Have sex with the wrong person and It will follow you around, until It kills you. ‘It’ is very obviously a metaphor for STI’s but also could be seen as many different things. David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows is a high concept, slow burn, atmosphere smoked, synth saturated piece of sheer simultaneous beauty and terror, one of the finest and most influential pieces of horror filmmaking of the last few decades. The concept here is like some urban legend you’d hear at a house party: teenager Jay (Maika Monroe) sleeps with a strange boy from a neighbouring county, after which he ties her up and informs her that something, which can look like anyone, will follow her around relentlessly until it kills her, then resume following him and go back down the chain of sleeping around to whoever pissed it off in the first place. It only walks, mind you, but that’s almost worse because it comes across as more nightmarish and only prolongs the inevitable. Along with her sister (Lili Sepe) and some friends they form a makeshift posse to both outrun, outwit or simply beat the shit out of It until it leaves her alone.
This film works wonders for many different reasons other than the horror, which is chillingly effective. The concept alone works to stir up the kind of fear you don’t cultivate with gore, jump scares or cheap ghoulish tricks. This is the kind of horror that creeps up and sits down beside you during the film until you are uneasy beyond words, then gets up and follows you home when the credits roll. There are several practical set pieces involving this thing stalking them that should be used as textbook examples on how to raise hell within the genre. The performances are fantastic as well, particularly Monroe and Sepe, making these kids feel vaguely 80’s, kind of contemporary but always in a kind of dreamy, faraway laidback state that slips right in with the atmosphere. Speaking of atmosphere, one of the key elements here is the unnerving original score from Disasterpeace. It’s sometimes melodic and aerial, sometimes jagged and abrasive but always serves the scene and provides an auditory dreamscape for character and audience alike, giving a voice to the mute fiend that hunts them and lacing the dereliction of the Detroit setting with dread. The monster itself is representative of STD’s and that’s the main theme to read but there’s deeper linings to it as well. Her sister remarks at one point how when she was younger their parents wouldn’t let them stray past 8 Mile and how she didn’t understand why. It can almost be seen as a spectral manifestation of the unseen, unmapped, wilder areas of our urban sprawl, the mounting decay in any given city and the forces that govern it and perhaps eventually follow us back to the sanctuary of home. Whatever you choose to read into it, this is one fine example of what can be done in the horror genre and a brilliant slice of spook pie. Hell, the five minute prologue alone is already something else.
-Nate Hill
Podcasting Them Softly 