A Horror Film Classic...Ten Out of Ten

Rating: 10/10 (29 October 2017)

A perfect horror movie to watch around Halloween time is "It Follows", a story about a group of high school students trying to protect their friend Jay Height (Maika Monroe) who has unwittingly become the last link in a chain of sexual partners thus making her the sole prey of an unknown supernatural predator only she can see. It can look like a young woman wearing a torn blouse and dripping urine from beneath her skirt, a naked man standing on the roof of her own home, or a tall man who could easily pass for "Lurch", the awkward butler from "The Addams Family" TV sitcom. And the only way for her to survive is by having sex with someone else to pass along the curse.
Jay has sex for the first time with her new boyfriend Hugh (Jake Weary) and everything is going great until he forces her to realize that she is now the lowest member of a human food chain strung together through sexual encounters and warns her to run away from any stranger who is walking directly at her. His nightmarish tale comes true a few days later when Jay glances out the window of her classroom and sees an old woman wearing a hospital gown walking across the lawn headed in her direction. She escapes this first encounter and runs home to seek help from her sister Kelly (Lily Sepe), her childhood neighbour Paul (Keir Gilchrist), and another close friend Yara (Olivia Luccardi) who circle the wagons around her. Later, a mutual high school acquaintance Greg (Daniel Zovatto) follows them into the park and drives them out of the city for safety.
"It Follows" has everything horror movie fans enjoy; a twisted story line, resilient survivors, smooth flowing dialogue, and genuine cinematic appeal. This supernatural curse has been passed along quietly from one sexual partner to the next without alarming anyone else in the small town. Jay and her high school friends are mature enough to hang onto their low paying jobs yet still enjoy a carefree day at the beach. They can talk to each other without resorting to slang or trash talk yet each can poke fun at the others with a pretty sharp needle. The empty high school hallway Jay runs through and the deserted beach where Yara splashes around in the water as the others hang back on the sand are perfect settings for the attacks that follow.
This movie packs a real psychological wallop without resorting to a lot of screaming or hysteria. Yara is left behind to nurse her gun shot wound while Paul and Kelly methodically go around the indoor swimming pool deck following Jay's finger points trying to kill a creature they cannot see. Yet the gruesome body of the first teenage victim and Greg's disturbing death scene are enough to satisfy the most sophisticated horror genre fan.
There is no explanation for the low rating given by the IMDb's user reviews except perhaps poor word of mouth at the box office because "It Follows" stands alongside two other great movies, "The Silence of the Lambs" and "The Shinning" as a classic horror film. This movie deserves ten out of ten.