"It Follows" masters and massacres the horror genre

Rating: 8/10 (19 February 2016)

It's early autumn, dusk in a residential neighborhood in suburban Detroit. A teenage girl in red stilettos sprints out her front door and into the middle of the street. Her heels click-clacking across the pavement, she slows and turns back towards her house, terrified. She's being chased. But nothing's there. Moments later, she begins running again, the camera panning in a circle, following her back through her own front door as her father runs out to help. She runs out again, hops in the family car, and peels out down the street.
Jump cut to the shores of Lake St. Clair. The girl sits with her back to the water, illuminated by headlights, and phones her dad to say she's sorry, and that she loves him. She's accepted that "it" will kill her. She can see it. But we cannot. What follows is one of the more grisly and unsympathetic images you will ever see put to screen.
This is the opening scene of writer-director David Robert Mitchell's "It Follows," a contemporary horror film of simply monumental intelligence and artistry, one that celebrates and satirizes in equal measure the conventions of the sex-as-death, teen-victim horror flick, which began with such promise in John Carpenter's "Halloween" nearly four decades ago. Our heroine is seventeen-year-old Jay Height, who consummates her relationship with new boyfriend Hugh in the spacious backseat of his well-manicured, chocolate- brown Plymouth sedan. As Jay basks in the post-coital glow of unprotected boning, Jake silently approaches her from behind and subdues her with chloroform. When she wakes, Jay is roped to a wheelchair beneath an overpass. Hugh apologizes and explains that something will now follow her, wherever she goes. Someone gave "it" to him, and he gave "it" to her, by having sex with her back in the car. "It" can look like anything. Even someone she knows. But only she can see it. It moves slowly, but is always getting closer. And if it catches her, it will kill herunless she passes it on to someone else, just like Hugh did back in the car.
Mitchell takes the "sex will kill you" trope of slasher films and conservative dads literally. Have sex, and you die. "It" is always on your mind, "it" follows you everywhere, "it" is passed on to someone else like chlamydia. And "it" can't be destroyed. Mitchell's "it"—whatever "it" is—is the monstrous and literal anthropomorphization of our most basic drives: to escape death, to Netflix, and to chill. "It" is unstoppable, all-consuming, and inevitable. But even if you don't appreciate or much care about the film's insights into Freudian psychology, you'll appreciate how "It Follows" all at once masters and massacres the entirety of its genre. No trope or standard of cheap slash-horror is safe from Mitchell's brilliant and often comic satire.
In "It Follows," sex kills you; more sex kills others. The monster crawls at a snail's pace, but somehow you can't outrun it. All our heroes are beautiful, and essentially quite stupid. The heroine is helpless and blonde. Her love-interest is talldarkhandsome and, of course, irresistibly misunderstood. The string-beany, friend-zoned nerd tries in vain to save and bang the damsel in distress—not necessarily in that order. Parents are inexplicably absent. The kids never seem to go to school. They watch shitty horror films and talk about screwing. They make poor decisions, back themselves into corners, and turn their backs on danger. "It Follows" is, in every conceivable respect, a horror film ABOUT horror films.
Mitchell crafts a horror film that is in equal measure a love letter and scathing editorial of the genre itself. His direction is exacting, heavy on slow movement and zooms, 360- (even 720- degree) panning long-takes, and compositions that draw the viewer's attention deep, deep into the background, ominous and drenched in panic. The film's shrieking and concussive, synthy and discordant score from Rich Vreeland (of Disasterpeace) delivers half the film's terror by itself. Genuinely unsettling, surprisingly funny (if you know what it's really\ doing), and properly frightening, "It Follows" is smart, unconventional, intensely atmospheric and, most importantly, utterly self-aware.
"It Follows" knows exactly what it's doing. Its jump-scares are cheap (the funniest is nothing more than a dodge ball hitting a window). Its monster is slow and stupid. Its heroes are only slightly faster, and somehow even stupider. Everything about "It Follows" screams intelligence, foresight, and self-awareness. And that includes the much-maligned final act.
Many worthwhile critics, most of whom actually like the film, have criticized its climactic swimming-pool face-off for being more of a letdown than a showdown. The teens' plan is as intricate as it is moronic. Their strategy is to have Jay swim in the center of a high-school pool (during a thunderstorm, mind you), and line its edges with electrical appliances plugged into sockets surrounding the entire pool. There, they wait for "it" to approach and wade into the pool after Jay, whereupon they will toss the lamps and toasters and Forman Grills into the water and electrocute "it" to death. Sounds moronic, doesn't it? And that's the point, folks. That's the damn point. It's moronic because our heroesare morons. Like most teens, these teens don't think things through. They think they're invincible. They don't think they need help. They try to do everything on their own, and often fail disastrously. And teens in horror films are the worst of all teens in this respect. So, while I have no argument with any critic or casual viewer who isn't taken with the film for reasons of personal taste, I hold no quarter with those who critique it for reasons of internal logic. Because, I'm sorry, folks, if you think the climax is stupid because it's stupid, you've missed the point entirely. The climax of this horror film is galactically stupid because its heroes are teens in a horror film and are, as evergalactically stupid. And that, my friends, is smart.