It’s like an R.L. Stine story on drugs. The kids play around, piss off a monster, tell it to aloof parents, and leave us on a cliffhanger.
There is a moment in David Robert Mitchell’s, “It Follows” where Jay (the film’s protagonist played by Maika Monroe) has just returned home safely from an ordeal she believes is long over. Jay has been stalked by a supernatural entity since the night she slept with her date, Hugh. Hugh passed the curse to her, eventually believes she has shaken it. In the scene, we track Jay as she enters her dimly lit bedroom to her nightstand. As we ease in, the music gets louder and the lighting gets dimmer. The nature of the film up until now has been unnerving, so we’re lead to believe that something is bound to happen. It doesn’t. Instead, we cut to a quiet exterior scene of Jay socializing with her friends.
It’s scenes like this that remind me of all those old rules of horror film making, the most notable being that good suspense always comes from slowing things down, not from speeding them up. A simple rule, much overlooked these days by an industry that insists on fast cuts and generic jump scares, jerking its audience to the point of exhaustion. Alfred Hitchcock perfected this technique, and here Mitchell exercises it wonderfully. He plays us like an organ, using long takes and abrupt cuts to achieve his vision.
So the editing is great. So what, right? Any young independent filmmaker fresh out of a university like Mitchell could replicate old Hollywood techniques and create something nostalgic. But the film is more than that. It is nostalgic, but it is also inventive. Take, for instance, the decisions Mitchell has made in selecting his main characters. Jay, a horny young adult, regrets her life choices when they literally come back to haunt her. Paul, her childhood friend, is compelled to help her in the only way he believes he can: have sex with her. If this were a 1980s slasher flick, Jay and Paul would do it simply for the sake of getting killed, much to our fancy. Instead, Mitchell uses this motif of shallow young adulthood to give his characters a much more interesting complex. The only way Jay can be rid of the entity is by sleeping with another man. When is the last time we’ve seen a character in a horror movie with such a conflicted objective? Mitchell has indeed played to the young adult crowd by tipping his hat to old stereotypes from films like “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” but has breathed new life into them. He has fleshed out the characters and given them a human quality that seems new in light of contemporary horror films.
Then there is the monster. What does it mean, where did it come from, why is it here and what does it symbolize? Dozens of film critics and horror movie buffs have given their spin on the monster and its meaning. I read a book once called How to Read Literature Like a Professor (I’m pretty sure every damned Junior at Cienega High School was required to at some point), and the book had a chapter that basically said any fictional form of monsters, ghosts or demons had an ulterior meaning more than that seen on the surface (i.e., Jack Nicholson was battling alcoholism and insanity in “The Shining,” Catherine Deneuve dealt with paranoia in “Repulsion,” and Blatty clashed science and religion in “The Exorcist”). This is all symbolic and true and very good and I’m sure one could pick apart the seams of “It Follows” down to the last frame and get some kind of concrete reason and theme behind it all. But does it matter? Do we really need to know why “It” appears to be a stranger to Jay one moment and suddenly be her friend the next? I don’t think so. Analyzing it to death would be a nightmare in itself, truly. What is never clear is always criticized, yet the obscurity of the picture is its strength. In that sense, the film is beautifully abstract and deserves a spot on the shelf next to “The Blair Witch Project.”
The problem with discussing horror films is that the majority of opinion is attributed to personal preference. It’s the same with comedies. Fair enough. I’ve never found ventriloquist dummies to be scary and don’t think I ever will, yet I know there is a sea of folks who’d call me crazy. But if one looked past personal taste, just for a moment, and examined more closely what makes “It Follows” a horror film, one might see why everything works so well, maybe not for everybody, but for the film.
The film is visually distinct. Detroit has never looked murkier and, although this is the same city in “Gran Torino” and “8 Mile,” seems distorted. Mitchell puts us in a Detroit far unlike the one we know The brick mansions in the projects become grotesque faces. The suburbs become a maze. Backyards offer no privacy and trees look like figures. Mitchell uses low light and heavy fog to enshroud us in this world of fear. The film’s grey look creates this tone. The majority of Jay’s solo interior scenes feature prominent back light, amplifying her fear and closing us in tightly with her. Even the bright daylight scenes look bleak, similar to the brief daylight scene in “Evil Dead.” To shoot an overcast sky is simplistic, but effective.
Rich Vreeland’s score is one of the most powerful elements in the film. At first, it appears to have a typical build up similar to others, in which the volume and strings increase until the jump scare. But there is more going on. The music, like that of “The Shining” is obscure but concentrated. For example, in the first scene where the monster appears, we get a simple wide shot of a naked lady coming slowly towards Jay. The shot looks good enough, but when the music kicks in it gets loud. Really loud. I don’t know anything about music or what he used, but the combination of sounds is truly jarring. The music builds so slowly and so painfully loud that we want the scene to cut, but it doesn’t. It lingers and we are stuck there with Jay. The music in this scene alone puts us on the edge of our seats, and yet it never “satisfies” us with a jump scare. The music is also very unusual on some parts. Some transitional shots are accompanied by a strange assortment of instruments that create a sound difficult to describe. The best comparison I can make is that of an 80s flick, with its electronics and all that stuff (again, no bueno with music).
So there’s the music, and the story, and the monster, and the characters and all of that stuff, but I won’t go much further into breaking down this or that. To wrap it up, what makes “It Follows” one of the greatest horror films in recent years (NOT necessarily one the scariest), is the confidence with which it carries out its creativity. Slasher fans may be puzzled by the teenage-killing monster and agitated by character motives whereas lovers of the jump-scare will mock and scoff at the film’s theatricality. In regards to being a slasher flick and a polished-off art-house film, “It Follows” has both, and that alone is an accomplishment.