It Follows is writer/director David Robert Mitchell’s excellent breakout supernatural thriller about a group of teens doing everything they can to outrun a mysterious entity that will stop at nothing to kill its target. We all know that having sex in a horror movie (well, slasher mainly) automatically puts a target on you. This movie takes that premise to a whole new level. The scenario here is that there is a person that is a target. The only way for them to stop being a target is to have sex with someone, which passes it on, so to speak. The entity takes over a host body and uses it to walk, relentlessly, to the target and kill it. Once the target is killed, the previous target becomes the new target and so on. It never stops. So your only hope is to pass it on, and hope it keeps getting passed on so that you have a little breathing room for a while. An important aspect is that the target is the only person that can see the host body.
You obviously have to suspend reality to accept this premise. In one particular scene the kids drive out to a lake to get away and think about what to do next. Your logical brain surmises, “Why don’t they get on a plane and fly across an ocean?” You can’t do that though because horror is many times about accepting the absurdity of the premise and just being scared by it. The movie does a great job in creating scary and incredibly suspenseful scenes with this set up. It forces you to take note of the background in scenes and find the killer. It could be anybody so literally someone just walking in your direction is terrifying. It is wonderfully atmospheric and has a very good, brooding score. Some people likely won’t be able to get past how much you have to suspend reality, but if you can just give in and “live in the world of the movie” you will really enjoy how creative it is and how uneasy it can make you feel.
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