Sex and death: a staple of scary movies forever, from eroticized vampire feeding frenzies through to Cronenbergian body horror (Shivers, Rabid) and slasher movies’ promiscuous teens. You don’t need to have studied Freud to view the endless Friday the 13ths and Halloweens, with their knives, axes and chainsaws thrusting at and penetrating nubile young girls (and the occasional guy) as frustrated phallic revenge. Film studies tutors get off on these readings the way Jason Vorhees does when watching a new batch of dumbass campers arrive at Crystal Lake.
Yet despite their sledgehammer subtlety, Jason or Michael Myers’ psycho/sexual motives are hidden subtext compared to the explicit analogy of It Follows. David Robert Mitchell’s tale is brilliantly simple: The Ring with sex. The curse here is a slow-moving but relentless killer apparition who appears – but is only visible to you – when you sleep with someone already cursed, who’s now passed on the ‘virus’ to you. The only way to escape is to sleep with someone new, who will in turn be stalked. Sex is death. And death, judging from the Followers’ appearances – usually naked or in bedroom attire – comes directly from sex. The circle of death, as Elton John once nearly sang. And so it goes. Or, rather, follows.
It’s all much more than 19-year-old Jay (Maika Monroe) bargained for, when she started dating hunky Hugh (Jake Weary). Finally they get it on in the backseat of his car, but instead of offering her a post-coital cigarette, Hugh chloroforms her. When Jay awakes, she’s bound to a wheeled office chair in a deserted garage, where Hugh spells out the plot – and then proves it, as Follower No.1 (they can shapeshift into a variety of presumably former victims) emerges to lumber towards a terrified Jay.
Hugh doesn’t want to sacrifice her – in fact, if you pass the curse on and that person is killed, it boomerangs back round to you again – but instead warn Jay, at the same time as callously worming out of his own fate. You can always outrun these creatures, who make Romero’s zombies look like Usain Bolt; but once unleashed, they never, ever stop coming. Insert your own sex gag here.
Mitchell beautifully and very creepily establishes his world straight away, the opening scene of a young teen fleeing her house, eventually jumping in her car and driving off, terrified of an unseen threat, all in one unbroken, slowly panning shot. The sudden cut later on to her grisly fate is a genuine jolt, the first of many. More often, however, Mitchell employs slow zooms, inexorably bearing down on his characters, long before the Followers show up. It’s as if an inherent malaise lingers in the air, the anodyne houses and high school or rundown city limits of Detroit at once both bland and sinister.
It’s a refreshing change for modern horror, which has become far too reliant on jump scares and deafening sound cues, in place of carefully mounting tension. Mitchell prefers a slow burn. The use of wide shots is particularly successful once Jay starts being pursued. It’s almost like a sick game of ‘Where’s Wally?’ – find the plodding killer in the frame before it’s too late…
As with his sweet-natured debut feature, 2010’s The Myth of the American Sleepover, Mitchell also nails that charged, woozy boredom of suburban teenagers, a world where adults barely figure and close bonds need few words. Jay’s friends understandably struggle to believe her at first, but there’s no sense that they’ll desert her – and that’s not just because her neighbour Paul (Keir Gilchrist) nurses a serious crush.
What’s also fascinating is how sex is used by different characters in different ways. For Hugh it’s a survival tactic, but rather than make the plot about a series of revenge tag-team-shags, Mitchell’s kids have conflicted and conflicting reasons for going all the way. It’s why Mitchell never reduces his storyline down to, say, an AIDS allegory. There are bigger, perhaps even more frightening and inescapable dangers on his mind.
Precisely because there’s so much ambition and originality here, it’s even more of a disappointment when It Follows eventually starts going round in ever-decreasing circles. The tone wobbles like crazy towards the end; Jay aside, the small number of characters are frustratingly vague; a swimming pool set-piece falters badly, merely recalling a much better, similar scene in Let the Right One In; and ultimately there’s a limit to the shocks that horror thrives on when you know exactly who is – and isn’t – in danger. You can’t fully ‘elevate’ a genre if you take away some of the foundations. But the attempt to raise the game is still something to admire.
The Verdict
A hauntingly original and genuinely unsettling take on familiar spooky elements that ultimately doesn’t quite hang together and might even alienate hardcore horror fans. But there’s huge promise here from writer-director David Robert Mitchell and, whatever the genre, it’ll be worth seeing how he follows it up.
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It Follows was reviewed at the London Film Festival – see the published article on IGN