It Follows (David Robert Mitchell, 2015)

[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.

[Murdoch]

It really is, perhaps the best horror film I've seen released in twenty years. I think one of the film's biggest attributes is its soundtrack. The music cues and droning rhythms add perfectly to the tension and really build the atmosphere of the overall film. What impressed me the most about it were the "filler" tracks used during scenes with the group of teens wanders around searching for a safe haven, there's a sort of playful eeriness to "Inquiry" in particular that I love. Between this and FEZ, Disasterpeace is on a roll.

[Mr Sausage]

Oh yeah, that score is impressive and plays a considerable part in the effectiveness of the movie.

I've been wondering about the meaning behind the peculiar title. Obviously it refers to the creature following people, but it also pointedly means "is a logical consequence of" in logical discourse. I'd like to know why.

[Raymond Marble]

Oh yeah, that score is impressive and plays a considerable part in the effectiveness of the movie.

I've been wondering about the meaning behind the peculiar title. Obviously it refers to the creature following people, but it also pointedly means "is a logical consequence of" in logical discourse. I'd like to know why.

Well, being terrorized is a logical consequence of having sex, according to horror movie tropes.

[Mr Sausage]

One possible reading (that requires you to treat the film symbolically):

So let's take a cue from the Dostoevsky quote late in the film and treat the monster as a figure for mortality, with the consciousness of death slowly creeping up on you in various forms, not always there but never too far away.

The pool symbolism becomes crucial. Water is a traditional symbol for, among other things, sex, death, and maternity. The pool imagery in the film seems to reinforce that symbolism: the above-ground pool is where Jay goes to feel safe, a kind of womb that stands in for the remote and absent mother character. Towards the end of the film, the pool is broken unaccountably (probably by the monster), showing the increasing lack of safe places in the narrative, the inability to return to the womb to escape death, and a kind of birth into adulthood and its consciousness of mortality. It's probably no accident that the creature avoids water, and that the final image in the community pool is a flood of red and black blood, a symbolism that hardly needs explaining.

So the film would be doing what horror films do and associating sex and death, although in this case sex is also a stand-in for the move towards adulthood. Generally, sex creates death by perpetuating mortal beings; and part of the burden of adulthood is the increasing consciousness that one is mortal and will inevitably die.

The characters in this film are all just entering adulthood--much of their talk and interactions centre around the significant moments and places of their childhood, especially those moments that were their first steps towards adulthood (mostly sexual/romantic). The sex in this movie is, narratively, a move towards more adult romantic interactions (eg. the contrast between Jay's comments that having sex with Greg in high school was no big deal, and how her and Greg's attitudes towards sex and each other deepen and becoming more adult). Many of the characters confront more troubling adult manifestations of sex (the guys on the boat, the prostitutes). And the final image of the movie is the two lead characters, looking glum and holding hands like people in an old relationship, being followed down the street by the spectre of mortality (and perhaps the actual monster). That transition into adulthood through sexual experience brings the ability to perceive the spectre of death and links everyone in a chain.

So there is one way to read the film as an anxiety-nightmare about adulthood and mortality.

[Satori]

Sexuality is also a doubled symbol in the film, though: it not only represents an entry into this consciousness of mortality, but also functions as a way of deferring mortality. It was this structure of deferment that I found so interesting about the film and what I think elevates it over the horror movie cliche association of sex and death. Sex is both the poison and the (temporary) cure, so to speak. So sex not only carries the typical horror movie association with death, but it is also the only way these characters can stay alive. Or, within your symbolic reading of the film, maybe sex also allows for a temporary "forgetting" about the adulthood and death, or a deferring of its responsibilities.

[Mr Sausage]

Agree completely. Using sex as a way to defer or escape mortality has a long tradition, too. Philip Roth has made a career out of it (see especially: Sabbath's Theatre). But this is generally something reserved for characters who are aging. Teens aren't usually made so death-conscious. I guess this would be the logical consequence of the horror film making young characters absurdly death conscious: they are saddled with behaviours (and their stories with themes) that are more typical of much older characters. Horror movies force young characters to confront things well beyond their years, I guess.

The film has a complicated attitude towards sex. Its depiction of sexuality lacks many of the traditional negatives: no one is shamed for their sexuality, for instance, not even when it causes a ghoul to pursue them. The moral dimension of sex is made into a more difficult dilemma about whether one ought to to ease one's own burden at the expense of another person, a question that gets no easy answer.

[gcgiles1dollarbin]

Excellent analyses. I would just add that the orgasm--and sexual intercourse more generally--has been historically characterized as "la petite mort," a kind of analogue of death that links nicely with the irretrievable threshold of hallowed virginity that we insidiously emphasize in cultures throughout the world--once done, somehow it cannot be undone, although there is no actual change upon commission of the act. But our attitudes toward it nonetheless reflect the ultimate example of this: death, one of the few things that, beyond symbolism, really and truly cannot be undone. Deferment is not a solution but a stopgap before the inevitable; in some ways, none of these people escape, while the required compulsion to "pass it on" is reminiscent of risky behaviors reenacted as a way to deny this inevitability--in the same way that you can feel more alive when you are closest to that threshold, whether by wingsuiting in the Alps or barebacking anonymously. Sex does not have to be risky, but notice how in this film Paul decides to sleep with a prostitute, which is in fact risky behavior but, with regard to this film's weird epidemiology, an excellent way to disperse the curse. Risky sexual behavior is the best means to keep the monster at bay.

There is nothing more terrifying to a young person than the banal and grave responsibilities of adulthood (here comes your infirm grandmother!), so I am in total agreement with the above interpretations, but I thought I would look a little more closely at this design toward sexual compulsion.

[domino harvey]

Congrats to this film for being unexpectedly name dropped by Ted Cruz in tonite's Republican debate

[lacritfan]

[therewillbeblus]

Sequel, obviously titled They Follow, in the works

David Robert Mitchell will write and direct, and Maika Monroe will return to star