Different but slow.

Rating: 7/10 (3 April 2015)

In the intro, a girl runs out of her house at sunrise in her sleepwear and high heels for some reason. She stands in the middle of the road then runs back into the house and back out. She gets into her car and drives to a beach. Later we see her dead and her body wrecked.
Next we meet a girl named "Jay" for some reason, her sister, a friend and a guy friend. They hang out, watch old movies on a black and white tube TV. One night she goes out on a date with a guy she's been seeing. They have sex for first time with each other. Afterward, he drugs her, binds her to a wheelchair and takes her to an abandoned building. Now he comes clean. From now on she will be followed by a stranger or somebody she knows. The followers tend to walk slowly so she can outrun them. A way to deal with this situation is to have sex with someone, it will pass on the condition to them. That's why he had sex with her. And he's right, a naked woman goes after them.
And sure enough, next day at school Jay sees an old woman following her. Problem is, no one else sees the followers. Her friends don't understand what's going on with her. She starts seeing followers everywhere. Now another kid from the neighborhood joins the gang, which apparently has nothing else going in their lives than looking after Jay. They drive to the new guy's family remote beach house. But even there someone appears. When one of her friends throws a chair at it, it fights back and sends the kid flying. But they realize that shooting it in the head seems to work.
Jay ends up in the hospital and decides to have sex with the new guy much to the chagrin of her virginal friend who has a crush on her. But oddly enough the guy sees nothing. One night though, Jay sees him breaking into his own house and his mom has turned into a follower. The kids then devise a plan to trap a follower and eliminate the threat.
It Follows is a different horror movie. It's very much influenced by 70s/early 80s horror movies in terms of the music especially. It reminded me of another very original movie--The Guest. And like it, It Follows also is a bit anachronistic. It seems to be set in the 70s and sometimes it doesn't. Perhaps that accounts also for the very slow pace, which is a problem here because in the addition to that, not much really happens. And the lives of the kids isn't particularly interesting and neither is the lead character Jay. It turns out that the followers are most interesting; not that we get to learn anything about them. In fact we learn nothing about this situation. Nor do we learn how come the date happens to know so much about it. Sure there's the interpretation that all this represents a sexually transmitted disease, or AIDS I guess, since we're talking about a Hollywood production. But that doesn't explain anything. So we're left to make whatever we want to make of It Follows. Unfortunately, the movie doesn't give us enough to go on, nor is it striking enough to care about but it does have a different style.