Let’s face it: a lot of horror movies have a focus on sex in one form or another. It makes a certain amount of sense. It’s an activity most people enjoy, but it is also a time when we might be at our most vulnerable. Many popular fictional monsters can and often are connected to sex, perhaps most notably vampires. There are a lot of emotions tied into sex, especially first time sex, and many a slasher film has set sex up as an activity that can get a person killed.
Sex that can get a person killed may have never been as literal as it is in It Follows.
The movie opens with a young woman running out of her house, pausing in the street, before taking off in her car. She later stops on a beach, makes some calls to loved ones, and when day breaks, she’s dead, violently ripped apart from the looks of things. That’s more or less the first ten minutes or so. An explanation soon follows when high school student Jay (Maika Monroe) goes out on a date and ends up having sex. Her date (Jake Weary) then chloroforms her, and when she wakes up, he explains that she is now cursed. A nameless creature will follow her at a slow, steady pace. It won’t talk. It won’t stop. It will take many forms, many of them dressed if at all like they are ready for sex or at least sleep. It may or may not take the form of someone Jay knows. Only she and former targets can see it. And if it catches up to her, she will die a violent death, after which the thing will go back to its previous target. The only way to get it off Jay’s back is for her to have sex with someone else. The only reason her desperate date drugged her was to show her he wasn’t lying.
From there, Jay’s sole task is to stay one step ahead of this slow-moving killer. Fortunately, she has some friends and a sister who come to believe her. It helps that even if the creature is invisible to them, they can still see the effects of its presence. It’s invisible, not intangible. Of course, it also seems to be unkillable. Of course, Jay can just go have sex and pass the curse along, but is that right? What can she do?
I had heard about this one for a while, namely on how good it was. Writer/director David Robert Mitchell, who doesn’t have a huge resume, actually produced a really high quality horror film with an original monster. The thing doesn’t have a name. It doesn’t talk. It just walks along and kills. As metaphors go, it’s a good one for a girl’s first time and everything that can go wrong. Why not have what is basically a supernatural form of VD? Mitchell manages to make a thing that, one of the first times Jay gets a good look at, appears as an old lady in a nightgown, and somehow still makes the thing creepy while creating a unique mythology.
It helps that Monroe gives a good performance, and that Jay as a character has a good support group that doesn’t really doubt what happened to her. This isn’t something parents can get involved in because it’s a movie about teenagers maybe figuring out some rather adult ideas about their sexuality. Whether or not Mitchell can recreate the magic, I don’t know, but if a writer/director has to have one really good movie under their belt, something like It Follows is a great one to have.
Grade: A-
0 Comments