It Follows turns the traditional slasher trope of sex amounting to death into something that will forever haunt your nightmares.
David Robert Mitchell, writer and director of It Follows
David Bertozzi / BuzzFeed News
Some horror movies make you jump, while others resonate with a deeper kind of animal panic in your subconscious — and It Follows, the second film from writer-director David Robert Mitchell, certainly did for me. The night after I first saw it, I spent hours huddled in bed, sleepless and sweaty, still unable to get it out of my head. I couldn't decide if I felt better facing the window or the door — to keep an eye on what might be coming — though neither was actually that reassuring. One of the things It Follows emphasizes is that there's no real comfort in being able to see what's approaching if you can't stop it. There's only keeping track of where the exits are and hoping you don't eventually get exhausted from running away.
It Follows has lingered in my brain since its premiere at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival. Months have passed and it's screened at other major festivals, racking up praise, staking out that rare sweet spot where horror fans and art-house movie lovers intersect, and now finally making it to theaters in New York and Los Angeles on March 13. Unlike a lot of modern horror movies, It Follows goes light on the gore and startle-scares in favor of a more sustained and sometimes unexpectedly poetic dread — the kind that doesn't need to feel rational.
And there's nothing rational about its urban legend-style premise, which sounds awful on paper but works disturbingly well on screen: 19-year-old college student Jay (Maika Monroe), who lives at home in the Detroit suburbs, has been seeing a seemingly nice guy named Hugh (Jake Weary). In the lazy afterglow after they first have sex, he drugs her, ties her to a chair, and tells her that he was cursed, and he's just passed it along to her. There's this monster that will chase her now, and while no one else can see it, to Jay, it can look like anyone, like a stranger or a friend. It's slow, but it's inexorable; it will violently kill her if it catches her, and she can only pass it off by sleeping with someone else.
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