It Follows
DAVID EDELSTEIN, BYLINE: There are many ways a filmmaker can try to scare an audience - fancy special effects, loud noises, things jumping up, splatter. Or he or she can go for something less concrete - vague outlines, shadows, weird camera angles that play on the fear of the unknown, hints that things aren't what they seem. But after seeing the indie horror film "It Follows," I'm suddenly convinced there's nothing more blood-freezing than a lone figure, clear as day, relatively normal-looking, walking at a moderate pace from way back in the frame towards the front. Forget about what it is and why it's doing what it's doing, what matters is that it follows.
It Follows
OK, it would help to know why it's doing what it's doing. The lack of motive never stopped "Halloween's" Michael or "Friday The 13th's" Jason. We know that sex has a connection to whatever it is that follows. After a prologue too upsetting to relay and the movie's one hideously gory image, which I'd like to get out of my head somehow, we meet Jay, played by Maika Monroe, a teenage girl in suburban Detroit asking herself the usual teenage-girl questions. A cute guy named Hugh, played by Jake Weary, wants to sleep with her and she's not sure. In a movie theater, he's spooked by something - a girl in a yellow dress, who she doesn't see, and they hurry off. Then they're on a quiet lakefront beach talking. Then they're in his car having sex. Then Jay's world changes forever. Drugged, she wakes up tied to a chair as Hugh paces behind her.
I'm a lifelong horror freak, and I've rarely been as scared as I was at "It Follows." But it wasn't a fun kind of scared. I felt sick with dread. What makes me recommend it is the ending, which manages to be both inconclusive and conclusive in a way that's unexpectedly moving - at least if you don't think about what follows.
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Tarantino's right that It Follows seems to have some trouble sticking to its own mythology. The monster supposedly follows the victim without stopping, but sometimes it just hangs out in a theater or on top of a roof for no reason. And the violent turn "it" takes later in the movie is arguably at odds with its initial introduction as a slow but terrifyingly relentless source of death.
The film follows Jay Height (Maika Monroe), a 19-year-old student living in the suburbs of Detroit. After a sexual encounter, she becomes stalked by a nameless entity. The film then becomes an exercise in existential dread: no matter how far Jay runs, she must face the mounting dread of its slow but relentless approach, and the fact that she will never be totally safe, even if she passes it on. 041b061a72