It Follows (2015)
Directed by David Robert Mitchell
A young woman is followed by an unknown supernatural force after a sexual encounter.
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His opening shot, with its placid suburban street, reminds you of Haddonfield, Illinois, where Jamie Lee Curtis was pursued in “Halloween,” and the director of that movie, John Carpenter, supplied a throbbing electronic score that is constantly echoed here.
Alongside knowing visual echoes of Halloween , there’s a deep vein of John Carpenter in the simple but unnervingly effective electronic score by Disasterpeace, which runs from almost subliminal background booms to crunching, sometime strident dissonance (I’ve just listened to some on my laptop, and even heard this way they’re still deeply troubling).
But there are also times when the camera itself turns threatening, prowling the quiet suburban streets in eerily smooth tracking shots that hark back to John Carpenter's slasher classic, Halloween.
The teenage cast gives subtle, sympathetic performances, grounding this wild terror in reality, while the cinematography and assaultive score openly recall the cinemascope suburbia and savage synths of John Carpenter’s Halloween while building on the influence and deepening it.
The inspiration from John Carpenter’s “Halloween” (1978), extending to the eerie, electronic musical score, is unmistakable and used to great effect.
By echoing John Carpenter's Halloween (not in terms of narrative but it nearly every other way that matters), director David Robert Mitchell has announced that he won't be bound by the limits of modern multiplex horror tropes.
Eschewing the self-aware humor of Scream and Cabin in the Woods and skipping the camp qualities that marred so many of the reboots and re-imaginings and homages of recent years, It Follows embraces the horrifying nature of unstoppable, implacable evil.
The slasher arms race that followed didn’t measure up to Carpenter’s work because it couldn’t – Wes Craven’s original “A Nightmare On Elm Street” came the closest – but it was Craven himself who finally laid the genre to rest with an eternally underappreciated slice of satire known as “Scream.”
With its woozy widescreen Steadicam aesthetic and prowlingly squishy score (composer Rich Vreeland giving Cold in July’s Jeff Grace a retro run for his money), It Follows seems at times to be stalking the ghost of Halloween’s killer, Michael Myers, albeit with the post- Scream knowingness of Geoffrey Wright’s sardonic Cherry Falls .
It's not unusual for a horror movie to connect sex with death: Scream even made a joke of the fact that the best way to stay alive in a slasher flick is to be a virgin, since the horny teens always get offed first.
The same could be said for Paul, Kelly, and Yara, who tend to believe Jay even when her story makes no sense and are ultimately willing to stand by her (the film reminds me, in this regard, of Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street, which also benefitted from its teen protagonists displaying elements of generosity and morality).
One thing is certain: it’s the work of someone who appreciates the two best stalker flicks of the late seventies and early eighties, John Carpenter’s “Halloween” and Wes Craven’s “A Nightmare on Elm Street.”
The slasher arms race that followed didn’t measure up to Carpenter’s work because it couldn’t – Wes Craven’s original “A Nightmare On Elm Street” came the closest – but it was Craven himself who finally laid the genre to rest with an eternally underappreciated slice of satire known as “Scream.”
These are just teenagers, like A Nightmare on Elm Street’s Nancy Thompson, fumbling in the face of a terrifying power, and trying to catch it with what little they have.
Between scares it even lapses into a dreamy, teen-movie hangout mode reminiscent of Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides, or the work of Richard Linklater.
It’s sort of like if The Virgin Suicides (the Jeffrey Eugenides book, anyway, I never saw the Sofia Coppola movie) was a straight-up horror movie.
Like Mitchell’s debut feature, The Myth of the American Sleepover, It Follows takes place in a dreamy, nostalgia-swaddled Michigan suburb that owes an awful lot to the Grosse Pointe of Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides.
Rather, Mitchell seems to be charting an ominous adolescent dreamscape, in the manner of David Lynch or of cult teen movies made in Lynch's wake, such as The Virgin Suicides or Donnie Darko.
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The plot mixes the curse theme of The Grudge or The Ring with the sexually transmitted plague of David Cronenberg 's Shivers, while its pulsating digital score is straight out of John Carpenter 's playbook.
There’s a fairly nail-biting confrontation sequence at a deserted swimming pool, and while I enjoyed the tension—and the echoes of Tourneur’s Cat People —I slightly regretted the shift away from a pensive, nervous register into an all-out showdown.
Mitchell’s previous film, his debut, was “The Myth of the American Sleepover,” a straightforward teen picture in the vein of “American Graffiti” and “Dazed and Confused,” only with less rambunctious kids.
Mitchell made his debut with The Myth of the American Sleepover, an acclaimed ensemble coming-of-age drama frequently compared to Dazed and Confused.
“It Follows,” an interesting hybrid of “Halloween,” “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” and “Dazed and Confused,” is a zombie-slacker movie with a slasher film sensibility.
In the style of classic screen zombies or even the menace from the superb recent horror movie It Follows, they look almost like people you care about and they don’t ever pick up their inexorable pace – they just walk after their victims until they catch up.
…jumping between victims in a parasitic chain in a clichéd pass-it-on setup that recalls horror flicks like It Follows or Smile…
The premise evokes 2014’s It Follows but, without that film’s violence and adult content, Davies comes at it from an altogether eerier angle.
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Most of it evokes the attacks on lust that flourished in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and The Birds and that were rampant in the high school nightmare movies of the 1970s and 1980s.
The visceral result of violence functions much like the shower scene in Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960): It establishes the stakes with such force that it taints everything that comes after.
Not for Mitchell the revelations of 1956’s “It Conquered the World,” in which “it” proved to be Zontar, a cone creature from Venus, or 1955’s “It Came from Beneath the Sea,” about a giant octopus.