Certainly on a technical level, David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows stands out as one of the stronger horror offerings of recent years. As its title suggests, Mitchell’s film is about the dread of knowing something horrendous will happen, that Sword of Damocles hanging over main character Jay’s (Maika Monroe) head with each passing second; this unnerving feeling is amplified by the impressive score by Rich Vreeland and the haunting sound design. Mike Gioulakis’s camera also adds immeasurably to the overall disquieting effect: It tracks the characters so close behind, you could practically touch them on their shoulders.
More than being a skillful technical exercise, however, It Follows also offers intriguing wrinkles on the usual horror-genre obsessions with sex and the teenage experience. There is more to this film than the typical puritanical cautionary tale it appears to be on the surface. Mitchell’s previous film, The Myth of the American Sleepover, found its distinctive voice in moments that oscillated between generic and unique: One thinks that something revelatory will happen at a sleepover, that glimpsing into the lives of children at that particular rite of passage will unearth something life-changing—but its ultimate ordinariness is exactly what makes the film profound. It Follows similarly deconstructs the myth of teen sex, so often held up as a time marker of adolescent transition.
Mitchell’s most tantalizing ideas lie in the irony of making the sex act this forbidden danger, to the point where one will “contract” a ghost afterward. Mitchell seems quite aware of the cultural assumptions we bring to losing one’s virginity, and slyly uses this awareness to subvert the pedestal on which we place sex and sexuality, particularly women’s sexuality. The sex that occurs in the film isn’t special or life-changing in the expected ways; in fact, few of the characters in the film romanticize the sex act, approaching it with relative ambivalence. But thanks in part to conditioning on the part of popular media, we go into this film assuming it must mean a great deal to the girl. And, as it turns out, this girl, Jay, can do no right: She either has sex with another guy and is implicitly labeled a whore, or stays chaste and avoids sex yet still must confront the demon trying to finish her off. Unlike other Final Girls in previous slasher movies, she’s given two choices that leave her at risk either way. By complicating Puritan ideas of sexuality, It Follows could been seen as a conversation-starter as to why we, as a culture, continue to cling to such ideas.
It Follows isn’t just interested in tweaking genre conventions, though. The film transcends the slasher norm in the ways it focuses as much on its characters as it does on satisfying horror-movie expectations. A scene between Jay and her close friend Paul reveals an unspoken bond whose sexual tension had been, up to that point, latent and unrealized. The dialogue initially exudes a teen-drama blandness, but as the conversation continues, the voices of the actors begin to suggest a level of parody, the lines delivered with a self-aware lilt. Mitchell’s technique is also as much tuned into his characters’ psyches as it is to generating chills. He employs beautifully restrained long shots and 360° pans to evoke Jay’s isolation and loneliness: Jay’s world, ruined by the act that was probably peddled to her as ceremonial and transcendent, feels almost empty, were it not for her friends. There’s the intentional irony of juxtaposing these deep spaces, widescreen compositions that have much in the way of information yet little in the amount of activity, with an internal claustrophobia. The emptiness is both literal and figurative, augmenting the anxiety. None of this would have worked as well as it does without Maika Monroe’s performance as Jay: She brings an authentic sensitivity and vulnerability to her gestures and line readings that add depth to what might have been a mere genre archetype.
Though the film and its characters exist to some degree in a self-aware universe, it’s not a winking one, like The Cabin in the Woods or any of its ilk. It takes its premise and its inhabitants seriously, and its simultaneous commitment to and deconstruction of ideas about teen sexuality is what elevates It Follows to a higher plane: a spooky horror yarn with a slow-burning intelligence.
