It Follows (2015)
Since the genesis of the slasher subgenre, sex and death have been inextricably linked. If teenagers engaged in the "sin" of premarital sex, they were almost certain to be penetrated by something much sharper and more fatal than male genitalia. In their own bizarre, self-righteous way, horror movies doubled as cautionary tales against such a transgression, encouraging adolescents and young adults to save themselves and their purity for the right person with whom they wish to share the rest of their lives. Now, of course, if the young, attractive, sexually active characters in horror films finally realized the virtue of the pious message being bluntly communicated in the Halloween and Friday the 13th franchises via their masked, silently judgmental antagonists, we would no longer be able to bask in the pleasure of the beheadings, eviscerations, and impalements that constitute the raison d'etre of slasher movies. So let's just keep imparting the moral judgment on our characters and hope that they never learn the error of their ways.
In David Robert Mitchell's supernatural horror film, It Follows, the link between sex and death is no longer implicit. The teenage protagonists don't partake in premarital intercourse only to find themselves being hunted soon after by a maniac disguised beneath a goalie mask and wielding a Freudian machete for no discernible reason. Here, the mysterious antagonist is created and transmitted through the specific act of sexual intercourse. If you have sex with someone, you free yourself of the demonic disease by passing it on to that other person. It's an obvious but brilliantly terrifying allegory for the unstoppable horror of sexually transmitted diseases in general, only exacerbated with a supernatural twist. It Follows is not a teen slasher, despite its central premise, but rather a quiet, melancholy, patiently crafted exercise in supernatural horror that reinvigorates ancient genre tropes while repurposing the plot of Koji Suzuki's Japanese horror novel, Ring, emphasizing psychological torment and a creeping sense of dread over a repetitive series of jump scares or a high, gore-drenched body count.
Jay Height (Maika Monroe) is a 19-year-old college student who lives with her single mother (Debbie Williams), a functioning alcoholic coping with the loss of her husband, and younger sister, Kelly (Lili Sepe), in the suburban neighborhood of Detroit, Michigan. She has a small group of companions, one of whom is her sister, to keep herself occupied since her mother is just barely a presence in either of their lives: her childhood best friend, Paul (Keir Gilchrist), who harbors unrequited feelings for Jay that go beyond that of a friendship; Yara (Olivia Luccardi, who I'm convinced is the long-lost sister of Molly Gordon), a philosophical, laidback, uninhibited girl with a penchant for reading stories on a seashell-shaped e-reader; and Greg (Daniel Zovatto), a neighbor across the street with whom Jay once hooked up casually in high school.
Over the past few weeks, Jay has been seeing a new guy named Hugh (Jake Weary). Following an awkward date at a theater that had to be cut prematurely, Jay agrees to go out with Hugh again, this time in a deserted area in the woods where they have sex in the backseat of his car. Soon after, as Jay lounges on her stomach, expressing her lifelong desire to grow up, date handsome men, and experience the euphoric freedom of adulthood, Hugh unexpectedly renders her unconscious with chloroform and ties her to a wheelchair inside an abandoned warehouse. Once she comes to, Hugh explains that he's transmitted a supernatural curse to her that will manifest as a silent, emotionless entity which will pursue her relentlessly. "It can look like someone you know, or a stranger in a crowd." If it so much as makes physical contact with Jay, she will die. All she has to do to rid herself of it is to sleep with another man and thus transmit the curse to him. However, should that other person fall victim to it, it will return its focus to Jay, going straight down the line to whoever created it.
Once Prince Charming drops her off at her house, speeding away and leaving his date partially naked and stumbling onto her lawn, Jay is informed by police that Hugh used a fake name to rent a house in the city and is nowhere to be found. As she attempts to recover from the traumatizing ordeal with the man she thought truly cared about her, Jay quickly realizes that "Hugh" wasn't some delusional psychopath fabricating a fanciful story, but a legitimate victim of a curse who issued a dire warning. With the support of her sister and friends, Jay must make an impossibly difficult moral decision: continue being on guard and looking over her shoulder for the rest of her life, or pass the curse to some other unsuspecting victim.
That's the elemental plot of It Follows, and Mitchell, performing double duty as screenwriter and director, does a phenomenal job at laying out the bare essentials of his terrifying story. He doesn't clutter up his screenplay with tangential secondary subplots or an unwieldy addition of unrelated supporting characters. He keeps his focus centered exclusively on Jay and her small group of comrades, who band together to figure out a way to put an end to this entity's reign of terror and prevent their loved one from becoming the latest target checked off its list. Despite telling an overall original story of survival and human vulnerability, Mitchell pays tribute to the customs of the horror genre, beginning with the opening kill, one of the absolute best in modern horror.
Mitchell opens on a still image of a quiet suburban street late in the evening. A row of colorful trees line the block. Leaves are strewn all over the street. There's not a car driving down or a single person in sight. Cinematographer Mike Gioulakis slowly pans his camera to the right, settling on a large, beautiful house. Bursting out the front door is a young woman named Annie Marshall (Bailey Spry), who races into the street in a pair of high heels (the only silly detail in an otherwise instantly gripping and heart-stopping set piece). She begins backing away slowly, looking ahead at something only she can see, and it's evidently petrifying. A neighbor unloading groceries from her trunk asks the young woman if she's okay, to which she unconvincingly replies she is. Without giving it a second's thought, the neighbor goes inside her own house. Annie's father steps outside and asks what she's doing. Once again, Annie weakly promises she's fine. Composer Richard Vreeland's heart-pounding synthesizer score intensifies alongside Annie's terror. The camera rotates as Annie runs across the street onto the opposite sidewalk and races in a circle back onto her front lawn, dashing past her concerned father and inside her home, where Dad follows. A moment later, Annie reemerges from the door, runs into her car, and speeds down the street, looking nervously out her back window along the drive. In the blackness of nighttime, she settles down at the sandy shore of a lake, comforted by the susurration of the serene water behind her. Annie dials her father and tearfully expresses her love for him and her mother, apologizing for all the times she mistreated him for no reason. Suddenly, her oasis of calm is broken by a petrifying sight, but all we get to see is her car parked in front of her, its headlights penetrating the darkness. The driver's door remains open. Rather than depicting the gruesome details of her violent encounter, editor Julio C. Perez hard cuts to a close-up of Annie the following morning. She lies motionlessly on the shore, her face expressionless, her skin a ghostlike white. Gioulakis pulls back to reveal the full scope of her condition. Her right leg is twisted upward with a gash in her kneecap. Her foot hangs suspended above her chest, the red high heel still on. Her left leg is covered in blood and her other shoe has been removed.
Mitchell forbids access to Annie's perspective, depriving us of the horrifying sight of the demon that was pursuing her. He spares us the grotesque details of her unnatural execution, cutting in the snap of a finger from her heartbreaking farewell to her father to the aftermath of her demise. No sound effects or dramatic musical score are necessary accompaniments. With little dialogue and a lot of visual storytelling, Mitchell immediately establishes the nature of his supernatural threat, with a setting that evokes the deceptively peaceful suburbia of John Carpenter's Halloween. By denying access to his character's sight, he enables us to share in his character's paranoia while increasing the sensation of disorientation. We're on edge about something we can't even see, which also necessitates less work on Mitchell's part to fill the scene with extras. It's a masterful method for priming the audience for the horror that's going to unfold, and best of all, he compounds the paranoia of being chased by something not of this world from which you can't escape with the poignancy of knowing you're going to die and issuing your final goodbye to your loved ones.
Mitchell has conceived one of the most nightmarish, relentless, and innovative villains in 21st-century horror with his titular creation, and it's no surprise its genesis emanated from a series of recurrent nightmares experienced by the writer-director in his youth, all centered around the universal fear of being followed. "I didn't use those images for the film, but the basic idea and the feeling I used. From what I understand, it's an anxiety dream. Whatever I was going through at that time, my parents divorced when I was around that age, so I imagine it was something to do with that." The element of sexual transmission came later from Mitchell's desire for something that could be transferred between people.
The demonic entity of It Follows lives up to its namesake in the most simple and elementally effective fashion imaginable. As implied, it is a nonhuman force with one single-minded goal: to follow its target until it finally kills them. It doesn't have a name or a motivation. It doesn't think or grant mercy to anyone based on certain personal characteristics. Whoever it's been transferred to via sexual intercourse, that's who it will pursue with an implacable thirst for blood. Mitchell draws a lot of inspiration from Carpenter's aforementioned seminal holiday slasher, and that manifests in his characterization of "It." While it wasn't born as a human only to be consumed by evil at the random age of six, nor does it wear a costume or wield a household weapon or expose itself to everyone, it moves and behaves with a similar adherence to nightmare logic and disregard for the rules of the real world in which it exists.
Aside from emulating the inhumane blankness of Michael Myers, Mitchell seems to have also derived inspiration from another horror icon often referred to as "It": Pennywise the Dancing Clown. Much like the shape-shifting alien with an insatiable hunger for children, this entity possesses the ability to morph into any appearance it chooses. It's not committed to one form or another. As Hugh accurately warns, it can take the shape of a random person walking down the block, or more devastatingly, a relative or friend to deceive you into weakening your defenses. However, it still suffers from the weakness of making itself somewhat obvious, pursuing its targets with a solemn expression and zombie-like gait. Like Michael, it can be hindered, however briefly, by bullets, which do release blood as red and wet as that of any real human. And it rises with the same swiftness and ease. Unlike Pennywise and Freddy Krueger, it lacks the ability of speech, preferring the intimidation of silence. This thing has no interest in taunting its victims or relishing in their suffering. It has a chain of targets to kill off and no time to dawdle. In a refreshing twist for the supernatural subgenre, this entity is somehow incapable of either opening locked doors, having to resort to hurling a brick through a window at one point, or locking doors telekinetically to trap a victim. And it does possess mass: if a cover is thrown over it, its physical shape will become visible to everyone, cursed or otherwise.
Mitchell conjures his demon through a gallery of some of the most diverse and plainly terrifying figures: an elderly, gray-haired woman in a white hospital gown; an exceedingly gigantic, skinny man in a white T-shirt with enlarged, blackened eyes; a naked old man standing on a roof; a hissing, vampiric neighbor boy who was often stalking Jay before she was cursed; and most conspicuously, a young, gap-toothed woman wearing a sock on one foot and not the other, and a bra that covers one breast while the other hangs out loosely, all while a stream of urine drips down her leg and splashes onto the floor. Of the vast array of villains in the horror genre, Mitchell's unnamed, enigmatic entity comes the closest in personifying the pure, irrational, relentless terror of a nightmare.
For a character-driven horror film like It Follows to succeed, Mitchell has to create a protagonist with whom it's easy to empathize and cast an actress with the talent and commitment to traverse a multifaceted arc of emotions. He knocks it out of the park on both fronts. Jay Height is not a particularly remarkable human being, nor is she anything resembling a badass along the lines of Sidney Prescott or Nancy Thompson. That's precisely the point. She's more like Laurie Strode, a meek, down-to-earth, good-natured teenager living a relatively normal life in the suburbs. She attends a community college, shares a close bond with her sister, socializes with a few lifelong friends, and is reveling in the freshness and excitement of a new relationship with an older hunk. Her father hasn't been in the picture since childhood, having either separated from her mom or, more likely, passed away. Once the simplicity of her suburban life is shattered, Jay finds herself forced to fight for her life without the comfort or help of either parent. She has only her closest friends to turn to, and even they're at a disadvantage of not being able to identify her assailant. Only those afflicted have the benefit of seeing it, including those no longer currently in its crosshairs.
In the role of It Follows' new target, Maika Monroe submits a star-making lead performance, with the innate likability and emotional availability that made a literal star out of Jamie Lee Curtis in 1978 (and it's no coincidence her character's name is a nickname for Jamie). Without even doing much actual screaming (because the role necessitates more crying), Monroe presents herself as one of the finest young scream queens working in the horror genre today. She commits her entire physical being to this starring role, portraying Jay's perpetual state of apprehension as well as her craving for the unlimited wonders of womanhood. Jay is a woman of few words, but one glance into Monroe's soulful eyes, and you know exactly what this beautiful woman is thinking and feeling at any given moment. It's through those very big eyes that Monroe performs some of her greatest acting, achingly expressive of Jay's longing, vulnerability, trepidation, insecurity, disorientation, betrayal, devastation, guilt, and lethargy. She reads her lines with a softness that borders on childlike, reflective of a young woman on the cusp of adulthood but enamored with the still-recent beauty of childhood.
At the beginning of the movie, Monroe plays Jay as a soft-spoken, unassuming, goodhearted individual content with her ordinary life but salivating for something bigger. Following her second date with Hugh in which she's supernaturally tainted, Monroe's face, once full of the brightness and expectancy of youth, becomes drained of vitality, utterly bare of hope. She dissolves into floods of despondent tears and petrified guttural screams. Her greatest moment occurs in a hospital room. Following a car crash provoked by the entity at Greg's lake house, Jay wakes up in a hospital bed, the bloody bruise on her forehead wrapped. Sitting in sleep before her are her mother, sister, and all three friends. Her legs are currently immobile. She turns her head toward the open doorway, paralyzed with paranoia that the entity will seize the opportunity to kill her while she can't defend herself. Perez cuts back and forth between the doorway and Monroe's visually expressed trepidation, the veins in her neck protruding, her body trembling with anxiety as a tear drips down from her eye. In one shot, a woman walks by, but it's just a doctor. No one makes eye contact with Jay or walks inside. Mitchell is to be applauded for the restraint he exercises in this scene, a master class in subversive writing, silent physical acting, and repetitious editing that sets up a perfect opportunity for the entity to strike without giving in to the temptation for catharsis. That way, when it does reappear, the audience won't be numbed by predictability.
This doesn't represent the only instance in which Mitchell generates tension without the climax of a jump scare or even a legitimate threat. Take the scene where Jay and her friends locate and explore the decrepit, abandoned house rented by "Hugh" before he fled town. From a narrative standpoint, this could be misinterpreted as "slow" or "superfluous"; all they're doing, after all, is searching for clues as to his true identity so they can find him and extract more information. But the magnificently dingy production design -- newspapers plastered over every last window to block out sunlight, empty beer cans and bottles dangling from rope and clanging against one another, pieces of the walls shattering at the slightest touch -- imbues the technically harmless sequence with a nearly excruciating level of creepiness that makes it one of the best in the movie, evoking the indescribable discomfort of walking around a supposedly haunted house; you know that nothing and no one is going to hurt you, but you still can't wait to hightail it out of there.
While It Follows functions first and foremost as a showcase for the stellar acting ability of Monroe, one other actor is given an opportunity to inhabit a small but fairly complex secondary role: Jake Weary as the conflicted, shit-starting "Hugh," whose real name is revealed to be Jeff Redmond. True, Redmond is without a doubt the instigator of the plot and Jay's plight. He deliberately dates and has sex with her to transmit his supernatural disease and hopefully spare himself of its wrath. Once his mission is accomplished, he drags her out of his car and leaves her drugged, disoriented, and heartbroken in the street like an unwanted animal, clad only in a bra and underwear. Also true, Mitchell deploys him primarily for expositional purposes: explaining the abilities of his dream-logic demon, the solution to pawning it off on someone else, and that, even after doing so, you can still see it and be retargeted if the latest carrier has been killed. All of which makes it easy to overlook the humanity with which Weary invests the character. Jeff commits an undeniably villainous act, but he's not actually a villain. He's a victim of the curse himself, and is driven by the selfish desire for basic survival that any rational member of the human race can empathize with. Even as he performs the unenviable task of explaining the rules of the entity to Jay and her friends, Weary recites them with a proper tone of remorse for what he had to do and desperation to be believed. Watch closely the moment Jeff puts a rag of chloroform over Jay's mouth. As she whimpers and grips Jeff's arm, Weary holds her hand affectionately and rests his head on her shoulder in unmistakable guilt. Whether you regard Jeff with hate, empathy, or a mixture of the two, Weary communicates a clear message through his performance: you would do the exact same thing.
The meat and potatoes of It Follows' premise belie the thematic depth unearthed in Mitchell's screenplay. On the surface, this is about a woman being targeted by a shape-shifting demon whose only hope for survival is to sleep with a man. As Mitchell himself feared when he first began writing the script, if you verbalize the central conceit aloud, it runs the risk of sounding stupid or shallow. If you listen to his terse dialogue, however, you'll uncover much more in the way of underlying themes. Mitchell uses his characters, their backgrounds, their aspirations, their memories, to explore that universally relatable desire to grow up and into the person you're meant to become. "It's funny," Jay monologues to Jeff after losing her virginity. "I used to daydream about being old enough to go on dates and drive around with friends in their cars. I had this image of myself: holding hands with a really cute guy, listening to the radio, driving along some pretty road. Up north maybe. The trees start to change colors. It was never about going anywhere really. Just having some sort of freedom, I guess. Now that we're old enough, where the hell do we go?" This is what makes Jay both ordinary and identifiable. All her life, she's longed to grow older, get out into the real world, explore what it means to be alive and happy, fall in love, and soak in the joy of freedom, untethered from the demands and expectations of her parents.
But that longing for adulthood, as indicated by that final observation, is tempered with a nostalgia for the simplicity and freedom of childhood. While Jay and Jeff are waiting in line outside a theater, she convinces him to play "the trade game" in which he must select a person within his view to trade places with; Jay then gets two chances to deduce who he picked and why. He picks a little boy, envious of his carefree ignorance toward the ugliness of the world around him and his freedom to go to the bathroom whenever he wants. "How cool would that be, to have your whole life ahead of you?" he poignantly asks, despite being only 21 years old. While Jay and Paul sit beside each other on her couch, Paul distracts her from her paranoia and depression by reminiscing about a time in their childhood when they found porno magazines behind a pizza parlor and read them on Greg's lawn, only to be caught by the latter's infuriated mother. And it's no coincidence the climax is set inside an abandoned swimming pool, where Jay and Paul shared their first kiss as children. Even though these characters aren't written with thoroughly dimensional personalities and backgrounds, Mitchell supplies them with enough history and remembrances to make them feel like authentic, living, breathing people who grew up together and haven't entirely lost their connection with one another.
Mitchell accomplishes the dual purpose of reanimating a classic horror cliche -- that of equating the pleasure and promiscuity of premarital sex with the painful consequence of death -- while repurposing the contagion conceit of The Ring. In Suzuki's novel, then later the cinematic adaptations by Hideo Nakata in 1998 and Gore Verbinski in 2002, a group of characters are afflicted with a curse spread by the viewing of a video tape full of surreal imagery. If you watch the tape in full, a vengeful female ghost will emerge from your TV and kill you within seven days. The only way to rid yourself her wrath is to convince someone else to watch the tape. Mitchell blends the viral horror of The Ring with the moralistic messaging of the teen slasher genre to produce a hybrid that's at once singularly horrifying and vaguely familiar. Instead of watching a tape, the curse of this movie is spread through sex. By creating a monster whose evil is transmitted through intercourse, Mitchell makes the link between premarital sex and death more than intertwined, he makes it direct and literal. Sex itself is the villain of It Follows, or at least the conduit for the villain, but in no way does Mitchell demonize his characters for engaging in such a transgression. He makes it an expression of youthful exploration and a means for human survival.
In a possibly unintentional homage to Verbinski's rendition of The Ring, Mitchell the director, working in tandem with cinematographer Gioulakis, takes great pains to saturate his horror masterpiece with an aesthetically intoxicating color palette. It Follows was filmed in Detroit, Michigan, and Gioulakis manages to find a dreamlike gorgeousness in the run-down inner-city area where the majority of the movie transpires. Mitchell conjures a distinctly dreary atmosphere through two primary aspects: the hushed voices with which his cast deliver dialogue, and a perpetually overcast sky, captured most frequently in the late evening or pitch-blackness of night. When not enveloped in large, gray clouds, the sky always appears in a drearily delectable shade of dark blue. At times, the trees that surround and threaten to consume its characters are utterly bare; at others, they're ablaze with the warm, cheerful colors of autumn. When characters are driving down a street, Mitchell employs a passenger's POV shot staring out the windshield and side windows, speeding past an assortment of impoverished, dilapidated buildings that clue us into their financial status. The attention to detail that lent an aura of autumnal beauty and authenticity to Halloween is recaptured here in the leaf-strewn sidewalks and streets.
Gioulakis uses slow pans and rotational camera movements to scope out an area for the potential reappearance of the titular entity, stimulating the viewer to search every inch of the frame for an incoming threat. In his most dizzying, Jay and Greg enter Jeff's high school to discover his identity. After they walk in and head for the main office, Gioulakis rotates his camera repeatedly to the point of near motion sickness before pausing and zooming in slowly on the couple as they search through a yearbook. Mitchell also makes a point of zeroing in on more innocuous details like food. On two separate occasions while Jay is resting in bed, Gioulakis presents a close-up of an untouched plate of Doritos and a white bread sandwich. (The second time, is that the same plate as before? If so, yuck!) The implication is that Jay has stopped eating on account of her depression and apprehension of impending death. When Jay visits Kelly and Paul at the ice cream parlor where they work, Gioulakis zeroes in on her cup of chocolate and vanilla custard, blanketed in rainbow sprinkles, for a colorful moment of appreciation for the little pleasures in life. While the gang sits on Jeff's front lawn listening to his exposition, Jay is so out of touch and lethargic that she pulls out five blades of grass and rests them beside each other on her leg, a weirdly entrancing image captured likewise in close-up.
To illustrate the emotional unavailability of Jay and Kelly's mother, Mitchell adopts a similar tactic to that of Matt Reeves in his 2010 vampire horror remake, Let Me In, filming her out of focus or fragmentarily so that we never get a clear, distinct look at her face. While she's conversing with Greg's mom in her kitchen about Jay's assault, Gioulakis positions his camera at Williams' eyes, blurring her visage and highlighting a portrait of Jay as a child between her grandparents on the wall behind her. As she sleeps in bed, he captures only her legs, lying across from a bureau holding a wine bottle and a partially empty wineglass beside it, tautly painting a portrait of a well-meaning but negligent widow numbing her pain through alcohol. In this sense, she bears a characteristic resemblance to Marge Thompson, Nancy's mother from A Nightmare on Elm Street who can find no other escape from her divorce or her involvement in Freddy Krueger's murder than the bottle.
A tracking shot of Jay and Kelly walking down their block evokes the walk home from school by Laurie, Annie, and Lynda in Halloween. One morning, when Jay wakes up on the hood of her car after sleeping in the woods, she looks up, and Gioulakis treats us to a POV shot of the sunny blue sky, refreshingly light in hue, as if to offer a ray of hope that a new day holds the potential for a better outcome. For their introductions, Gioulakis films many of Mitchell's demonic manifestations in wide-angle lenses, offering a distant glimpse of their ghastly appearance without always granting a complete, up-close picture that could risk diluting their spine-chilling effectiveness. The most iconic intro is that of the tall man, who manifests without warning behind Yara in Jay's bedroom doorway and towers over her.
Taking a cue from Verbinski's directorial prowess in The Ring, Mitchell keeps the level of anticipation and suspense high and the body count commendably low. In fact, the number of onscreen casualties matches that of the J-horror classic: two, with the first occurring in the prologue. (Not counting Richard Morgan's death since that was suicide, not murder by Samara.) While the makeup effects don't hold a candle to those of Rick Baker in The Ring, namely regarding the contorted, rotted faces of Samara's victims postmortem, the imagery in It Follows is extremely disturbing without being excessively bloody. Apart from Annie's bloody and disfigured corpse in the humdinger of an opener, Greg's death is executed in a most visually unsettling and symbolic manner. With the entity assuming the form of his own mother, it arrives at his bedroom door with a single breast exposed, similar to the girl in Jay's kitchen, and hurls itself at Greg with an almost sexual fervor. As the lights flicker, the entity squeezes Greg's hands, oozing a water-like liquid, while dry-humping him in a burst of insanely fucked up Oedipal imagery. Once the ordeal comes to an abrupt end, Perez cuts to a close-up of Zovatto's face, expressionless and not uglified, just blue with lifelessness. It's both less showy yet somehow more deranged than the mangled, slack-jawed visages in Verbinski's nightmare.
The time period in which It Follows transpires is left deliberately and intriguingly ambiguous, thus feeding into the atmosphere of surrealism engineered by Mitchell. In the prologue, Annie calls her father on a cellphone, all but instantly grounding the film in the modern era. Likewise, Yara's defining character trait is reading philosophical stories on a strikingly seashell-shaped e-reader. To the contrary, the Heights' own a portable television in their living room, on which Jay and her friends seem to watch exclusively old black-and-white monster movies and cartoons. On Jay's nightstand sits a corded landline telephone, saturating the air in an old-fashioned 20th-century vibe. While waiting for Jay to return from her date, Paul, Yara, and Kelly play cards on the front porch, though that's more a sign of classy hangout behavior that's gone sadly extinct.
Speaking of those three characters and their means of socializing, the camaraderie between Jay, Kelly, Yara, Paul, and, to a lesser extent, Greg, adds a welcome element of warmth to Mitchell's chilling, hopeless brand of horror while thankfully subverting the trope of apathetic, nonbelieving "companions" in horror. How refreshing to bask in the company of such a strong support system for a protagonist! A younger sister who actually cares about and shares a friendship with her older sister, despite a trace of jealousy for the latter's "annoying" level of attractiveness. A small, loyal gang who stands by their friend in her time of need rather than heartlessly abandoning her, even if they don't fully believe in what she's running from -- that is, until they see it for themselves.
When Jay escapes from her home in the dead of night and takes refuge in a playground, Paul, Yara, and Kelly run after her on foot, the latter enveloping Jay in a sustained embrace, grateful for her safety. When Jay suffers a panic attack in her bedroom, sinking in despair into the corner, Kelly crouches down before her and puts her hands on her knees, telling her she loves her, even though she doesn't yet believe her. Then there's Paul, the unrequited love slave of Jay who's been pining hopelessly for her affection since their first kiss. He's the best type of guy in a horror story of this sort: patient, protective, mature, low-key, and ultimately life-saving. When he offers to spend the night at her house and keep watch for anything suspicious, it's for the legitimate reasons stated. When he invites her to sit beside him on her sofa because she can't sleep, he has no ulterior motive other than to keep her company and make her feel safe. Once Greg inserts himself in Jay's plight, Mitchell instigates something of a love triangle between him, Paul, and Jay. What I admire about Paul is that, thanks to Gilchrist's sweet, puppy dog-eyed performance, while his face conveys jealousy over Greg's more masculine personality and aggressive affection for Jay, he never expresses it aloud. He keeps it contained. After Jay transfers the entity to Greg, Paul does verbalize slight resentment over her choosing of him, but completely resists the petty, childish outburst of, say, Ducky in Pretty in Pink. In the end, he literally takes a demon for Jay, offering to have sex with her not to satisfy a longtime carnal craving but out of selfless sacrifice. He genuinely loves Jay, and wants only to free her of this life-threatening disease. He may be a puny, rail-thin geek, but Paul is the true hero of It Follows. And unlike Greg, who sleeps with Jay more to put her mind at ease, Paul is fully aware of the burden he's now taken on.
Apart from boasting quite possibly the greatest opener in recent horror history, It Follows also stakes a claim for one of the greatest original scores as well. Hell, as far as I can recall, this is the best of the past decade. Richard Vreeland, known by his stage name, Disasterpeace, composes an instantly distinctive synthesizer theme that qualifies as another villain in the movie, one that builds a steadily mounting sensation of anticipation before exploding into an energetic, pulsating, ghoulish crescendo whose strains invoke the spirit of Carpenter's iconic Halloween theme. It's at once reminiscent of one of the all-time legendary scores in horror and utterly its own recognizable monster, tinged with an undercurrent of wistfulness that reflects its protagonist's sobering journey into the murky waters of adulthood.
As a director, Mitchell demonstrates a disciplined mastery over the art of pacing, allowing sufficient breathing room between his antagonist's appearances to make each one count and steer clear of mind-numbing predictability. His narrative progresses at a hypnotically deliberate, dreamlike tempo, as befits an entity that advances slowly but surely toward its intended targets, immersing his audience in the humdrum lives of his melancholic characters. They're frequently depicted watching TV in Jay's living room, the girls sleeping together in the same bedroom or brushing their teeth simultaneously, lounging on a lake drinking quietly. Mitchell adamantly refuses to speed up his story to arrive at the next bone-chilling visual or supernatural confrontation.
Unfortunately, as is often the case with horror movies that take the plunge into the imagination-rich realm of the supernatural, It Follows is guilty of occasionally breaking its own internal rules. Remember, Jeff "Exposition" Redmond makes it clear that if this thing so much as touches you, you're dead. That certainly proves the case when Greg is ambushed by his "mom." And yet, there are two instances where it has the opportunity to kill our heroine, and for whatever reason, doesn't. Not only does it have the opportunity, it literally makes physical contact with her. Does she suddenly collapse to the ground lifelessly? No. Does her face turn a sickly blue? Not at all. In the first moment of contact, the entity, assuming the shape of Yara, sneaks up behind Jay and pulls her hair up. Why does it choose to merely play with her? Isn't this thing all about instant death, not sadism? And does physical contact with hair not count? Does the touch have to be on skin? If that's the case, how do you explain in the climax when the entity, now in the form of Jay's father, grabs her leg and drags her beneath the pool? Its hand is now attached to her flesh, with such strength that it leaves a welt. Why is she still alive when the more expendable victims had to perish? Seems like a classic case of unfair protagonist privilege to me, also referred to as plot armor.
That's not the only reason the climax ceases to hold water from a logical standpoint. For some reason, Paul, Yara, and Kelly conceive the idea that the demon, which can't be killed with bullets, can be killed with electricity. A for effort, I suppose. The setting in which this elaborate but unsurprisingly failed plan transpires is a clever and beautiful one: expansive enough for the entity to appear at multiple spots, and evocative of a happy place for children, the ideal symbol of innocence corrupted. The pouring rain and cracks of thunder outside the building heighten the dismal atmosphere in a style reminiscent of Gothic horror. Mitchell reverts to the method of suspense building utilized in the opening scene; rather than showing us what his protagonist is seeing, at least at first, he relies on her trepidatious reaction to it. Once the physical violence commences, despite featuring nothing in the way of bodily penetrations or bloodshed, it's squirm-inducing and harrowing to sit through.
Beyond the murkiness of the entity's inconsistently lethal touch, how do Greg and his mom not hear the shattering of their downstairs window or the loud warning of Jay who's in their upper level hallway? Are they both that heavy of sleepers? After Greg's unaccountable death, where's the police investigation? We do see a shot of a cop car in his driveway and a boarded window, to be fair.
Boasting a fiendishly imaginative concept, an instantly iconic synth score, a slew of nightmare-logic frights, and a stellar, star-making performance from modern scream queen Maika Monroe, It Follows is a melancholy, patiently crafted exercise in sustained trepidation that reinvigorates a classic teen horror trope while putting a fresh -- and petrifying -- spin on the coming-of-age odyssey. The final shot, which finds Jay and Paul, now officially a couple, holding hands as they take a silent walk around the neighborhood, leaves us hanging in the best way possible. A perversion of the typical boy-gets-girl happy ending. Yes, Paul has finally won the heart of his childhood crush, but at what cost? Now it is he who has to remain on guard, looking over his shoulder every second, fearing the approach of a stranger, not even able to fully trust that the person in front of him is who they appear to be. And the only way out is to not only curse some other innocent soul, but to essentially cheat on his girlfriend. It's a crushing moral burden, and it's now been transferred to his shoulders.
While there's no obvious threat in this closing shot, who's to say that person raking their leaves isn't "it"? Or the man walking far behind them? Safe as Jay may be for now, it's only a matter of time before it returns. If it kills Paul, it will reset its sights right back on her, unless she finds some poor new sap to sleep with. On and on it goes. A never-ending cycle of senseless violence. Supernatural though it may be, perhaps this entity is a metaphor for a real-life danger. Not just that of premarital sex or sexually transmitted diseases, but something deeper and more universally contagious: the violence we inflict on one another every day, passed down from person to person, generation to generation. Like the shape-shifting demon of the title, it comes in various forms: physical, sexual, emotional. And it never stops. It just keeps following.
8.4/10
Comments
Post a Comment