It Follows is an indie horror movie that premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2014 and received a theatrical release in March of the following year. It follows (no pun intended) a teenage girl named Jay who has sex with an older boy named Hugh, and he passes on a mysterious curse that a previous sexual partner once passed on to him.
This curse involves a supernatural entity that walks towards Jay at a slow, Michael Myers-like pace, and if it ever catches her, it will kill her. She can run away from it, but wherever she goes, it will keep following her and eventually catch up to her. The only way she can escape it is to have sex with someone else and pass the curse on to them, but if it kills that person, it will go back to chasing her.
One of the most unique things about this film is that it never reveals the creature's true form. The monster is visible only to those who've been cursed by it (even if they've passed it on to others), and every time we see it, it looks different. Sometimes it takes the form of people Jay knows, and other times it looks like random strangers, which makes for a very paranoid viewing experience. Since the creature can look like anybody and since almost nobody can see it, you're never quite sure where the thing is until it's too close for comfort. It makes you constantly scan the screen for anybody walking in a slow, straight line towards Jay, so even when the characters are just sitting around talking in a seemingly safe environment, you feel an incessant anxiety that eats away at you throughout the entire movie.
Then, when you realize the monster is finally onscreen, it becomes scary in a different but equally effective way. Sometimes, Jay doesn't even realize the thing is there, but since we do, the tension mounts higher and higher with every slow step it takes. Other times, Jay does recognize it, and even though she can easily run away from it (since it walks so slowly), the film still manages to unnerve you. Just knowing that this monster is slowly walking towards her and that there's nothing she can do about it is really distressing. Plus, when it takes a seemingly harmless form, like that of an old person, the juxtaposition of a harmless exterior with a really dangerous reality hiding beneath it is really unsettling.
The other main strength of this movie is its meaning. On the surface, it seems like it's just a metaphor for STD's, but it actually goes deeper than that. Throughout the film, one of Jay's friends is reading a book on an e-reader, and every so often she'll read snippets of it out loud to her friends. By the end of the movie, you realize that all of these excerpts are about the inevitability of death, and that's the key to understanding the film's meaning.
The monster symbolizes death, which comes for us all, and there's nothing we can do to stop it. No matter how far we run, it will keep coming for us, and it will eventually catch us regardless of where we may be. Even if we pass on the curse of death by having children (just like people pass on this movie's curse by having sex), we're still on its hit list, so we're not off the hook.
That may sound like a depressing meaning, and in a sense it is, but like I said in my recommendation of Re-Animator, good art deals with profound truths of the human condition even if they're unpleasant truths. That being said, this movie does deal with that truth in an uplifting way. I don't want to spoil the ending, but suffice it to say that by the end of the movie, the characters left on the monster's agenda give a great example of how to face the inevitability of death. They show us that we can't let our mortality dominate our thoughts and cripple our wills. We have to bravely face our inescapable destiny and just live. It's all we can do, so we should do it as best we can.
It's a shame that more people haven't seen It Follows, as I think it's one of the best horror films of this millennium. It has a wildly original plot, it has an underlying sense of paranoia that doesn't go away until the credits roll, and it also gives us some real substance to think about. This movie comes with my highest recommendation, so if you're looking for something new to watch, you should give this one a shot.
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