It Follows
I had heard some good things about It Follows but did not expect it to be particularly good. Horror movies have become lazy, relying on shock and splatter as a crutch, trying to prop up their lack of ability to build tension. It's tempting to call them derivative, but that's not the problem: it's impossible to find wholly new art, as we all feed on what has come before. The issue with modern horror (or, in fact, a lot of filmmaking) is not that it derives from its predecessors, but that it apes their elements without understanding how they fit together or why they work.
Nevermind my skepticism. David Robert Mitchell understands the components that can make up a suspenseful movie and how to recombine them into something new.
It Follows is a return to the suburban, shambling horror John Carpenter's original Halloween. It's got all the right bits: young people in danger, absentee or useless adults, an unstoppable force of evil. It's got the ambient, almost abstract electronic music. It's got the low key, hand-made “we made the actors bring their own wardrobe” quality (even if they likely didn't). It even has a faux-70s-with-some-modern-tech setting in Michigan that echoes Strodes' Haddonfield.
More centrally, deep down in its core, it shares 80s horror's driving force: what fuels its killer's rage are sexual hang-ups – this time mixed with the post-Ringu idea of a haunting as a contagion.
Mitchell knows how to create anticipation, constructing tense sequence after tense sequence. Whoever did the casting has an impeccable eye – particularly for some peripheral characters. The movie gets under your skin, and you'll find your eyes darting to the edges of the frame, trying to see things before the characters, as if you could warn them. It features the most unnerving set of everyday people you're likely to encounter in a film for a long while.
And that's all you need to know about it before seeing it.
I have the feeling that, as the movie shuffles towards its end, it doesn't know where to take its Scooby Gang. It has built too solid an antagonist, and wavers between coping out and letting them take it on, or being true to its pedigree and not taking an easy way out. But as a movie buff, there's added suspense in waiting to see which way its lumbering body will collapse.
Originally published on my old blog
#horror #davidrobertmitchell #neocarpenter #halloween #keirgilchrist #maikamonroe #olivialuccardi #itfollows