Movie Review: ‘It Follows’

The horror genre has gotten increasingly stale over the past few years, with a seemingly endless onslaught of films featuring paranormal hauntings or demonic possessions – and most of them shot found-footage style. So it’s always refreshing when someone dares to step outside the mold and do something different, something unique and original, and that’s precisely what director David Robert Mitchell offers with It Follows.

The film opens with an incredibly effective sequence featuring a teenage girl fleeing her house in terror. Something is chasing her – we can’t see what it is, but it’s scary enough to send her sprinting down the sidewalk in heels before hopping into the family car and hauling ass down the street. But her efforts are in vain, as we soon learn with a fleeting glimpse of her twisted, mangled body.

Next we meet another teenage beauty, Jay (Maika Monroe), getting ready for her big date with new beau Hugh (Jake Weary). The evening takes them to a secluded beach, and the back to his car for the sort of backseat romp that is so indicative of young lust. But things take a dark turn when Hugh pins her down and knocks her out with a chloroform-soaked rag, reviving her sometime later in a rundown parking garage in the middle of nowhere.

Hugh explains that he slept with Jay in order to pass something to her, but this isn’t the sort of affliction that can be cleared up with a strong antibiotic. Something has been following Hugh methodically, relentlessly, and now that something is fixated on Jay. It can appear as a friend, a loved one, or a stranger, and it will never stop coming unless she sleeps with someone else to pass it along.

Naturally, Jay’s friends are more than a little skeptical when she tells them what happened – and it certainly doesn’t help that no one else can see the apparition. But Paul (Keir Gilchrist), who’s been in love with Jay since childhood, is determined to protect her, and Jay’s sister Kelly (Lili Sepe) and pal Yara (Olivia Lucardi) agree to lend a hand, as well.

It’s difficult to say much else without spoiling some of the film’s best moments, a few of which are the requisite jump scares the audience spends half the film anticipating. But the most effective scenes are when the tension slowly builds to a crescendo, helped along by Rich Vreeland’s synth-heavy score, which is clearly influenced by John Carpenter and other staples of 80s horror. There’s a particularly nail-biting sequence that takes place in Jay’s bedroom, and another encounter on a beach, both of which should leave viewers with sweaty palms and a racing heartbeat.

It Follows isn’t a perfect film, and there are definitely a few stumbling blocks, including a head-scratching climax that seems to contradict the few “rules” the film has established up to that point. But it’s incredibly well-paced and well-shot, and the premise is a clever nod to the 70s and 80s horror classics, where sexual promiscuity all but guaranteed a grisly demise. Even though Mitchell’s effort is ultimately far more effective at creating an atmosphere of sustained tension than being truly frightening, he deserves tremendous credit for attempting to breathe some much-needed life into a genre so heavily steeped in death.