
The Movie
I think of It Follows as a nightmare. It looks like a nightmare, it feels like a nightmare, and it has that weird sort of dream logic where nothing you do seems to make a difference. You run and you run and no matter how far you go or how fast you go, when you turn around whatever you’re running from is right there.
From the very first scene – a suburban street at dusk, revealed in the first of many languid, floating 360 degree pans – the film feels slightly unreal. Disconnected. Not that it isn’t familiar – the setting evokes comparisons with John Carpenter’s Halloween and when a girl in nightclothes (and high heels) runs from one of the nearly identical houses we’re almost certain that someone or something will pursue her into the gathering dark. Nothing does however, nothing we can see anyway. The scene continues, but the rhythm is different, and it throws you off – or it threw me off, anyway.
Then the movie proper begins, and we meet Jay – played with a sleepy-eyed detachment by Maika Monroe. A disaffected young college student still living at home, still drifting through life like she drifts in the above-ground pool in the backyard. Other characters are introduced with typical horror movie economy – the pining nerd, the jealous sister, the former-flame next door. And, of course, the really nice guy she’s dating – the one with the terrible secret.
It’s that secret that lies at the heart of It Follows. Her beau has what has to be one of the worst sexually transmitted diseases of all time. There’s something monstrous following him, trying to kill him. When the inevitable occurs and Jay has sex with him, that thing is passed on to her. It’s horror movie cliché that sex-equals-death, of course, but here the trope is reversed. The only way to rid oneself of the curse is to have sex with someone else – passing it on to them. (Though if that person then dies, it makes its way back down the chain – neatly circumventing the obvious tactic of sleeping with your hated ex.)
The majority of the film involves Jay and her friends trying to deal with a presence that only she can see, that can look like anyone, and that absolutely will not stop. The feeling of unreality established in the opening scene persists throughout the film. Shots linger longer than they should. David Robert Mitchell uses a lot of wide lenses and they isolate the characters in the foreground, which combines with the longer shots to give us time to peruse the background for things that are out of place, off. Even closeups have plenty of depth of field and there’s always someone – or something – moving in that background space.
It Follows is a horror movie by way of indie-film character study – there are portentous scenes where young people say very little in very meaningful ways. A character reads Dostoevsky aloud. The main character stares into the middle distance without blinking while another character shifts nervously. I sometimes find this meaningful-meaninglessness to be annoying, but somehow it works in this context. It contributes to that dream-like feeling of unreality, as does the almost complete lack of adult presence. The characters – young, but not children – live in a vacuum that lacks significant relationship with the larger world.
The setting also facilitates that nightmare feeling. Despite the earlier comparison this isn’t Carpenter’s 1970’s Illinois, this is modern Detroit. A dim and grimy suburbia where similarity breeds contempt rather than familiarity. The characters live on the border of an urban decay that presents itself more as a profound isolation than a distinct threat. The looming, vacant-windowed buildings and empty, orange-lit parking lots are a modern wasteland, nearly empty of people and providing little in the way of comfort or context. Even the suburban houses, so similar and normal on the outside, are mazes of dim rooms lit only be the blue glare of the television.
Then there’s the soundtrack. The synth score by Disasterpeace is initially disconcerting – it feels like it belongs in an older, more Italian horror film. I couldn’t help feeling at times that someone had taken a Goblin score for an unreleased 1980’s Argento movie and simply repurposed it. That being said, it IS really effective, and in a movie that – for the most part – studiously avoids the standard cinematic shock cuts and jump scares, it provides much of the eerie and occasionally disturbing mood.
There are missteps. Sometimes the pacing is too glacial, even for the kind of mood they’re trying to create. One scene in a bathroom lingered so long on so little that when one of the rare jump scares occurred it didn’t work – I’d forgotten that we were supposed to be building up to something. There are a few action set pieces that are disjointed and confusing. The final scenes are too few and go by too quickly – especially compared to the earlier pacing.
The Bottom Line
It Follows is a really good horror movie, even on a belated third viewing. Knowing the set pieces and jumps let me pay more attention to things going on in the background and details like how IT often wears the form of someone Jay knows. (And what time period does this even take place in? Tube TVs but clamshell Kindles?) It unsettles more often than it scares, but it does that really well. Definitely worth a watch – or three.
