It Follows (2015)

The way that many teen horror flicks successfully evoke the claustrophobic landscape of adolescence is mostly a happy accident, a natural byproduct of filmmakers needing to kill time waiting for the next big scare and not putting the effort into fleshing out their characters. It’s a strange thing but it accounts entirely for the genre’s success. Who needs three-dimensional characters when whatever big bad thing coming to get a group of teenagers can be relied upon as a metaphor for all their growing-up problems? Outsource all that messy stuff to a ghoul or a demon or an axe-murderer and it’s satisfying enough just to watch them trying to outrun it.

It Follows knows this. And it knows about the sex = death paradigm of these movies. And it knows about keeping adults out of the whole equation. And it has a load of fun with all of it. These are the rules: “it” is a murderous shape-shifting demon thing that never stops hunting its prey at a glacial pace. It can be outrun, if you fancy trying, but the only way to shake it off is to pass the curse on by having sex. Even then, you’ll still be able to see it, it just won’t be after you. Until it has killed everyone else that came after you in the chain. Then it will be after you.

So you see, some tropes are flipped on their head – sex becomes both a way of transmitting a morbid awareness of death from person to person (‘the curse’) but also the only way to keep death at bay. (For the time being anyway.) It’s like the original 80’s conservative slasher film message (“don’t have sex!”) has been updated for a generation of 21^st Century nihilists. Now the message reads: “there are fun things to do while you’re alive. Just don’t forget that one day you will die.”

The absent parent convention is also played with, and to the same end – adults actually do show up in the film, but only as empty vessels, manifestations of the “it” that follows, essentially reminders from the family tree that time is creeping up at walking pace to sweep us all away eventually.

With It Follows, David Robert Mitchell has purposefully made the film that so many writers and directors stumbled upon in the 1980s. It’s not a revolution in teen horror flicks, just a very well made one. But the film knows this, of course it does. Like its characters’ inability to outrun the inevitable, It Follows examines and rearranges all the clichés of its genre, but it can never escape them. And it doesn’t really want to.