It Follows

It's never been a good idea to have sex in a horror movie.  Now here is It Follows, a slow burn thriller built around an ingenious hook.  The film's monster is something that appears invisible to everyone except its intended victim.  It can also assume any form it desires to get close to its victim.  Big deal, you say.  What's the catch?  The creature is passed along sexually, so to speak.  It stalks a person until that person has sex with somebody else, and then the creature turns its sights to the person who has just been made love to.

Of course, we don't know this right from the start.  In the film's opening scene, a young girl runs from her house panicked about something that seems to be pursuing her, but we can't see.  She drives to a beach, and makes a tearful final phone call to her parents, telling them she loves them.  All the while, the camera is focused on something that the girl can see, but again, we cannot.  The next time we see her, it is morning, and her lifeless body is now snapped and mangled by whatever it was she was running from the night before.  After that attention-grabbing set up, we're introduced to our heroine Jay (Maika Monroe), a 19-year-old girl who has recently hooked up with a local boy named Hugh (Jake Weary).  They go on a date, and Hugh seems to be acting weird.  While in a movie theater, he claims to see a woman dressed in yellow that Jay can't see.  Hugh immediately becomes nervous, and asks to leave.

They have a second date, which starts out a little better, with them making love in the backseat of Hugh's car.  As Jay enjoys the bliss of her sexual encounter, it is suddenly cut short when Hugh unexpectedly chloroforms her.  When Jay comes to, she finds herself shackled to a chair in an abandoned building, with Hugh standing before her to explain the situation.  A monster that only he can see and assume any form has been following him ever since he had sex with a girl.  Now he has passed it on to Jay.  The rules are simple.  The monster will pursue its target until it is dead.  Once the target is dead, it goes back to following after the previous person.  The only way for Jay to survive is to pass the curse on to someone else the same way Hugh did.  Jay obviously doesn't know how to deal with this situation, and Hugh skips town, so he can't help.  Before she knows it, she starts to see "it" everywhere she goes, which can take the form of anything from an elderly lady in a hospital gown walking across the school ground to her classroom, or a teenage girl who has broken into her house.

It Follows has the spirit of a late 70s/early 80s teen thriller.  In fact, I thought that was supposed to be the era the story was set in, judging by the old fashioned TVs and furniture seen in the characters' homes.  And yet, there are points where the characters use cell phones, so maybe writer-director David Robert Mitchell is only going for a stylistic tribute, instead of actually setting the story in a particular time frame.  As Jay and her teenage friends try to first track down Hugh, and then try to find more information on the creature, the movie builds suspense in a slow but deliberate manner.  Those accustomed to the quick cuts and jump scares of modern horror probably will find the pace of this movie maddening.  And yet, that's all part of Mitchell's plan with the film.  Some of the creepiest moments stem from the fact that Jay and the audience can see "it", but no one else can.  In one scene, they are sitting and having a conversation, and we can see someone approaching them from the distance the entire time.  The fact that the movie does not use any music cues or draws our attention to this is for the better.

The movie owes a great debt to John Carpenter's Halloween, both in its heavily synthesized score, and in the way its monster walks slowly but relentlessly toward its victim, never stopping for anything.  While the movie never quite reaches the heights that Carpenter's classic did, it at least doesn't come across as a rip off, and it knows how to create some successful tension of its own.  It's actually the unrelenting sense of tension that makes the film successful.  Even if nothing is happening, we know that the threat to Jay is out there.  The movie also never lets up.  Aside from a very rare light moment or two, it never wavers from the idea that Jay's life is in danger, and no one can help her from this supernatural entity.  This very idea is scarier than just about any boogeyman that has hit the screen recently.

No, It Follows is not perfect, as I think it could have been scarier.  It's good at building tension, but the payoffs could be better.  Plus, I was personally more disturbed by The Babadook.  Still, this doesn't take away the fact that this is a tense and mostly successful thriller that doesn't rely on gore or cheap jump scares for excitement.  It might be too old fashioned for some, but that's kind of special when a modern day filmmaker doesn't use modern horror techniques, and instead draws on the successes of the past, while still adding his own voice to the material.

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