Almost a guilty-pleasure film

Rating: 8/10 (12 January 2017)

It Follows might have been fantastic horror, but it had too many rookie-filmmaker mistakes.
It seems Mitchell tried to make cerebral horror film, which would make people think and be scared at the same time. Well, it didn't quite work out for me. The tension was there, the premise was great, the setting was fantastic and the film didn't gave the audience all the answers, so the viewers could come up with answers themselves. Unfortunately, Mitchell left out too many puzzle pieces so viewer couldn't really understand what kind of questions should one start asking in the first place.
I was scared a bit while watching this film, I felt the sense of hopelessness as the main character probably did, but it wasn't as scary as some other great horror films like The Conjuring or Halloween. Maybe because of the pacing and there was too much time between those scary moments.
I believe that the music score also took away some part of the horror aspect from It Follows. Mitchells relied too much on the music to build up tension and it the music spoiled the moments by pointing out when we should be waiting for something scary to happen. The music could be more subtle, just like the entity which followed.
The editing was very amateurish, I couldn't stand it. Everyone praises the cinematography of "It Follows" and it was the main reasons why I really wanted to see this film. I'm total sucker for great cinematography in films. It Follows tried to have great cinematography, but way too many times we had bad shots. Like the camera was shaking, or the cinematographer overdid the panning. Don't get me wrong, It Follows has mostly great shots, but also too many bad ones.
In conclusion: It Follows had interesting setting, relatable characters, great musical score (although overused in some cases), overall good cinematography (as mentioned it had bad shots), but with horrible editing and story which was meant to make audience members think, but left out too many puzzle pieces, which didn't make the film better in anyway.
I would like to believe it might be someone's guilty pleasure movie, but "It Follows" isn't even that . It's somewhere in between. It's too bad to be genuinely enjoyable and too good to be "so bad that it's good".