Best horror film I've seen in at least a decade

Rating: 10/10 (15 April 2015)

David Robert Mitchell's It Follows is the closest I'll get to seeing the gauzy, atmospheric, John Carpenter style horror films I grew up with on the big screen. It's a high concept, low budget, absolute masterpiece of a movie that gets under your skin and freezes your blood with eerie dread in the way that few films in the genre seem to do these days. In desolate, dreamy Detroit suburbia, a young girl (the haunting Maika Monroe) is assaulted and bound by a date after sleeping with him. He informs her he has passed along a curse to her, and that she will be followed. Not ran after, not scared by something jumping out of the closet, just simply followed, slowly... Deliberately... Relentlessly, until she passes it along to someone else. From the there the movie kicks into high gear as she and her sister along with their friends, played by superb young actors, giving their roles the fully realized attention and quirky dispositions to make us care about their plight, to figure out how to save herself. Many aspects together work to make this a wonder of a film: tight, fluid pacing, a gorgeous, thumping yet dreamy synth score that ratchets up the tension and sets a beautifully ambient, and at times overbearingly ominous tone, and a genuine love of the genre and movies themselves, implemented into making this the best, scariest and most engrossing horror movie in a decade.