It Follows (David Robert Mitchell, 2015)

[warren oates]

Or why not just take an indefinite road trip and become a permanent itinerant? Or fly to Belize? Or what about sailing to a Pacific island nation?

[domino harvey]

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I can think of a lot of reasons why 19 year olds would not make a huge and permanent life change (like that or other speculative advices given here) and would rather eventually resign themselves to the idea that they're going to screw someone else over rather than spending their whole life running. I don't think any reading of the film that's "victorious" or happy in the end is an accurate one. There's contentment and acceptance of the possibility of the inevitable, but the characters do make a choice that completely makes sense based on who they are and what they've done so far.

[zedz]

Or why not just take an indefinite road trip and become a permanent itinerant? Or fly to Belize? Or what about sailing to a Pacific island nation?

Uh, that was what we call a joke, son.

[warren oates]

So now I'm not getting that your "joke" about the film's ludicrous rules was, in fact, only a joke about the ludicrousness of giving a shit about ludicrous rules? Too many layers for moi.

[zedz]

So now I'm not getting that your "joke" about the film's ludicrous rules was, in fact, only a joke about the ludicrousness of giving a shit about ludicrous rules? Too many layers for moi.

No, the joke was that my proposed 'solution' (as with most such solutions) would kill the film stone dead, even if it conformed to its fictional rules. I thought the ghoul shaking his fist and yelling "you pesky kids" might have been a clue that this wasn't a serious remake proposal!

EDIT: Oh, and I should add that I don't find the rules of this film any more inherently ludicrous than those in countless vampire or zombie films. When you go into a horror film you just have to bend over and take that sort of thing. It's only if huge internal inconsistencies break out that it can ruin the fun, and I think this film is smart enough to keep things vague and contingent enough (since we never have any authoritative statement of the rules, just shared inferences) for that not to be an issue.

[colinr0380]

I haven't seen this film yet though it does sound like an interesting take on The Grudge and Ring-style films, especially Ring 2 - not the 2005 film directed by Hideo Hakata, but the 1999 film directed by Hideo Nakata that I seem to remember also ends with a messy failed scientific exorcism experiment next to a swimming pool (because of something about saltwater and Chlorine affecting psychic links with ghosts or something. It has been a while since I've seen it!), and I like the sense from this discussion that It Follows seems to be about actually taking matters and responsibility for acts into your own hands (which zedz's travelling theory might play into!) versus passing that responsibility off to someone else, which in some ways sounds worse as then you'll never know if this monster is going to be coming for you and how much safe distance you have between yourself and it in terms of other people you've thrown into its path!

[zedz]

I haven't seen this film yet though it does sound like an interesting take on The Grudge and Ring-style films, especially Ring 2 - not the 2005 film directed by Hideo Hakata, but the 1999 film directed by Hideo Nakata that I seem to remember also ends with a messy failed scientific exorcism experiment next to a swimming pool (because of something about saltwater and Chlorine affecting psychic links with ghosts or something. It has been a while since I've seen it!), and I like the sense from this discussion that It Follows seems to be about actually taking matters and responsibility for acts into your own hands (which zedz's travelling theory might play into!) versus passing that responsibility off to someone else, which in some ways sounds worse as then you'll never know if this monster is going to be coming for you and how much safe distance you have between yourself and it in terms of other people you've thrown into its path!

I think there's actually a nice sense in the film that the (somewhat obvious) 'solution' the kids come up with at the end is actually much less secure than they imagine, since:

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it's predicated on the assumption that communicating the curse to an extremely promiscuous mark will put a lot of distance - in terms of warm bodies - between you and 'it'. But an unknowing victim is a very easy target, so if the prostitute is killed before her next customer, the boomerang effect is immediate. If not, there's no guarantee that her first customer will himself be promiscuous and thus add more links in the chain, or whether he'll just meekly go home to his wife and wait for the milkman to lurch up behind him and rearrange his spine.

I think the very tentative nature of the film's mythology makes the ending all the more unsettling.

[CSM126]

Just got back from seeing this and I can only join domino et al in praising this film. I actually enjoyed the lack of consistency in the "rules" because, as has been said earlier, there's nothing dumber than horror movies where the characters just know what to do exactly and then have to forget so the quote-unquote tension can ratchet (of course, it doesn't, because stupidity is just annoying). And if the characters are in the dark, I'm fine with us viewers being there to. That is what builds real tension.

Furthermore, I'll gladly deal with that confusion if it means I get to sit back and enjoy this sort of gorgeous filmmaking. The direction, camera work, and music are all so utterly beautiful that for that alone I would give this movie a high recommendation. The fact that the acting and story are good too is just gravy.

I definitely need to check out Mitchell's American Sleepover now. I want to see more of what this guy can do.

[thirtyframesasecond]

Saw this just the other day and can easily echo the thread's enthusiasm for the film. A few days later and I still get a chill up the spine when I think about it. The sense of dread that Mitchell creates is palpable whilst at the same time he handles the family scenes with great empathy. Interesting too that it's an adult-less film (Jay's mum is permanently in bed, drunk?), there's nothing they can do to help anyway:

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Look at the first death, when the girl's dad tries to help when she runs out, but she scarpers in the car. This first scene is great thinking back - at this point we don't know what the terror is, but of course when we learn that the 'follower' is only visible to the person it's pursuing, that becomes even more frightening

I wonder if this plays out too in the Freudian way that

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Greg dies

. Then there's the fact that the teens

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venture out of the city's borders, away from home, to try to overcome the 'follower'

.

Mitchell's great with leaving certain scenes ambiguously, whether it's

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Jay wondering whether to swim out to the guys' boat

or

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the final scene when Jay and Paul seem to be followed

.

Like everyone else, I'll try to find The Myth of the American Sleepover too.

[D50]

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it's predicated on the assumption that communicating the curse to an extremely promiscuous mark will put a lot of distance - in terms of warm bodies - between you and 'it'. But an unknowing victim is a very easy target, so if the prostitute is killed before her next customer, the boomerang effect is immediate. If not, there's no guarantee that her first customer will himself be promiscuous and thus add more links in the chain, or whether he'll just meekly go home to his wife and wait for the milkman to lurch up behind him and rearrange his spine.

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Good point. She was forewarned, quite elaborately, when it was passed to her.

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As far as distance covered, there was the one instance of the boy ghost from the earlier bottom of the door busting here's johnny scene showing up too late on the bmx bike. I would think they could also ride buses, drive cars, even catch a flight.

[dreamdead]

Really love that it retains Mitchell's style from The Myth of the American Sleepover and simply transplants the structure of the unstoppable horror onto the impressionistic shots. At times the film angles for a more operatic approach than is necessary--the double close-up with Paul's hands is a bit too much--and there remain instances where characters just act strangely.

Hugh tells Jay how to avoid the creature, so the very idea of going into the white shack's enclosed spaces on the beach just seemed ludicrous until Mitchell belatedly revealed that there was another exit. And at several different moments Jay doesn't position herself in proximity to multiple entryways (namely, on the beach chair). Why didn't the sister try to throw the blanket over the creature earlier, why wasn't that detail understood earlier? But some of those idiocies are simply part of the genre. I liked how she bought herself extra time by getting ready to approach the boat with the college men, and how Mitchell cut at that point so that there wouldn't be a scene of Monroe looking despondent while engaging in joyless intimacy.

Where the film intrigues me is in the suggestion that it's the parent consuming the child sexually, and how that level of violation is all the more horrible. And in suggesting Paul's intelligence in heading for the prostitute even as we suspect that he's too much a fool for love to actually follow through with it, so that the closing image remains impactful. And while I don't know if Monroe actually has a fleshed-out character (see Mitchell's impressionism), the amount of intimacy that she's asked to experience directly makes her empathetic.

Very good--one that I don't think would drop much, if any, on a rewatch--though I think that as it relates to undercutting generic expectations, which this film isn't admittedly interesting in doing, Under the Skin is essentially the more interesting inverse of this one.

[mfunk9786]

I liked how she bought herself extra time by getting ready to approach the boat with the college men, and how Mitchell cut at that point so that there wouldn't be a scene of Monroe looking despondent while engaging in joyless intimacy.

Just because she did something that was likely uncharacteristic in that scene, there's nothing to suggest that it was meant to be joyless - it seemed like a pretty fun way to spend a few minutes, if I remember correctly.

[CSM126]

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it's predicated on the assumption that communicating the curse to an extremely promiscuous mark will put a lot of distance - in terms of warm bodies - between you and 'it'. But an unknowing victim is a very easy target, so if the prostitute is killed before her next customer, the boomerang effect is immediate. If not, there's no guarantee that her first customer will himself be promiscuous and thus add more links in the chain, or whether he'll just meekly go home to his wife and wait for the milkman to lurch up behind him and rearrange his spine.

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Good point. She was forewarned, quite elaborately, when it was passed to her.

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As far as distance covered, there was the one instance of the boy ghost from the earlier bottom of the door busting here's johnny scene showing up too late on the bmx bike. I would think they could also ride buses, drive cars, even catch a flight.

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The bike rider was the pesky neighbor kid who spied on Jay at the pool and climbed up to peek in her bathroom window. Having seen the film again I believe he's also the person following them at the end. Note the red jacket/blue jeans combo, the same clothes the neighbor boy wears, whereas his monster doppelgänger at the beach house only wore white.

[AMalickLensFlare]

Surprised there hasn't been any mention of the film's score by Disasterpeace. For me, it worked perfectly, and made the seemingly endless number of scene transitions less off-putting.

[swo17]

I haven't seen the film yet but I do love that Fez soundtrack that Disasterpeace did a few years ago...

[pzadvance]

I haven't seen the film yet but I do love that Fez soundtrack that Disasterpeace did a few years ago...

I discovered the Fez soundtrack after loving the It Follows OST and have had both on a loop for the past couple weeks. Really great stuff.

[Movie-Brat]

Surprised there hasn't been any mention of the film's score by Disasterpeace. For me, it worked perfectly, and made the seemingly endless number of scene transitions less off-putting.

The entire score managed to fit the film perfectly. I mean given the film is a homage to the 70's and 80's Horror films by John Carpenter, George A. Romero and Wes Craven, it certainly gave it the 80's vibe Mitchell was trying to channel and it sounded very Carpenter-esque as a result. Like I can see this being the kind of score Carpenter would compose himself.

[TMDaines]

With allusions to STDs and all else that casual sex entails, the film is a promising piece of Cronenbergian body horror that falls flat at the end. The setup is remarkably simple and the threat is unsettling: to rid yourself of the stalking demon picked up from your last sexual encounter, infect another. The film is at its best when it allows the presence to slowly draw closer to its intended victim, rather than relying on the lesser interesting slasher aspects the work sometimes falls prey to.

After a chilling first hour, the climax of the film sorely disappoints. While we could plausibly believe that enemy is purely an intangible supernatural presence, perhaps a figment of the imagination, a physical confrontation at the climax takes away much of the trepidation that the film had built up during its opening two-thirds. Despite its potentially hokey setup, the story never felt cheesy until the final encounter.

I'm not sure what value any of the swimming pool scene adds.

[domino harvey]

Interestingly, while both the US and the UK release feature a "critic" commentary, each are different and feature either American or British critics on their respective country's disc

[colinr0380]

It looks like the US disc is moderated by Scott Weinberg in a rotating discussion with five other critics, which sounds very similar to the format used on the US Snowpiercer disc (also a Weinstein Company release). Danny Leigh, who features on the UK disc, co-hosts the BBC's Film programme with Claudia Winkleman.

[djproject]

The other thing I found refreshing about it is all of the actors are new to a wide audience. I really think horror works best when you don't know who the actors are.

[domino harvey]

Actually, I spent 2/3 of the film trying to remember what I knew the male lead from (finally realized he was also the lead in It's Kind of a Funny Story)

[Lost Highway]

...and any horror fan will have seen Maika Moore in Adam Wingard's The Guest, which like It Follows was indebted to early John Carpenter.

[Lost Highway]

(I may be wrong but the bearded sexual menace in the pool scene looked like her father, and indeed a previous shot includes a detail of the same naked father standing on the house roof. The movie seems to be very delicately implying incestuous terror into the fabric. I find this extremely interesting.)

Also, when the boy across the road is murdered, "It" takes the form of his half naked mother, who then appears to have intercourse with the corpse of her son.

I watched this again last night and if anything liked it even better than the first time. On a first viewing the film can't help but fall a little short of expectations due to the advance raves. If the film has a flaw, its that the pace slackens a little in the last third before the show down, when it should be ramping up. But It Follows is the most visually beautiful horror film I've seen since Let the Right One In and it's certainly the film I responded to the most on a purely aesthetic level this year. The films uncertain 70s-to-the-future via Gregory Crewdson creates a world and peculiar atmosphere which I will revisit many more times.

[Mr Sausage]

This was terrifying. I watched it under ideal circumstances (alone, in the dark) and the sure grasp of tone and style coupled with the inexorableness of the thing added up to a worse and worse dread. There is a lot of talk about rules in the thread, but for me what's more important in a monster or ghost movie is a consist representation. The movie films its monster with such skillful consistency that any small variation (in appearance, in proximity to the camera, even in its absence from the frame during a shot that would normally contain it) makes the terror balloon. I love to see horror movies like this and The Babadook (saw the latter on Halloween) that understand how organized the formal elements must be if the atmosphere is to work appropriately.

Unlike The Babadook, the concept underlying the monster/situation in It Follows is not made clear on an interpretative level. Instead, the concept remains latent, as a tension rather than an idea. Larger interpretations are probably fruitless. The suggestive force of the thing is more where its strength lies. There seems to be no ultimate idea about sex here, but the movie adds a layer of sexual menace and sickness with the various hints at incest in the thing's choice of identity and apparel and the naked appearance of the thing at certain crucial stages. The movie is working up an emotion rather than an idea, and I think there'll be a lot of pleasure in rewatching it and teasing out all the suggestive formal and narrative details that contribute to that emotion.

It's a superior horror movie.