Dangers of the human touch

Rating: 6/10 (14 February 2019)

It Follows is an interesting low budget independent horror film. It has the decency to have mostly nice likeable young characters.
Jay Height (Maika Monroe) is a pretty teenager who has sex with her new boyfriend. He then ties her up and in a desolate house tells her that he has passed a curse on to her.
Some kind of malevolent entity will now follow her, it can be anyone and it will try to kill her. The only way out for her is to pass the curse along to someone else and hopefully they will transmit it forward.
Jay is troubled, soon she has visions of someone following her. Her friends and family are worried about Jay but rally around her. Yet they cannot see what Jay is seeing.
The film can be seen as an allegory of the consequences of promiscuous sex and passing on sexually transmitted diseases. The premise of passing on a curse can go back to cult films such as Night of the Demon by Jacque Tourneur.
Writer/Director David Robert Mitchell begins the film with a half naked young woman running scared out of her house in heels. Her dead contorted body is found on the beach. Outside of this he has gone for slow burn suspense rather than visceral horror.
The use of electronic music and going for jump scares reminded me of the early movies of John Carpenter.