It Follows (dir. David Robert Mitchell, 2014)- Review
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2014’s It Follows was variously hailed as a revival or a satire of the 80s slasher tradition; in any case, it extracts and develops a key ingredient of the genre, the boundless horrors of adolescence. David Robert Mitchell’s premise plays on the timeless, dreamy sense of feeling ‘forever young’ to draw a mighty fear of the unknown from sparse resources.
It Follows centres on 19-year-old Jay (Maika Monroe), and her attempts to escape a nameless monster which is transmitted through sexual intercourse. In the words of the crush who gave it to her, the entity is “slow, but it’s not stupid”; it can shapeshift to blend into crowds, and it’s invisible to everyone except its current target. The entity can be passed on through sex, but not permanently- once it kills a victim it will move on to the previous one.
With its simple plot and ‘normal’ characters, the film is driven by its use of negative space and psychological threats, most obviously in the unrelenting, invisible, unknowable entity. The fear of the unknown, and more importantly the question of whether the threat is real at all, is driven home by plot elements which should be mundane rather than supernatural: the central element of sex, the Detroit setting, anachronistic household items.
The film was widely recognised as a play on the ‘have-sex-and-die’ trope which dogged female characters in 70’s and 80’s horror; the premise toys further with genre antecedents by replacing the bloody violence of a slasher with a more intimate focus on the emotional angst of its teenage characters. With a major plot arc involving the love triangle between members of Jay’s guy group- suave neighbour Greg (Daniel Zovatto) and puppy-dog schoolmate Paul (Keir Gilchrist)- It Follows positions itself in between two classic ‘American’ teen genres- horror and the indie coming-of-age flick.
Flirting with different temporal elements sets the film further in the liminal space between the fearful and the familiar. Mitchell explained in a 2015 interview: “there’s a lot of things from the ’70s and ’80s... I think a lot of people feel like it’s a period piece to that point, but there are enough things from many different time periods to where you can’t quite put your finger on when it’s taking place. And that’s the intention, it’s like a dream or a nightmare.”
Aside from a few eyerollingly quirky prop anachronisms- including the “clamshell shaped e-Reader” on which Jay’s sister reads Dostoyevsky- which drift into knockoff David Lynch territory, the Detroit setting is one of the most effective forces in conveying this alienation. As the school friends drive through derelict, deindustrialised neighbourhoods- themselves relics of the twentieth century- for their showdown with the entity, one recalls that “when I was a little girl, my parents wouldn’t allow me to go south of 8 Mile… and I didn’t even know what that meant until I got a little older... I used to think about how shitty and weird that was.”
The uneasy marriage of two faces of classic Americana- the picket-fence suburb where the (all-white) characters go to school, and the ‘ruin porn’ of the derelict inner city- is particularly effective in playing on the viewer’s fear, not of the supernatural but their own internal discomfort. Jay’s frightened reaction to one of the few black characters in the film- a solitary man outside the derelict house where they’re looking for clues- adds a deft element of racial anxiety; she is afraid of any solitary stranger, who might be the entity, but with the supernatural premise removed, the sequence remains totally plausible.
