A modern take the suburban fear of everything

Rating: 6/10 (14 May 2015)

It Follows takes a familiar horror film storyline – suburban teen pursued by unknown evil – and delivers a new take on it through an original plot and an opening up of the teenage worldview with the roles sex, death, and fear play in the self-obsessed teenage mind. It also takes a long look back at John Carpenter's early horror movies, especially Halloween, in its music and long, slow camera moves, although the film is none the worse for it; the creeping horror slowly gaining on the central character, Jay, is effectively built up and Maika Monroe is excellent at portraying the haunted, trapped girl – trapped by her unwillingness to pass on the curse as much as by the curse itself. The film exists in an isolated, disconnected teenage world, where parents barely exist, a teacher is just a disembodied voice in a classroom, and the characters start off just sitting around doing very little then progress to running from place to place with little idea of what to do when they arrive. The film captures the aimless intensity of teenagers, the constant awareness of sex and the vague awareness of its perils, giving the film a depth most horror movies don't have. The basis of this is the plot premise of passing on a curse through sex. This can be seen as any number of allegories – sin, death, disease, guilt, and all those good things! This metaphorical dimension makes it more a semi-horror than full on horror film. Although the opening sequence ends with a gruesome image and there's a nasty incest/rape murder later on the film relies on building tension through inventive cinematography that is always looking for paranoid, claustrophobic angles and simple camera moves such as constantly closing in on Jay. Another interesting aspect of It Follows is the depiction of the suburban relation to the city. Filmed in Michigan and Detroit, the city the characters travel into is a desolate place, full of ruined housing and a ruined economy where people hang around because there's nowhere else to go. It's a reality check such a subjective film benefits from – suburban inner demons complemented by suburban fear of the city. It raises an interesting question: which is worse, a teen who sleeps with the wrong guy or the complete annihilation of American cities over the last decade?