After decades of horror films, US film-viewers are likely to find something inherently menacing in a camera panning across the average US suburban street of tidy brick homes shaded by trees laden with leaves turning for autumn. Particularly if the panning sequences are combined with a synth score and the sky leaden with gray clouds. In these ways, David Robert Mitchell’s superb It Follows is nothing new, adopting the visual and sonic palette of generations of scary movies.
What does make Mitchell’s horror film stand out, however, is how the director literalizes the creepy suburban setting in novel ways. Suburbs are stultifying. As such, they have long represented conformity, containment and the façade of normality in cultural works. It Follows capitalizes on the metaphors of the suburbs as part of its horror storytelling by, basically, positing that the very ossifying forces unleashed by suburbanization are monstrous, in a literal sense.
The premise of It Follows is very straightforward: there is a nameless monster that ceaselessly stalks a single victim and the only possible relief for the victim is to pass on the monster’s attention to someone else via sexual intercourse. The monster—the eponymous “It”—always manifests as a human, though often a quite unusually dressed or shaped one, and it moves slowly but without ever stopping. If the monster catches up to the victim, well, that is bad news and will result in the victim’s death. In this case, the curse of the following It reverts to the just-deceased victim’s most recent sexual partner.
There are several features that make It Follows fun and entertaining to watch. The setting is a suburb just north of post-2008 Detroit, with modest, but lovingly-maintained homes. The characters, however, make multiple jaunts into the apocalyptic urban interior of the once-great metropolis. There is also an excursion to a scenic lake house. One of the most pivotal scenes in the whole film takes place inside a Depression-era natatorium, the sort of place that anyone who has spent a lot of time in old natatoriums will attest is full of foreboding and atmosphere (sort of like the ‘50s-era basketball gym in The Vast of Night). The time component of the setting is all twisted: in terms of fashion, interior design and the cars the characters have access to, it is the early ‘90s, but then there is hyper-futuristic technology being used, too. For all these contradictory indicators, the film is meant to be contemporary; that is, 2014.
Another aspect that allows the viewer to thoroughly enjoy It Follows is that Mitchell does not feel the need to overelaborate the basis of the film’s story or explain anything else about the monster. The monster is simple. But the viewer will imbue various interpretative frames onto the meaning of the monster; by leaving the It underexplained, Mitchell allows several possible understandings of what the monster is all about. The film is capable of saying so much about coming of age, the suburbs, sexual mores and capitalism, but really it is up to the viewer to construct these meanings. Or not, and rather just enjoy the spectacle.
Finally, the technical craft of It Follows is simply delightful. The synth score highlights and amplifies the action. The set design and costuming adds to the scare factor as well as the overall atmosphere. Because the story is centered on an unrelentingly pursuing monster, physical space and the possibilities of escape for the protagonists, things such as windows, balconies and second doors, is crucial and the set design has fun coming up with a variety of spaces in which to place the characters. The cinematography of It Follows mixes panning landscape shots, establishing shots of the various physical spaces and close-up frames of the characters. Given the shapeshifting nature of the monster, It Follows is clever in showing quite a distance behind the character cursed with the chasing monster, because any human behind that character could be the monster.
As a reservoir of competing interpretations or as simply an atmospheric horror film, It Follows is a genre standout and a film deserving of continuing attention and a revisit. Particularly given the open-endedness of the final shot and the variety of meanings it could suggest for the film.
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