The Horrors of Sexual Awakening

Rating: 7/10 (16 August 2015)

"It Follows" joins "The Babadook" in a mini-boom of horror films in the last year or two that turn the literal psychological states of their main characters into tangible bogeymen that are every bit as real (and seemingly unstoppable) as Michael Meyers or Jason Voorhees. In "The Babadook," the protagonist's overwhelming grief became first a frightening predator lurking in the shadows and then a demon that possessed her and turned her into the monster. In "It Follows," the predator springs from adolescent sexual awareness and promiscuity, a sort of walking, talking STD that no medical treatment is going to get rid of. In fact, it's easy to read "It Follows" as an anxious response to our modern-day knowledge of every consequence, from deadly to merely embarrassing, that can arise from sex, both protected and otherwise. But I think the movie is less about the fear of anything so specific as contracting an STD, and more about that purgatory between adolescence and adulthood when kids start doing and feeling adult things without the life experience to process them emotionally. It's no accident that parents are absent in this film; these kids are on their own, navigating the scary emotional waters of sexual awakening without a compass.
The movie isn't totally successful, and it's certainly not very scary. The threat at the center of the film is sometimes treated as a supernatural force, sometimes as something corporeal that can be outrun and killed, and the balancing act between the two is frequently awkward. But it's a thoughtful movie and, like "The Babadook," it picks as its monster something far more horrifying, because so much more real, than any monster dreamed up in a slasher film.
Grade: B+