it follows essay

Newsletters
Account Activating this button will toggle the display of additional content Account Sign out

It’s Not Done

Why did i watch it follows twice what was i seeking in the feeling of fear.

Photo courtesy RADiUS-TWC

This essay discusses plot points of It Follows .

It’s a girl in a white dress, walking toward you. Now it’s a naked woman, pubes waxed bare and eyes ice-cold, flip-flops slapping the railroad tracks. Now it’s a towering hollow-eyed man. Now it’s your mother, your gym teacher, your college girlfriend, your weird cat-lady neighbor. Whatever it is, it’s always approaching. It’s never screaming, or holding a chainsaw. It’s never running. It never stops.

The premise of It Follows , written and directed by David Robert Mitchell, is absurd and simple: Some mysterious shape-shifting creature latches onto a single target and keeps walking toward her at all times with intent to kill. The only way to get rid of it? Fuck someone. Then it follows him. Until he fucks someone. Etc. You can’t destroy it. You can only pass it on.

The inexorability is what’s frightening. It doesn’t matter whether you can see it or not: It’s always coming closer. Part of the brilliance of the film is the idea that getting walked after can be suitably terrifying if you do it right. It’s the inglorious terror of a chronic condition; the unrelenting brutality of ongoingness. In Ongoingness , her meditation on how we make sense of the passage of time, Sarah Manguso writes: “My students still believe in beginnings … I no longer believe in anything other than the middle.” It Follows doesn’t believe in beginnings or endings, just the forever of perpetual peril.

“It’s slow,” one target explains. “But it’s not dumb.”

The first time I saw the film, I heard: It’s not done. Also true. It never is.

The movie begins with a teenage girl running out the front door of her ordinary suburban house. She keeps glancing over her shoulder. She’s wearing silk pajamas—a camisole, little shorts with lace trim—and red pumps. We hear her pumps clicking on the asphalt as she keeps backing away from something we can’t see. We have no access to the terms of her horror. Eventually she gets into her car and speeds off. The next shot shows her sitting on a lake beach in the dead of night, her back to the lapping waves; she’s telling her dad over the phone that she’s sorry she can be such a shit to him sometimes. Then we realize something has arrived. We don’t see it; we register its presence in her gaze.

The next shot is morning: her corpse. One leg has been bent forward at the knee, one red pump still on her foot, now hovering above her face. Seeing her dead body is almost a relief; at least we aren’t inside the last scene anymore, wondering, what’s going to happen? It’s one of the perverse inversions of a horror film: You start rooting for dead bodies because it will end the stress of worrying when and how everyone is going to die.

The moment we meet our protagonist Jay—floating in a swimming pool in her suburban Detroit backyard—we start wondering exactly this: when and how she is going to die. The world around her feels close and tingly with the latent possibility of danger. The film’s gaze is hyper-attuned to sensory details: the dirt and leaves cluttering the water, the grime and dirt of the pool’s ladder and its plastic walls, the little neighbor boys peering over the fence. We are already preemptively training ourselves to pay attention to any flickers of movement or information. Things are odd and off beneath their surfaces. A squirrel runs across a telephone wire; a bird is perched there awkwardly. It feels very David Lynch— that bird from the Twin Peaks credits , its robotic angled head, or the under-lawn view at the beginning of Blue Velvet— all ordinary suburban insect life until we see the human ear resting on top of the grass.

This sense of darkness in the midst of ordinary life is at the heart of the film: not just embodied by the specter of someone walking —the fact that its central danger is a thing we see every day, banal and inescapable—but by the landscape itself. Detroit is full of buildings that are already ghosts of themselves, husks and vessels. Near the climax of the film—which happens in a community swimming pool whose looming brick exterior looks more like an abandoned insane asylum—the characters discuss how their parents would never let them past 8 Mile when they were kids. It was dangerous to cross: it was where the suburbs ended and the city began. Now the suburbs aren’t safe either . Now it goes everywhere; it walks across any borders it pleases.

The world of It Follows is gritty and stylized and stylish: suede boots and plaid, acid-washed denim vests over animal T-shirts. The era is the late 1970s/the era is the early 1980s/the era is whatever it wants to be: The fashion vibe is very fur-trim-on-anything and the TV has clunky tuning dials, but a gal named Yara is reading Dostoevsky’s The Idiot on some kind of miniature e-reader shaped like a pack of birth-control pills. Jay fucks a boy named Hugh in his station wagon and wakes up strapped into a wheelchair in a gutted building as Hugh explains the rules of her new life. He offers advice as a silent naked woman comes toward them: Never go into a room with one exit.

Thankfully, Jay’s got a rag-tag crew waiting to help, a posse of suburban kids playing Old Maid on the porch— you can’t destroy it, you can only pass it on. They try to take care of Jay: we’re-in-this-together sleepovers and free fro-yo from the fro-yo shop where they work. This crew fights evil with whatever they can get their hands on: a station wagon to flee to dad’s hunting cabin; an array of domestic appliances (hair dryer, toaster, electric typewriter) designed to help electrocute “it” in that popsicle-blue swimming pool shimmering at the film’s climax.

They are still somehow innocent, these kids, and they are fighting with the weapons of their innocence; and of course the premise of the film is in some way about innocence, and falling-from-grace-via-sex-in-a-station-wagon, but part of what I love about the movie is the way it coaxes and then complicates various metaphorical interpretations of its premise. Getting followed comes from sex, sure; but the only solution is more of it. In fact, the best solution is sex with someone else who will have a lot of sex—in fact, you want to seek out a slut who only sleeps with other sluts who only sleep with other sluts, preferably globe-trotting sluts; a train of infinite and never-ending and very frequent sex is the only way to stop this thing once you’ve got it. Immediately the mind starts calculating, backseat sex-strategizing: You’ve got to fuck someone with so much game, or superhuman strength, someone who could actually kill this thing; you’ve got to fuck a sumo wrestler or an MMA fighter; you’ve got to fly across the world and fuck a prostitute and fly back home . At first Jay doesn’t even fuck anyone. Then she does. Then she regrets it. Then she does it again. All this feels less about culpability, the sexual engine of so many horror stories, and more about powerlessness; it’s certainly not about losing her virginity—one senses that happened years ago, in someone’s mother’s minivan.

When they decide to really fight this thing, they go back to the swimming pool where Jay had her first kiss—and that’s mentioned, as if relevant, as if it makes the pool a natural or even necessary site for this showdown. And once “it” arrives, faithfully following Jay to the water, it takes the form of her father—long-deceased but recognizable to us from the photograph tucked into her bedroom vanity mirror. In this final confrontation; she has to face down the original man, and the original crime. But what’s great is that the showdown fails; the sexual metaphor crumbles. Going back to the sources of the sexual fall—the father, the first kiss—doesn’t mean shit. It doesn’t work.

Jay is constantly attached to pink—pink flower lamp on her desk, pink curtains on her window, pink blanket on her bed, pink dress on her date, pink lingerie underneath, pink bikini at the lake—and the color shows up so frequently it starts to feel like a self-aware joke: All the pink purity in the world couldn’t possibly save her. She’s also got an X tattooed on her middle finger. She’s already marked. She is getting pinned to tropes of girlish innocence in order to suggest the absurdity of considering the world in these terms: innocent and fallen. We’re all fallen, no matter how much pink we wear. We’ve all got targets inked on our skin. Any one of us could look over our shoulder to find the beast shambling slowly toward us.

This is the most obvious metaphoric read of It Follows : Death itself is the slow thing always walking toward us, always advancing toward us from some angle—from some distance—even if we can’t see where it’s coming from, or how far off it might be. The specter of mortality is haunting all the sex we have. It’s the curse we pass on to the creatures our sex creates. Sex itself marks us for target practice.

In case we don’t get it, Yara sits in a hospital bed at the end of the film—nursing a gunshot wound, a bit of friendly fire fallout from the pool—munching a sandwich from a hospital tray, sucking loudly on a juice box, and reads one final passage from her e-reader Idiot:

When there is torture there is pain and wounds, physical agony, and all this distracts the mind from mental suffering, so that one is tormented only by the wounds until the moment of death. But the most terrible agony many not be in the wounds themselves but in knowing for certain that within an hour, then within ten minutes, then within half a minute, now at this very instant—your soul will leave your body and you will no longer be a person, and that is certain; the worst thing is that it is certain .

Wait! Hold up. You mean the literal terrors of the film are only a distraction from the metaphysical truth that we’re all facing the undeniable certainty of our own deaths? Fair enough. But the movie gives us this truth through a mouthful of chewed-up sandwich, and its superlative craft—a world so irrefutably and playfully sculpted, very intentional and edgy and full of nods, the soundtrack winking at Carpenter; the particularity and fine grain of its texture, its self-aware retro vibe, all these keep the premise from taking itself too seriously, or dissolving into over-easy metaphysics: We might all die but at least we don’t have some ghoulish perpetual-motion machine bending our legs forward till we’re face-to-face with our own feet.

What’s the real terror of It Follows ? It’s certainly the terror of the chronic, but it’s also the horror of chronic indifference, the creature that doesn’t display emotion or remorse or even react. It never panics or gets frustrated. It just gets the job done, and walks on. There’s nothing you can do that will make it do anything different than what it’s doing. What the fuck do you want? Jay screams at the naked woman from her wheelchair. Its desire is relentless and sourceless and inexplicable.

In his poem “Hap,” Thomas Hardy thinks about the ways in which some power willing us ill is actually more appealing than the possibility of governing indifference:

If but some vengeful god would call to me From up the sky, and laugh: “Thou suffering thing, Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy …”

Here, we get none of the comfort of that ecstasy. The creature only follows, betraying no feeling or reaction. In the face of this menacing indifference, we become our worst selves. This it invites us into our own moral humbling; invites us to pass it on , for example, in service of self-preservation. This is an evil that makes perpetrators of us all. Being a hero means fucking someone else, and essentially fucking her over.

This horror is the absence of any true horizon of relief: Even if you could defeat the thing (which you can’t) you’d never know for sure that you had; you’d still spend every day terrified it would simply come walking back.

In the first shot after the climactic swimming pool scene, we immediately see a chair propped against a door. What happened at the pool wasn’t the end; not even the characters believe it was the end. It’s not just that they’re not safe; it’s that they no longer believe in the possibility of safety. Jay is fucking affably nerdy fro-yo worker Paul—her first kiss, who’s had a crush on her ever since—but their sex happens under a window streaked with rain. We are watching that window for what it might show.

But nothing comes. Which is even worse. Now we don’t know where it is. But we think it must be somewhere.

The final shot shows Jay and Paul walking down a sidewalk, a figure walking in the distance behind them. It could be it . It might not. It doesn’t matter. If it’s not, it could happen another day. Any day. In front of them, in several directions, are street signs saying: Dead End. Indeed. No matter which way you turn.

I saw It Follows twice. First I saw it on date night: a horror film credentialed by the fact that it was playing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. I placed a certain weight on the film—I’d suggested it, and my husband wasn’t necessarily sold on horror, and every date night means you’re essentially paying triple-price because of the sitter—so I wanted us to get fucking scared .

And we did. We felt the intimacy of that darkened collective, all of us getting scared together—the sense that we were all equally vulnerable to this artificial fear to which we’d simultaneously decided to prostrate ourselves. I spent about a third of the film closing my eyes, another third pushing my fingers into my ears. Sometimes I was doing both at once. I was just burying my head into my husband’s shoulder, hearing and seeing nothing, thinking This movie is SO GOOD! while I didn’t even watch it.

Mitchell says the film’s premise came from a nightmare he used to have when he was young: “In the dream it looked like different people and was always coming closer. I could always get away from it, but it was just about this feeling of anxiety knowing that something’s always following me.” It certainly followed us. For days after the film, my husband and I joked about it constantly: It follows. It snuggles. It needs to talk about its feelings. The comic horror of doing something— any thing—relentlessly; the horror of refusing to desist. I kept wondering what felt so smart about what we’d seen. Why was it lingering? Why did I think the movie was good when I’d spent half the movie trying not to watch it?

All of which is to say: I went back. I decided to see it again, this time by myself. Watching a horror movie alone is a fundamentally different experience than watching it in company. If part of the pleasure of fear, of voluntarily making ourselves vulnerable, comes back to Edmund Burke’s notion of the sublime—the pleasure of perceiving danger from a position of safety, that sense of boundaries—then that’s precisely what dissolves even further when you watch a horror film alone: the boundaries. * There aren’t any other bodies standing between you and the fiction of what you’re seeing—a fiction you know isn’t real but still feels real, when your evolution-trained body startles at every sudden figure in the window, every body shambling across the frame.

As I sat in my big cinema seat and the seconds until start-time ticked by, I realized with a sinking feeling that I was going to be the only person in the theater. My eyes kept flicking to the corners of the room. I counted the exits. I switched seats so that the back wall would be directly behind me. The lights started dimming and I almost walked out into the lobby to ask them to keep them on. Couldn’t they do this, since I was the only one? Meaning: There wasn’t anyone else to bother. Meaning: There wasn’t anyone else to protect me.

But I stayed. Something thrilled me about staying, when I wasn’t sure I’d be able to. What was I seeking in that feeling of fear? Whatever is passive about watching movies hits some sort of limit case in horror: We are controlled and manipulated into postures of fear and surprise; doing for our feelings what we do for our bodies on a roller coaster—subjecting ourselves to the most extreme experience of powerlessness that film can offer.

Perhaps the pleasure comes back to the pleasure of experiencing powerful artifice—encountering artifice so forceful it can trump our intellectual awareness of something being made with a visceral feeling of being subject to its fabrications. Perhaps it’s not the imagined danger or the knotted stomach that brings pleasure but the crossing of whatever threshold separates them: the minor but legitimate wonder of something imagined creating something physical, something actual, in response.

Leaving the theater, in the middle of the day, I felt—yes—followed by what I’d seen. Every walking figure caught my eye. I found myself staring at an old woman pushing a shopping cart full of toilet paper. She was coming toward me. She smiled. I smiled back.

We come to art for its bounded spaces—craft is a series of boundaries erected between us and the things we’ve made—but we like to feel the boundaries violated. We like to see old women turned sinister, to feel the dark theater following us back into the light, the noon sky sheltering a thousand walking evils. We’re never out of reach. The worst thing is that it is certain. We feel the bright world restored to us, infected by that certainty.

*Correction, April 22, 2015: This article originally misidentified Edmund Burke as Edward Burke. ( Return. )

It Follows: Explained (Plot Analysis And Ending)

Horror films are notorious for simple (even practically simplistic) and easy-to-follow plots, leaving plenty of room for the suspense, thrills, fright and gore that viewers pay for. You only have to look at the horror films available to watch every day to get a feel of how this plays out. The 2014 indie horror flick “It Follows,” however, defies this predominating paradigm, instead putting the onus back on the audience to figure out what actually just happened and what it all means.

In this spoiler-filled explanation of the film’s many ambiguities, you’ll discover the somewhat sensical explanations for the somewhat nonsensical elements left unaddressed and the slightly rational answers to the slightly irrational questions left open in the film.

Hollywordle – Check out my new Hollywood Wordle game!

Where To Watch?

To find where to stream any movie or series based on your country, use This Is Barry’s Where To Watch .

Oh, and if this article doesn’t answer all of your questions, drop me a comment or an FB chat message, and I’ll get you the answer . You can find other film explanations using the search option on top of the site.

Here are links to the key aspects of the movie:

– Plot Summary
– When is It Follows set?
– Where is It Follows set?
– What’s With the …?
– …Woman Running in Heels?
– …Cans and Bottles?
– …Indistinguishable Woman and an Unidentifiable Man
– The Climactic Impersonation
– Why So Cagey?
– It Follows: The Ending?
– Why People Interpret It Follows As Sexual
– No, Really, The End This Time

It Follows: Plot Summary

College student Jay begins dating Hugh, a sweet but strange boy. Right after the two have sex for the first time, Hugh disappears from her life. Before he leaves for good, though, he reveals that he’s leaving behind a curse for her.

Under this sexually-transmitted curse, according to the sense Jay can make of Hugh’s paranoid ranting, Jay is supposedly now being stalked by a horrific being that can take on the appearance of any person, be it someone Jay knows or a stranger. Moreover, Jay is the only one who can see the thing, whatever form it takes. If this creature, the “It” of “It Follows,” ever catches her, it will kill her.

To avoid becoming its next victim, she must now pass the curse on to someone else, since “It” only stalks one victim at a time, that being the most recent recipient of the curse, followed next by the one who passed it along to that unfortunate soul, and so on.

Jay and her friends ultimately decide to take the story at face value, believing it despite no actual evidence of its veracity. So they decide that, rather than Jay perpetuating the chain of infection, they’ll work together to kill “It” once and for all. This leads to the nail-biting, horrifying and somewhat perplexing ultimate climax in which the hapless group enacts a plan worthy of Scooby Doo to electrocute “It” using an abundance of plugged-in household appliances lining the pool’s edges.

Sounds somewhere between simple and silly, doesn’t it? So why do the film’s audiences have such wildly conflicting interpretations of what they all see on the screen? It turns out that could all be the director’s intent.

When is It Follows set?

Not only does the film seem to deliberately avoid establishing the period of time in which it occurs, but it seems to actively obscure any clues to when that time-frame may be.

Consider, for example, the e-reader one of the characters uses, one of the only forms of technology depicted in the film, and one that doesn’t even exist in the depicted form in real life. Rather, this e-reader looks like a cross between a vintage clamshell-shaped makeup compact and a more modern flip phone.

Other elements of the film that play an anachronistic game with one another, effectively obliterating any sense of a setting in time, include the following:

All the televisions appearing in the movie either have dials and rabbit-ear antennae or are slightly less ancient cathode-ray tube (CRT) models.
Everything the characters view on television is vintage era: either a 50s B&W monster flick or an early cartoon.
The decor in Jay’s kitchen is classic 70s but the refrigerator in Greg’s home is modern stainless-steel.
The photos on the wall of a young Jay and Kelly look too old to line up with their ages.
Jeff’s mother is a full-on 80s fashion plate.
Driving the roads are cars from a range of eras, from Henry Ford’s to the 21st century. Moreover, the vintage cars look just as fresh and new as the more modern ones.

As it so happens, this defiant abnegation of another filmic convention, that of establishing the setting in place and time, is, indeed, intentional. Specifically, it’s because, according to director Robert Mitchell in multiple interviews, the film has no time period. Rather, it takes place in all times and outside of time entirely, just like a dream. And it is a dream, in fact — specifically a nightmare in which a foreboding, inescapable force was following him — that Mitchell has expressed in interviews inspired him to make the film, hence the dreamlike feel he tried to evoke in it with these blatantly disjunctive elements.

For every time there’s supposed to be a season, but not in this flick. At its start, there’s a young woman running outside in a tank top and short-shorts. Her wardrobe and the lush green trees and lawn surrounding her clearly evoke summer. As soon as she turns around, however, the leaves on the trees in the yards opposite hers have already started turning colors and falling to cover the lawns. On one home’s porch, pumpkins sit, all suggesting autumn.

Likewise, prior to Jay’s date, she swims in her pool, implying summer. During their movie date, however, everyone in line outside the theater wears winter coats.

These are just two examples of how Mitchell obscures even any sense of time of year, beyond just the year in time.

Where is It Follows set?

If this film had a continuity supervisor, that person must’ve been pulling out their hair daily on the set, given so many of its “mistakes” were actually of the director’s conscious devising. Once again contributing to the film’s dreamlike quality are glaring inconsistencies in regards to matters of place, like windows showing up in office walls where they couldn’t even have fit, let alone been, previously.

Other Inconsistencies, or “What’s With the …?”

Beyond inconsistencies in matters of setting, the film is also seasoned (pun intended) with random acts of confusion throughout, all designed, it seems, to make the viewer work to unearth the film’s secrets rather than spell it all out. What effect they really produce, however, is to leave the viewer in a constant state of unsettlement from opening to closing credits.

What’s With the Woman Running in Heels?

At the start of the film, a young woman flees “It” while wearing heels. Why is she in heels? Perhaps, it’s to suggest that “It” came upon her by surprise and she had no time to switch into sensible shoes before running for her life.

What’s With the Cans and Bottles Strung From the Doors and Windows of Jeff’s Hideout?

The fact that Jeff has tried to protect himself by hanging cans and bottles over his hideout’s doors and windows tells the viewer without overtly telling the viewer that “It” does have a physical body and can’t simply enter a building by, say, walking through walls.

An Indistinguishable Woman and an Unidentifiable Man

Jay and Kelly’s mother is depicted in strange ways in the film that all combine to make her more of a mysterious apparition herself than a fellow protagonist. Her face is always obscured somehow, such as with light and shadow or blurred focus. What’s more, every time she appears in the film except the last time in Jay’s bedroom, she’s drinking during the day. Adding to this sense that Jay’s own mother is not really, fully “here” anymore is Greg’s mother’s later comment to him that Jay’s family is “a mess.”

One likely interpretation of this, though one not confirmed by the director, is that Jay’s mother is traumatized by the death of her husband, Jay and Kelly’s father. Supporting this possibility is the observation that the man “It” impersonates in the climactic pool scene, presumably Jay and Kelly’s father (more on this in a moment) appears to be the same age as the man in the old wall photo in Jay’s home, both looking in their late-30s to early-40s.

A dad dead by suicide could also explain why Jay doesn’t want to tell Kelly what form she sees “It” take in the pool house. Other photos depicting the man at the same age appear elsewhere in the film as well, like on Jay’s bedroom mirror posing beside her as a mere child, or in a family photo seen over Jay’s mother’s shoulder with Jay, Kelly and their mother all looking the same degree younger beside this man who look only the same.

The Climactic Impersonation

In the climactic fight with “It” in the pool house, Jay’s sister asks her who she sees, referring, of course, to the form “It” chooses to take this time. Jay’s answer: “I don’t want to tell you.”

Later, when the audience views the scene from Jay’s point of view, “It” appears as a character most audience members would say they haven’t seen before in the film.

Already aware “It” occasionally impersonates one of the victim’s loved ones, audiences are wise to wonder if this bearded, middle-aged man they see is one of Jay’s loved ones. Indeed, earlier in the film, when camera shots inside Jay’s home catch glimpses of the photographs on the wall, astute audience members may notice that some of them depict the very same man. While never explicitly stated, it would be safe for audiences to assume he’s Jay and Kelly’s father, probably, as suggested earlier, now dead.

Why So Cagey?

To truly understand “It Follows” requires delving beyond mere explanations of the meaning of the individual ambiguities in the film to the larger meaning of making a film with so many bald ambiguities.

Hugh doesn’t know enough about the monster to provide entirely complete, or even accurate, information about what it is or how it operates. The audience is unclear how far “It” can travel, whether it can find its prey no matter where or how far they run. The group’s plan to kill “It” is to electrocute it in the pool, even though they know so little about it to know if that would even work. And so on.

As director Mitchell essentially told Yahoo Movies , leaving so many obvious gaping holes in the movie subverted the common tendency for fans of the genre to simply pick apart a horror film in order to expose all of its plot holes. By presenting itself as unconcerned with unnecessary backstory and explanation, the film insures itself against such accusations of incongruity.

It Follows: The Ending?

Probably the biggest ambiguity in “It Follows” occurs in the final scene, when Jay and Paul are walking down the road post-coital as a figure approaches them slowly from behind.

What is the figure? Is it the monster itself, apparently not dead and defeated after all? And if it is, why don’t the pair run for their lives?

As Mitchell explains it, the ending leaves it up to the audience to decide what happens next and, thus, what the film’s ending really means. Is “It” finally, truly, permanently dead or isn’t it? Or is the creature dead but the curse still alive and rampant? There’s nothing in the closing moments of the film to contradict any of these interpretations.

Why people interpret It Follows as sexual

There are several interpretations critics and viewers have made of the film that share a sexual nature in common. In its most general form, this film is about something bad that teenagers pass from one to the other through sex. Some therefore see the story as a commentary on promiscuous teen sexuality in general while others drill down deeper to describe it as a metaphor for STDs.

Consider the evidence:

The curse is passed from person to person via sexual intercourse.
Most people are informed, if possible, that they’ve become “infected.”
Only people affected by the curse, now or in the past, can “see” it.

Even the film’s director himself has thrown a hat into this ring. While he shies from giving any outright explanations of the film or for his choices in making it, he does admit to a conceptual framework around human mortality as an unavoidable inevitability from which flimsy and fickle uncertainties like sex and love may distract, but never ultimately deter.

No, Really, The End This Time

As these revelations collectively reveal, underlying the transfixing cinematography, lush soundtrack and novel plot twists of “It Follows” is a mystery locked in a puzzle trapped in an enigma. In other words, the more you watch “It Follows,” the deeper you delve into its nuances, the more you find how little you actually know or understand about it.

How did you like It Follows and its ending? Do drop a comment below with your thoughts.

Barry is a technologist who helps start-ups build successful products. His love for movies and production has led him to write his well-received film explanation and analysis articles to help everyone appreciate the films better. He’s regularly available for a chat conversation on his website and consults on storyboarding from time to time. Click to browse all his film articles

Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors.

Now streaming on:

If you look at the title of "It Follows," an unsettling, and deservedly celebrated new horror film, and can't tell what the movie is about, then the movie is already working. "It Follows," the second feature by writer/director David Robert Mitchell ("The Myth of the American Sleepover"), works as well as it does because its creators keep viewers at arm's length. It's a ghost story, though dead people don’t necessarily haunt its suburban protagonists. And it's about teenagers who have sex, though it's neither a simple celebration nor condemnation of under-age necking. Instead, "It Follows" both prolongs and heightens the potency of high school-age fears until they appear to be ancient existential terrors. In that sense, "It Follows" is not really about sex, but an unbearable, unsinkable mood that descends when you come of age, and never completely dissipates, not even after climactic sexual, or other violent acts.

Since "It Follows" concerns the never-ending state of hormonal crisis we call "adolescence," the film is about illogical actions that have long-lasting consequences. Jay ( Maika Monroe ), a quintessentially sullen teen, learns this soon after she has sex with, and is summarily abducted by Hugh ( Jake Weary ). After he chloroforms and ties up Jay, Hugh deliberately, but impatiently tells her everything he knows: Jay is the latest victim of a sexually-transmitted haunting. She must pass this burden on to another person by having more sex. If she doesn't, she will be relentlessly pursued by someone she knows...or maybe it will be a stranger...possibly living and/or dead. Whoever follows Jay—it varies from encounter to encounter—cannot be seen by anyone else, but can definitely hurt her. Jay passes this knowledge on to worried friends, like stymied love interest Paul (Keir Gilchrist). And they consequently try to help Jay banish whatever it is that's after her.

Don't panic: "It Follows" is not nearly as obtuse as it sounds. If anything, it's a little frustrating in its limited view of kids that are always concerned with, but never really thinking about sex. Jay and her friends take for granted the fact that they're living in a constant state of excitement. That's a given, so Mitchell doesn't exoticize, or exaggerate that aspect of their characters. He does, however, refuse to explain what Jay feels when she's pursued by various pale, zombie-like followers. Jay's not really introspective, so she only cursorily talks about her naive pre-sexual expectations. All we know is that she expects sex to be momentous and/or freeing, as she airily says to herself after she and Hugh fool around. Instead, it's a momentary respite that's inevitably followed by a series of confrontations with people she may or may not know (aka adulthood).

The horror at the heart of "It Follows" isn't a singular threat, but the vague knowledge that nothing lasts forever. Jay and her friends try to connect with each other physically, but only wind up realizing that, while their bonds are not skin-deep, they're also not liberating. Here's where "It Follows" gets frustratingly—but pointedly—murky: if life after sex is purgatory, does that mean sex is bad, or that sex simply isn't a cure-all for juvenile awkwardness? The latter seems more likely given an unnamed book passage that Jay's loyal friend Yara ( Olivia Luccardi ) reads aloud later in the film. "Your soul will leave your body and you will no longer be a person," Yara tells Jay, underscoring Jay's implicit understanding of sex as an out-of-body vanishing act. Jay's haunting either frustrates this vague fear, or confirms it. Either way, she is pursued, and may never know why.

That kind of primordial dread is embedded in the film's visual style. Mitchell's camera visually unifies the characters' shared world, either through static panoramas that show several characters occupying the same space, or tracking shots and/or pans that follow characters from one end of the room to the other. We're also given the impression of infinite space whenever Mitchell's camera stands in for, or is positioned inside Paul or Jay's cars. In these scenes, the road that stretches out in front of them/us is long, and there is never a set destination in sight. That concept is far more unnerving than any of the film's more traditional scare scenes, though those are pretty good too (don't look at me, experience them for yourself). No, what's most disquieting about "It Follows" is the way it presents sex as neither abnormal, nor beneficial. By contrast, sex in "It Follows" indiscriminately draws pre-existing emotions out, like a cruel genie that can never be returned to his lamp.

Simon Abrams

Simon Abrams is a native New Yorker and freelance film critic whose work has been featured in The New York Times , Vanity Fair , The Village Voice, and elsewhere.

Now playing

Little Wing

Marya e. gates.

Riddle of Fire

Robert daniels.

Brian Tallerico

Glitter & Doom

Sheila o'malley.

Film Credits

It Follows (2015)

Rated R for disturbing violent and sexual content including graphic nudity, and language

100 minutes

Maika Monroe as Jay

Keir Gilchrist as Paul

Olivia Luccardi as Yara

Lili Sepe as Kelly

Bailey Spry as Annie

Daniel Zovatto as Greg

Jake Weary as Hugh

David Robert Mitchell

Director of Photography

Mike Gioulakis

Latest blog posts

Ebertfest 2024 Announces Full Lineup, With Guests Including Eric Roberts, Mariel Hemingway, Larry Karaszewski, and More

How Do You Live: On the Power of Edson Oda’s Nine Days

Eleanor Coppola Was the Guardian Angel of Apocalypse Now

The Overlook Film Festival 2024 Highlights, Part 1: Fasterpiece Theater, Exhuma, All You Need is Death, Me

Supported by

Review: In ‘It Follows,’ a Shape-Shifting Horror Stalks a Teenager

Share full article

Anatomy of a Scene | ‘It Follows’

David robert mitchell narrates a sequence from “it follows,” opening march 13..

By Stephen Holden

March 12, 2015

The nameless, shape-shifting horror that stalks the blond, 19-year-old Jay ( Maika Monroe ) in David Robert Mitchell ’s cool, controlled horror film, “ It Follows ,” might be described as the very incarnation of paranoia. The menace, which only she can see, takes any number of forms, from a naked man standing on the roof of a house to an unsmiling old lady heading purposefully in her direction. When it appears, it is usually first glimpsed from a distance, walking slowly toward her like an expressionless zombie. Although Jay repeatedly flees, she can never shake the sense that it is out there somewhere and knows her precise location.

The second feature film by Mr. Mitchell, the director of the 2011 cult film “ The Myth of the American Sleepover ,” “It Follows” is set during autumn in a Detroit suburb. The place is so depopulated that the empty streets and darkened houses evoke a ghost town evacuated in an emergency. Except for a few scattered people, Jay and her teenage friends are the only remaining local residents. There are no parents in sight.

It takes a while for Jay to convince her friends that the danger isn’t just a figment of her imagination. But as the ominous portents accumulate, the group, which includes Kelly (Lili Sepe), Yara (Olivia Luccardi), Paul (Keir Gilchrist), and Greg (Daniel Zovatto), stands by her. Unlike the daredevils and vixens of slick Hollywood horror thrillers, these are everyday teenagers. The shy, pensive Paul, who has had a crush on Jay ever since they shared a kiss many years earlier, is the most memorable.

“It Follows” opens nearly a year after winning the Next Wave award at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival. Its acclaim derives from its masterly manipulation of mood by its cinematographer, Michael Gioulakis . The deadly menace, which seems to emerge from your peripheral vision, is initially hard to discern, but as it draws closer, never quickening its step, you sense its grim intention.

Rather than breaking new ground, “It Follows” recycles familiar teenage horror tropes — a girl alone in a house, evil forces banging on a door — but its mood is dreamy. Seldom do you feel manipulated by exploitative formulas. The violence, when it comes, is sudden, and the camera doesn’t linger over the gore.

Jay’s troubles begin after she sleeps with her new boyfriend, Hugh (Jake Weary), who, after their lovemaking in his car, ties her to a chair under a bridge, and explains her predicament. From him, she has caught a supernatural version of a venereal disease. Having sex with someone else is the only cure, if cure is the right word.

The explanations for almost everything that happens are intentionally enigmatic and sometimes completely mystifying. In the most elaborate set piece, Jay dives into an indoor swimming pool, which her friends encircle with electrical appliances. But why? For protection?

“It Follows” abides by a principle that few horror movies have the courage to embrace: The unknown is the unknown. Clues to the source and motives of this menace are dropped, but they don’t add up. Like the evil in a David Lynch horror film, it is out there in the night, waiting to get you.

“It Follows” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Disturbing violent and sexual content, including graphic nudity, and language.

Explore More in TV and Movies

Not sure what to watch next we can help..

Even before his new film “Civil War” was released, the writer-director Alex Garland faced controversy over his vision of a divided America with Texas and California as allies.

Theda Hammel’s directorial debut, “Stress Positions,” a comedy about millennials weathering the early days of the pandemic , will ask audiences to return to a time that many people would rather forget.

“Fallout,” TV’s latest big-ticket video game adaptation, takes a satirical, self-aware approach to the End Times .

“Sasquatch Sunset” follows the creatures as they go about their lives. We had so many questions. The film’s cast and crew had answers .

If you are overwhelmed by the endless options, don’t despair — we put together the best offerings on Netflix , Max , Disney+ , Amazon Prime and Hulu to make choosing your next binge a little easier.

Sign up for our Watching newsletter to get recommendations on the best films and TV shows to stream and watch, delivered to your inbox.

How the Cinematography in ‘It Follows’ Trains You To Be Paranoid

Welcome to The Queue — your daily distraction of curated video content sourced from across the web. Today, we’re watching a video essay that explores how the cinematography in “It Follows” challenged slasher movie conventions.

2014’s It Follows never hides the fact that its interests lie in the 1980s; that its conversation partner is, first and foremost, the kind of slashers that sacrifice sexual deviants and reward resilient virginity.

If the film passed you by (or is collecting dust on your watchlist), here’s the gist: after hooking up with date, Jay (Maika Monroe) finds herself the newest victim of a horrifying disease. Something is stalking her now. It can look like anybody. And it’s coming to kill her. As long as Jay keeps moving, she’ll be fine. But when the creature keeps clipping Jay’s heels, she and her pals must find a way to divert the curse to someone else.

We could gladly spend all day listing the ways that David Robert Mitchell’s film challenges the conventions of the slasher film. But as today’s video essay notes, one of the film’s most sophisticated twists on the genre takes the shape of one of the slasher’s cheapest tricks: the jump scare.

From the use of offscreen space to the subversion of what we’ve come to expect from “spatial penetration,” here’s a video essay that examines the techniques that train us to be paranoid rather than shocked. Don’t forget to look over your shoulder … you never know who’s behind you.

Watch “How Cinematography in It Follows (2014) Challenges Slasher Horror”

Who made this?

This video essay about how the cinematography of It Follows challenged slasher conventions is by Jordan Schonig , who holds a Ph.D. in Cinema and Media Studies from the University of Chicago. They are a Film Studies lecturer and make video essays on, what else, film. You can subscribe to Schonig on YouTube here . And you can follow them on Twitter here .

How ‘It Follows’ (2014) Re-Imagines the Final Girl

Published by

Jenni Holtz

A girl in a black swimsuit lays on her back in a swimming pool.

Welcome to the Women in Horror column. Every Wednesday, we highlight the work of women in the horror genre.

The Final Girl has been a staple in horror cinema since the 1980s. The young woman who defies the odds, surviving repeated attacks from the killer or monster in the film. Classic slasher leading women like Laurie Strode in Halloween (1978) , Sally in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) , Ripley in Alien (1979) , and countless others have leading women who fit the bill, though the trope was first named by Carol J. Clover in her 1992 book Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. In the nearly thirty years since the term was coined, Final Girls have appeared in many iterations, some pushing boundaries and some in line with the traditional trope. David Robert Mitchell’s film It Follows (2014) directly confronts the problems with the Final Girl while maintaining some elements of the trope, playing a role in crafting a new, modern version of the Final Girl.

A blonde woman is sat in a library. She is looking out of the window.

To understand what It Follows accomplishes, it’s necessary to assess the gender politics of the time of the trope’s emergence in comparison to when It Follows was released. Particularly in the slasher and body horror subgenres, women’s bodies were/are typically displayed in overtly sexual ways up until the moment that they are brutally murdered. However, the use of the Final Girl trope in the slasher genre seemed to signal a change in horror’s portrayal of women. Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) in Halloween is one of the most memorable examples. She survives Michaels’ attempts to murder her using household objects to defend herself, defying some patriarchal notions of women: that they are weak, lack agency, and cannot defend themselves. Although this trope signaled a bit of a shift and gave women more onscreen agency, it did not mean women were given the same depth of storyline or amount of screen time as men. Additionally, the Final Girl was/is practically always white, traditionally attractive, able-bodied, and middle class. Her status as the Final Girl is typically earned through her purity and virginity rather than her wit and Jay (Maika Monroe), the Final Girl in It Follows, is no exception. Jay is white, blonde, attractive according to Western beauty standards, and able-bodied. She is not a virgin, though. She’s seen having sex a few times throughout the film and she though she is not shamed, she faces consequences in a different form: the sexually transmitted monster.

A woman puts looks in the mirror whilst putting on lipstick.

The sexually transmitted monster, referred to as “It” throughout the film, is one of the most creative and terrifying monsters in recent horror history. “It” follows one person at a time and moves at a leisurely pace, walking toward prey with no rush. Taking the form of strangers or people the victim knows, “It”’s appearance shape shifts depending on the situation. We’re left with a contradiction here: Jay has sex and lives — pushing back against the virginal aspect of the Final Girl — yet, at the same time, she’s left with a murderous monster as a direct result of her sex life. So, although she does fight back and survive the monster, Jay is, in a way, punished for having sex the same way many women in horror films are. Typically, though, women are literally murdered for being sexually active whereas Jay is threatened with murder but ultimately lives. It’s a small change but with the prominence of the trope’s ties to virginity, it is monumental that Jay has sex when she wants to, with who she wants to, and is not shamed for her actions.

It Follows does not subvert the Final Girl trope on all fronts — she still looks and acts like classic Final Girl (white, pretty, thin, and fit) — but the acceptance of Jay’s sex life and persistance of her fight against “It” are big, positive shifts in the genre. Jay’s story is an example of what the Final Girl can be like in the future. Hopefully, we’ll get to see Final Girls who push back in more ways and break the conventions of the trope even more.

The Real Inspiration Behind It Follows Probably Isn't What You Think

It Follows - Jay and Hugh Wheelchair Scene

"It Follows," the 2014 psychological horror film by director and screenwriter David Robert Mitchell, has been interpreted by viewers as being inspired by the risks and anxiety associated with sex and sexually transmitted diseases. On the surface, this interpretation is perfectly justifiable: the movie centers around the some of the deeply uncomfortable aspects of teenage sexuality, taking the classic "death by sex" horror trope to a terrifying literal extreme. However, Mitchell himself has revealed that his primary source of inspiration behind "It Follows" didn't actually involve sex at all. So what was it that inspired him to create what some have dubbed "the STD horror movie"?

Childhood Nightmares

The answer is actually heavily alluded to in the first half of the film, during the scene in which the character Hugh is describing the titular "It" to Jay, "It could look like someone you know, or it could be a stranger in a crowd. Whatever helps it get close to you. It could look like anyone, but there's only one of it. And sometimes ... Sometimes I think it looks like people you love, just to hurt you."

As it turns out, these lines are extremely similar to the director's own words regarding his initial source of inspiration for "It Follows." As he told IndieWire :

"The basic idea came from a recurring nightmare that I had when I was a kid in which I was followed by a monster that looked like different people. And only I could see it. And it was very slow and it was always walking toward me. In the dream I could get away from it easily or sort of easily. I could come into a room, climb out of a window, run down an alley, or go into the street. It wasn't about it being able to overtake me, it was the feeling of dread and anxiety knowing that something is always coming for you."

Other hints at a childhood nightmare serving as the foundation for the idea behind "It Follows" are sprinkled throughout the film. In another scene, the aforementioned Hugh states that he wishes he could trade places with a little boy he sees at a movie theatre when prompted with a question by his date. When she asks why a 21-year-old man would want to swap lives with a child, he replies, "How cool would that be to have your whole ahead of you? Look at how happy that kid is."

In addition to Hugh's confession, the teenage characters spend a lot of reminiscing on pre-adolescence and childhood after having been thrust into an unfamiliar, dangerous situation brought on by, among other things, sex. They are literally and figuratively realizing they're past a point of no return. There is no going back to the innocence and shelter of childhood, just as they can't just undo the events that have opened them up to supernatural torment. At one point, another character mentions how her parents wouldn't allow her to "go south of 8 mile" because "that's where the city started and the suburbs ended." She states that she didn't realize the reason why her parents tried to protect her with this rule until she was older.

The Shape of Anxiety

Further illustrating the source of inspiration for "It Follows" are the themes of anxiety, trust, and inevitable fate. The scariest thing about the monster in "It Follows" isn't the fact that it can kill you. A lot of things we encounter on a daily basis can kill us. The true horror lies in the psychological torment of being steadily pursued by a seemingly unstoppable, omnipresent figure that only you (and those who have crossed the sexual threshold that ensnares them in its supernatural web) can see. The creature doesn't even make an effort to run, implying that it is not concerned with whether or not it can catch you because it knows that, sooner or later, it will . Worse yet, it is shown to take the form of people the characters know, causing them to become mistrustful, anxious, and paranoid. For the protagonist, Jay, it takes the form of her friends, her potential love interests, and — in one particularly horrifying scene — her dead father.

The dread and anxiety born of not knowing if the people you are supposed to love and trust are actually malevolent figures who seek to destroy you is enough to drive anyone insane, but letting your guard down can literally get you killed. Such is the case with one of the other characters, Greg. Greg has sex with Jay despite the fact that the creature is "passed' from one person to the next via sexual intercourse, partially because he's a horny teenager, and partially because doesn't believe that the entity tormenting her exists. His unwillingness to believe or trust her despite the very clear and traumatic toll it has taken on her leads to his demise when the creature tricks him into opening his door by taking the form of his mother. Those impacted by the creature are not safe, and they can never go back to the way things were before, no matter how much or how little they choose to acknowledge the terrifying reality of it all. Their only choices are to live with the anxiety of it all, doing their best to prolong the inevitable, or to die.

Aesthetic Inspiration

"It Follows" is as deeply unsettling as it is picturesque, and intentionally so. The film's surrealistic portrayal of suburbia was inspired by the work of award-winning photographer Gregory Crewdson, who is known for his tableaux vivants (French for "living pictures"). Like Crewdson's work, "It Follows" features intricately staged, dreamlike scenery of American homes and neighborhoods, which is yet another callback to "It Follows" being inspired by screenwriter David Robert Mitchell's childhood nightmare. In the same way that abrupt, nonsensical changes in atmosphere tend to occur in dreams, the seasons appear to change throughout the movie, even though it only takes place over a few days: characters are shown swimming and wearing shorts in the midst of those around them wearing coats and other attire associated with winter. Additionally, the film is rife with imagery that evokes very specific time periods, making the precise decade in which "It Follows" takes place unclear: there are multiple classic cars featured alongside more modern vehicles, the characters dress in modern clothing while the décor in their homes appears to be a mixture of elements from bygone eras like the '50s and the '70s, and one of the characters has an e-reader shaped like a clamshell.

On the curiously anachronistic quality of the film, David Robert Mitchell told the AV Club :

"There are production design elements from the '50s on up to modern day. A lot of it is from the '70s and '80s. That e-reader cell phone—or "shell phone"—you're talking about is not a real device. It's a '60s shell compact that we turned into a cell phone e-reader. So I wanted modern things, but if you show a specific smartphone now, it dates it. It's too real for the movie. It would bother me anyway. So we made one up. And all of that is really just to create the effect of a dream—to place it outside of time, and to make people wonder about where they are. Those are things that I think happen to us when we have a dream."

Given all of this information, it seems a bit dismissive to just label "It Follows" as "the STD horror movie." At its core, it appears to be less about the dangers of sex, and more about the jarring transition from the safety and innocence of childhood to the confusion and anxiety of adolescence, sexual awakening, and the inescapable awareness of danger that comes with it all.

‘It Follows’ 4K Ultra HD Review – Modern Classic Holds Up Nearly 10 Years Later

Cinephiles tend to be reluctant to call a new movie a favorite, instead favoring tried and true paradigms, but It Follows is a rare contemporary film that immediately struck a wide swath of viewers — myself included — as a modern classic upon its release in 2014. Comfortingly familiar yet invigoratingly fresh, I’ve only come to appreciate it more since, and Second Sight Films’ new 4K Ultra HD edition proves it hasn’t lost any staying power after nearly a decade.

The plot is deceptively simple: after a sexual encounter, 19-year-old Jay ( Maika Monroe , The Guest ) begins being followed by… something. The supernatural force takes a human form but never sticks to one for long; it could be a familiar face, an obscene stranger, or anyone in between. The only recourse seems to be passing it on to someone else via sexual intercourse. Otherwise, it will kill her, then the person who gave it to her, and so on down the line.

With her father absent and her mother distant, Sam teams up with her loyal friends — lovesick Paul ( Keir Gilchrist , It’s Kind of a Funny Story ), sister Kelly ( Lili Sepe ), and friend Yara ( Olivia Luccardi , Channel Zero ), with assists from neighbor Greg ( Daniel Zovatto , Don’t Breathe ) and ex-boyfriend Hugh ( Jake Weary , It Chapter Two ) — in an attempt to bring the nightmare to an end.

From the film’s captivating opening — a 360-degree shot that tracks a girl running out of her house and around the neighborhood — it’s clear that writer-director David Robert Mitchell has a vision. Shooting on location in the Detroit area, where the filmmaker grew up, lends itself to a lived-in feel while subtly showing suburban dissonance. Together with cinematographer Mike Gioulakis ( Us, Split ), whose elegantly understated camerawork is impressive but not ostentatious, they depict a dreamlike reality.

One could get lost in the weeds trying to analyze the thematically dense material and poke holes in the mythology, but the rules are established as being passed down by young adults like an urban legend. The titular “it” is commonly interpreted as a sexually transmitted disease, but other popular theories include aging, abuse, and trauma. Or, perhaps, it’s simply a scary concept with no underlying metaphor. With Mitchell’s layered subtext and purposeful ambiguity, all readings are valid.

It Follows exists outside of time, subtly disorienting the audience with production design that blends past, present, and future in a single frame. Technology, cars, styles, and media featured in the film are from disparate eras; while most of it is vintage, a shell-shaped compact e-reader — an impractical device created for the movie — is prominently featured. Not even a season can be pinpointed, as costumes fluctuate from swimsuits to winter coats between scenes.

It’s no surprise that Monroe has become something of a horror darling after the one-two punch of The Guest and It Follows . She’s faced with a particularly challenging role here, which essentially requires her to be terrified for the entirety of the movie’s 100 minutes. The actress is vulnerable without becoming a damsel in distress, conveying fear and resolve in equal measure.

Like Halloween before it, It Follows ‘ effectiveness is inextricably linked to its dread-inducing electronic score. In his auspicious film debut, video game composer Richard “Disasterpeace” Vreeland ( Triple Frontier, Bodies Bodies Bodies ) channels the atmosphere of vintage John Carpenter but with amplified abrasiveness. The soundtrack’s versatility stands out among the ’80s synth worship that dominates modern indie horror.

For its 4K Ultra HD debut, the UK’s Second Sight has newly mastered It Follows in 4K, in conjunction with the original post production facility, with Dolby Vision HDR and a newly-produced Dolby Atmos audio track. (The included Blu-ray won’t play in most US players, but the UHD disc is region free and has all the extras.) While it may not be the most significant 4K upgrade, given that it was shot digitally and completed in 2K, quality is noticeably improved over the original Blu-ray. The restoration is noted as being approved by Mitchell, but the filmmaker is otherwise absent from the release. I respect his desire to maintain ambiguity, although his retrospective input would be valuable.

Louisiana State University professor Joshua Grimm, who authored a book on It Follows for the Devil’s Advocates series, provides a new commentary that’s analytical but not pedantic. Armed with information culled from a variety of articles, coupled with his own theories, the well-researched extra is perhaps the next best thing to having Mitchell himself. The archival track with film historians Danny Leigh and Mark Jancovich, on the other hand, is more like a fan commentary — and not a particularly illuminating one. (The critic commentary led by Scott Weinberg from the US release is absent.)

The disc has interviews with: Gilchrist, who reveals that Mitchell upheld the film’s ambiguity with the cast; Luccardi, who beams about her first movie being mentioned in the Scream franchise; producer David Kaplan, whose insightful discussion includes an alternate ending that was written but not filmed; Vreeland, who reveals he hadn’t seen a John Carpenter movie prior to composing the score; and production designer Michael Perry, who recalls his biggest concern being the shade of pink used for the e-reader. Taken as a whole, they paint a picture of a challenging production that everyone is ultimately proud of though no one could predict its impact. Filmmaker Joseph Wallace explores “The Architecture of Loneliness” in a thoughtful video essay.

A limited edition version is available at nearly twice the price, but it’s worthwhile for the exclusive, 150-page hardcover book consisting of new essays by Anne Billson (“Untrivial Pursuits”), Kat Ellinger (“It Unfollows: How It Follows Suberts Teen Horror Conventions”), Eugenio Ercolani (“The Intangible Monster of Teenage Fears”), Jennie Kermode (“In Pursuit of the Inevitable: It Follows and the Psychology of Death”), Martyn Conterio (“Anxious Youth: The Myth of the American Sleepover as a Precursor to It Follows”), Kat Hughes (“It Follows: Sex (Death) and the Final Girl”), Matt Glasby (“It Follows: The Unhappiness of Pursuit”), and Katie Rife (“Ongoing Investigations into Malevolent Thought Forms, or: Sex Tulpa”). It’s housed alongside the discs and six art cards in a rigid slipcase with artwork by Thinh Dinh.

Much like how its characters exist in the liminal space between adolescence and adulthood, It Follows strikes a perfect balance between classic slasher and contemporary arthouse horror. Shades of Halloween, Blue Velvet, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Rear Window , and Final Destination can be found in its DNA, but Mitchell builds upon his influences rather than slavishly emulating nostalgia. As much as I’d love to see more of this unique world, the lack of definitive answers is scarier than any sequel could be.

It Follows is available now on 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray.

Gateway Horror Classic ‘The Gate’ Returns to Life With Blu-ray SteelBook in May

One of my personal favorite horror movies of all time, 1987’s gateway horror classic The Gate is opening back up on May 14 with a brand new Blu-ray SteelBook release from Lionsgate!

The new release will feature fresh SteelBook artwork from Vance Kelly, seen below.

Special Features, all of which were previously released, include…

Director Tibor Takacs, Writer Michael Nankin, and Special Effects Designer & Supervisor Randall William Cook
Special Effects Designer & Supervisor Randall William Cook, Special Make-Up Effects Artist Craig Reardon, Special Effects Artist Frank Carere, and Matte Photographer Bill Taylor
Isolated Score Selections and Audio Interview
The Gate : Unlocked
Minion Maker
From Hell It Came
The Workman Speaks!
Made in Canada
From Hell: The Creatures & Demons of The Gate
The Gatekeepers
Vintage Featurette: Making of The Gate
Teaser Trailer
Theatrical Trailer
Storyboard Gallery
Behind-the-Scenes Still Gallery

When best friends Glen ( Stephen Dorff ) and Terry ( Louis Tripp ) stumble across a mysterious crystalline rock in Glen’s backyard, they quickly dig up the newly sodden lawn searching for more precious stones. Instead, they unearth The Gate — an underground chamber of terrifying demonic evil. The teenagers soon understand what evil they’ve released as they are overcome with an assortment of horrific experiences. With fiendish followers invading suburbia, it’s now up to the kids to discover the secret that can lock The Gate forever . . . if it’s not too late.

If you’ve never seen The Gate , it’s now streaming on Prime Video and Tubi.

4 New Horror Movies Releasing This Week Including ‘Late Night with the Devil’ at Home

Spring 2024 Horror Preview: 12 Horror Movies You Don’t Want to Miss

Blumhouse and Lionsgate Join Forces for Brand New ‘The Blair Witch Project’ Movie!

The ‘Scary Movie’ Spoof Franchise Is Getting a Reboot at Paramount!

‘The Omen’ Franchise Ranking: All Six Movies from Worst to Best

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Filmhounds Magazine

All things film – In print and online

It Follows (4K Review)

Second Sight

This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labour of the writers and actors currently on strike, the movie being covered here wouldn't exist.

When stalking your prey, is it best to run after them, or walk slowly? Slashers everywhere (aside from Scream ) tell us that the approach taken by the tortoise is better, suggesting that those of us who read fables as children are possibly all going to grow up to be effective serial killers. Other lessons taken from serial killer films — “don't have sex” in particular — anchor themselves in societal images of what is moral and right. Never before has a killer been more akin to an omnipresent representation of judgement as in It Follows though, an entity that slowly pursues the latest person it has been passed to.

Very little is explained, we don't know whether the creature is a ghost, a demon, a curse, a monster… all we are told is that there is only one of them, and if it catches you it will kill you. The only way to get rid of it is to have sex with someone and pass it on.

It's a simple premise really, and arguably done before with video tapes in Japan, and William Shatner masks in suburbia. But there's an inherent originality to the way the story is presented here that helps it to stand alongside the films it apes. A lack of explanation that burdens other similar films with exposition allows It Follows to focus solely on feelings of anxiety and the fear of becoming prey.

Director David Robert Mitchell refuses to anchor It Follows in any particular time period. There is a dreamlike quality to the mix of futuristic technology amongst old TVs with manual dials and three channels. The surrealism is emphasised further with shots of unremarkable things from a birds eye view, encouraging the viewer to zone out and stare at these details in the way our lead character does.

This should not suggest that It Follows suffers from slow pacing or a lack of scares, it's arguably one of the scariest films of the 21 st Century. Wide landscape shots have us constantly searching the negative space in the background in the same way scream queen Maika Monroe does. Have we seen it before her or has she seen it before us? The anxiety created by both scenarios is solid enough to chew on. Moments of gore, though irregular, are genuinely unpleasant. It's possibly the closest cinematic equivalent to how it feels to walk through a dark house and have someone appear that you weren't expecting. Imagine feeling like that for 100 minutes and it gives you some idea.

The bonus features are an excellent mix of interviews and commentaries, and a very welcome video essay from Joseph Wallace. Once again Second Sight sadly neglects to include subtitles on these, but that doesn't take away from the quality. This is likely to be one of their most popular releases, and for good reason.

Special Features

Dual format edition including both UHD and Blu-ray with main feature and bonus features on both discs
Second Sight Films 4K master produced in conjunction with the original post production facility
Approved by Director David Robert Mitchell
UHD presented in Dolby Vision HDR
New Dolby Atmos audio track produced by Second Sight Films
New audio commentary by Joshua Grimm
Audio commentary by Danny Leigh and Mark Jancovich
Chasing Ghosts: a new interview with Actor Keir Gilchrist
Following: a new interview with Actor Olivia Luccardi
It's in the House: an interview with Producer David Kaplan
Composing a Masterpiece: an interview with Composer Rich Vreeland
A Girl's World: an interview with Production Designer Michael Perry
It Follows – The Architecture of Loneliness: a video essay by Joseph Wallace

Limited Edition Contents

Rigid slipcase with new artwork by Thinh Dinh
150 page hardback book with new essays by Anne Billson, Martyn Conterio, Kat Ellinger, Eugenio Ercolani, Matt Glasby, Kat Hughes, Jennie Kermode and Katie Rife
6 collectors' art cards

It Follows is released on Limited edition 4k and Blu-ray from Second Sight on September 11th

Civil War (Film Review)

Swede Caroline (Film Review)

5 Classic Universal Monsters We Need To See On The Big Screen Again!

You may have missed.

Release Dates

Bridgerton Season Three Trailer Released

Why Pyramid Game Is The Next K-Drama You Should Be Watching

Alternative Artwork: Alex Garland

Margot Robbie’s LuckyChap To Produce Monopoly Film

Set The Tape

It Follows (2014) – 4K UHD Review

It Follows tells the story of Jay ( Maika Monroe ), a college girl from Michigan who lives with her mother and sister, Kelly (Lili Sepe), and spends her time hanging out with her friends, Paul (Keir Gilchrist) and Yara (Olivia Luccardi). Her quiet life goes through some changes when she starts dating Hugh (Jake Weary), a new guy in town. After a couple of dates Jay and Hugh sleep together, but shortly after having sex, Hugh drugs her. Jay wakes up tied to a chair in an abandoned building, with Hugh looking panicked whilst looking around the building.

READ MORE: Crimes of the Future (2022) – Blu-ray Review

Hugh tells Jay that he’s passed something onto her, that an invisible entity will now be coming for her. Only her, and the people infected before her, can see it, and it can take on any human form. The creature will be following her, always walking towards her, and that she needs to be on the lookout for anyone who’s following her. He explains that if it catches up with her it will kill her, and then come after him again. The only thing she can do is to sleep with someone else to pass it on. Shortly after explaining this, the entity appears, and Jay realises that Hugh was telling the truth.

Thus begins Jay’s fight for survival, as the entity begins its relentless pursuit of her. With Jay having seemed to have been sexually assaulted by Hugh after he leaves her at home in her underwear, and her in a state of fear and anxiety, her friends and family assume that she’s simply going through trauma. Now she has to convince those around her that she’s not crazy, and that her life is in danger.

It Follows is the creation of writer/director David Robert Mitchell , and it’s clear very early on that he has a very specific look and feel for the movie, one that will draw you in and interest you as much as the actual story and characters. The film exists in a time out of time, almost in its own world. There are scenes where you see modern cars and phones, and others where cars are from the 70s and 80s. Fashions are mixed, with people in the same room wearing clothing styles from varying decades. Most modern appliances and electronics are absent, with older TVs appearing throughout, showing movies from the 1950s. One of the characters has a e-reader/phone that’s inside a literal clamshell, a compact mirror having been repurposed for this use. The result is a film that is hard to pin down, one that at times feels like a period piece, and others a modern day tale.

Part of this was done due to the director wanting the film to feel timeless, but it was also done to give the narrative an almost dream-like quality, where the small details don’t quite make sense. This absolutely helps the movie, as the central story has a nightmarish quality to it. I’m sure most of us have had a nightmare where something is chasing us, at least once. The slow moving camera shots, the use of wide angle lenses, and the choice to often keep characters isolated in the middle of the frame, small and vulnerable in a wider world, add to this, and give the film a feel unique all to itself.

In some ways, the central antagonist of the film (the titular It) takes some ideas from other places. The themes of sex and horror have been used numerous times over the years, and being cursed because you have sex isn’t a new one. A monster that only you can see, that makes your claims that your life is in danger seem false, fits very much into the cliches of the Gothic, especially when a woman is placed at the centre of it. And the relentless pursuer that never stops, that seemingly can’t be killed, and that cannot be reasoned with, immediately conjures connections to The Terminator . Whilst the film seems to borrow from these other areas, the end result feels very original, and the concept of the creature and the way it works is a novel one.

The creature is also a big part of the enjoyment of the movie. Once you’ve been informed of the rules, the movie almost becomes like a game, albeit a tense one. Once you know that this thing is constantly coming you start to examine every scene, looking for someone in the background who could be the entity. You start to question every person walking towards Jay, trying to figure out if they’re real or not, and you begin to experience a little of the fear and horror that the characters are going through.

The cast sell this fear well, with Maika Monroe doing a wonderful job at showing this slow descent into desperation and fear. Her character goes through a lot in the film, feeling like her boyfriend assaulted her, not knowing if she’s going crazy or not, trying to show her friends that she’s not imagining things, and then dealing with the idea that she’s in danger for the rest of her life unless she places another person in danger. Monroe manages to convey this journey in a subtle way, never descending into screaming and shouting, with a more internalised journey going on. A lot of her scenes almost have a sense of defeat to them, of a young woman pushed so far to the edge that she has nowhere left to go, and is ready to give up. It’s a decent contrast to Weary’s performance, who injects Hugh with a manic desperation and frayed nerves that puts his own trauma on the surface.

The music is another aspect of the film that stands out, and the film’s composer, Disasterpeace, is as integral to the success of the film as the cast and director. Having previously worked on video game scores, this is the composer’s first film work, and it’s hard to believe as the score for It Follows is one of the best horror scores in decades. Like with the other aspects of the film, the score feels weirdly out of time, though its heavy use of synths gives the film a very 80’s feel, and reminds one of John Carpenter in the best ways. The music elevates the film thanks to the ominous moods that it brings to scenes that would otherwise feel normal and benign, and it’s often the shift in sound that will set you on edge. Disasterpeace enhances every moment of the film with his music, and the recurring motifs and themes end up getting stuck in your head.

There have been many essays and dissections of It Follows over the years, and a quick search online will bring up dozens of deep dives into the film’s themes, its meanings and interpretations. Modern horror tends to play things quite straight, with things being either easily understandable, or with explanations given in the narrative. It Follows bucked that trend, and because of that it grabbed viewers’ attention. Not knowing what the creature is, where it came from, or why it does what it does makes the movie get under your skin a little bit more. You end up thinking about it after it’s done, you create theories, you discuss it with others, and you end up going back and revisiting it hoping that you can glean some further insight. This is why the film made more than 20 times its budget, and often features on ‘best horror’ lists.

READ MORE: The Comic Cave – Old Man LoganStar Trek: Defiant #7 – Comic Review

This new release not only comes with a new 4K master of the film that looks gorgeous, but also a host of interesting extra features that those who want to know more about the movie will enjoy. There are new interviews with several members of the cast and crew who recount their time working on the movie, a video essay about the film, and two audio commentaries that go in depth into the making of the movie. The Limited Edition version also comes with a 150-page hardback book filled with essays about the film. The review copy we received did not include the book, but it’s something that I’d love to read, and is sure to further satisfy those wanting to deep dive on the film.

It Follows has been described as an instant modern classic, and having revisited it again for the first time since its release it’s hard to disagree. The film feels different, and has a style all to itself, and it doesn’t talk down to the audience or feel the need to hold your hand. The fact that it didn’t spawn a slew of sequels, and that the creator knew it could stand on its own, only makes it stand out further, and once you watch it it’s sure to stick around in your brain for a long while after.

It Follows is out on Limited Edition 4K UHD and Blu-ray on 11th September from Second Sight Films.

Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)
Click to share on WhatsApp (Opens in new window)

Great post. Always loved this film, the atmosphere, the cinematography, the dreamy somewhat surreal atmosphere throughout. One of my favorite horrors in recent years.

Definitely needs a rewatch soon.

Drop us a comment Cancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed .

Discover more from Set The Tape

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Type your email…

You must be logged in to post a comment.

It Follows (2014) Limited Edition Review

It Follows (2014) Limited Edition Review Care-free high school student Jay Height (Maika Monroe – THE GUEST) has just started dating a ‘nice’ guy – Hugh (Jake Weary – ZOMBEAVERS), but they have sex, everything changes and life will never be the same again… When she wakes up, she’s tied up in a deserted parking ..

Care-free high school student Jay Height (Maika Monroe – THE GUEST) has just started dating a ‘nice’ guy – Hugh (Jake Weary – ZOMBEAVERS), but they have sex, everything changes and life will never be the same again…

When she wakes up, she’s tied up in a deserted parking lot, where Hugh reveals his dark and disturbing secret… he’s passed on something unimaginable… a deadly curse that will see her relentlessly pursued by evil… A shape-shifting force It follows its victims and will stop at nothing to kill them. The only way to escape, is to pass it on to another person through sex…

The brand-new Limited Edition is set for release on 28 August and is presented in a stunning box with new artwork by Thinh Dinh alongside a 150-page book, with new essays. There will also be Standard Editions in 4K/UHD and Blu-ray, and all versions come complete with a host of fantastic extras, please see full details below.

Believe the hype – IT FOLLOWS – leads the way as a genuinely scary, modern horror classic and now this nightmare inducing freakout fest, from award-winning director David Robert Mitchell, is about to creep up and shock you with an immense new Limited Edition 4K UHD / Blu-ray dual release from Second Sight Films this August.

Lauded by critics and audiences alike, IT FOLLOWS has been described by The Independent as ‘Ingenious…… gets under the skin’ and by Little White Lies as ‘Petrifying and refreshingly original… unremittingly pursues the two greatest themes in both art and life’ and now Second Sight Films has relentlessly chased down the best special features, contributors, and design for a stellar must-have release of this seminal film.

Much like the central entity in IT FOLLOWS writer and director David Robert Mitchell’s seminal horror flick comes at you slowly but surely, getting under your skin like no other horror flick has this millennium. Seen by some as a contemporary take on MR James’ 1911 ghost story CASTING THE RUNES (adapted into the classic 1957 film NIGHT OF THE DEMON) and by others as a parable about HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, IT FOLLOWS was conceived by the director based on several reoccurring dreams he had in his younger years about being followed.

IT FOLLOWS plays out like you’re in someone else’s nightmare and you feel like you’re in that dream-like state throughout. Taking inspiration from Romero and Carpenter, Mitchell’s movie plays to the same visual aesthetics. Mitchell has no interest in explaining the entity’s origins and instead pushes forward with what is effectively an extended chase as Maika Monroe’s Jay does her utmost to avoid a grisly fate at the entity’s hands. Whilst (fortunately) there has (yet) been no sequel to IT FOLLOWS recent horror flick SMILE dared to tread a similar path and in doing so proved that when something has been done so brilliantly and effectively already then you really don’t need any another like it.

Special Features

Dual format edition including both UHD and Blu-ray with main feature and bonus features on both discs

Second Sight Films 4K master produced in conjunction with the original postproduction facility

Approved by director David Robert Mitchell

UHD presented in Dolby Vision HDR

New Dolby Atmos audio track produced by Second Sight Films

New audio commentary by Joshua Grimm

Audio commentary by Danny Leigh and Mark Jancovich

Chasing Ghosts: a new interview with actor Keir Gilchrist

Following: a new interview with actor Olivia Luccardi

It’s in the House: an interview with Producer David Kaplan

Composing a Masterpiece: an interview with composer Rich Vreeland

A Girl’s World: an interview with production designer Michael Perry

It Follows – The Architecture of Loneliness: a video essay by Joseph Wallace

Limited Edition Contents

Rigid slipcase with new artwork by Thinh Dinh

150-page book with new essays by Anne Billson, Martyn Conterio, Kat Ellinger, Eugenio Ercolani, Matt Glasby, Kat Hughes, Jennie Kermode and Katie Rife

Six collectors’ art cards

Registration

Desired role:

My Bloody Reviews

Skip to main content
Keyboard shortcuts for audio player

Pop Culture Happy Hour

LISTEN & FOLLOW
Apple Podcasts
Google Podcasts
Amazon Music

Your support helps make our show possible and unlocks access to our sponsor-free feed.

'Civil War' envisions a too-near future

Glen Weldon

Walter Chaw

Danielle Kurtzleben

Monica Castillo

Hafsa Fathima

Mike Katzif

Jessica Reedy

Kirsten Dunst as Lee in Civil War. A24 hide caption

Kirsten Dunst as Lee in Civil War.

The new film Civil War depicts a contemporary America torn apart by a military conflict between the federal government and an alliance of secessionist states. Directed by Alex Garland ( Ex Machina ), the film follows a small band of journalists led by Kirsten Dunst's jaded war photographer. They embark on a harrowing journey to the heart of the conflict, encountering brutality and bloodshed along the way.

IMAGES

Analyse: It Follows
It Follows
'It Follows' Review
It follows narrative
It Follows Movie Synopsis, Summary, Plot & Film Details
It Follows

VIDEO

Painfully Beautiful Past Lives
They Don't Know They're Born
I'm an MCU Fan, But I Can't Take This Anymore
Small Scribbles by a Toddler (no audio)
IT FOLLOWS 4K UHD BLU-RAY
It Follows (Movie Review)

COMMENTS

It Follows and the Transgressive Pleasure of the Horror Movie
This essay discusses plot points of It Follows.. It's a girl in a white dress, walking toward you. Now it's a naked woman, pubes waxed bare and eyes ice-cold, flip-flops slapping the railroad ...
It Follows: Explained (Plot Analysis And Ending)
As these revelations collectively reveal, underlying the transfixing cinematography, lush soundtrack and novel plot twists of "It Follows" is a mystery locked in a puzzle trapped in an enigma. In other words, the more you watch "It Follows," the deeper you delve into its nuances, the more you find how little you actually know or ...
It Follows movie review & film summary (2015)
In that sense, "It Follows" is not really about sex, but an unbearable, unsinkable mood that descends when you come of age, and never completely dissipates, not even after climactic sexual, or other violent acts. Since "It Follows" concerns the never-ending state of hormonal crisis we call "adolescence," the film is about illogical actions that ...
'It Follows' is Not About STDs.
It Follows is among the most thematically-rich horror films released in the past decade, so it's endlessly frustrating that the average viewer knows it as "the STD movie." To be fair, this ...
It Follows
I recently watched this movie and fell in love with it so I thought I'd write an analysis on it. It's possibly my favourite horror movie since Antichrist. To start I think a lot of the movie's depth comes from the ambiguous nature of the "thing" (this is what I will call the monster which follows). There is various symbolic interpretations of ...
It Follows Film Analysis
It Follows is a more typical film that displays aesthetics of formalism such as expressive sound, expressive cinematography, expressive mise-en-scene, and performance capture. These two films are on completely different ends of the film spectrum, since one is fictional horror film and the other is a non-fiction documentary, so they differ in ...
Review: In 'It Follows,' a Shape-Shifting Horror Stalks a Teenager
1h 40m. By Stephen Holden. March 12, 2015. The nameless, shape-shifting horror that stalks the blond, 19-year-old Jay ( Maika Monroe) in David Robert Mitchell 's cool, controlled horror film ...
How the Cinematography in 'It Follows' Trains You To Be Paranoid
Today, we're watching a video essay that explores how the cinematography in "It Follows" challenged slasher movie conventions. 2014's It Follows never hides the fact that its interests lie ...
It Follows
It Follows is a 2014 American horror film written and directed by David Robert Mitchell.It stars Maika Monroe as a young woman who is pursued by a supernatural entity after a sexual encounter. Keir Gilchrist, Daniel Zovatto, Jake Weary, Olivia Luccardi, and Lili Sepe appear in supporting roles. It Follows debuted at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival and was later purchased by Radius-TWC for ...
How 'It Follows' (2014) Re-Imagines the Final Girl
David Robert Mitchell's film It Follows (2014) directly confronts the problems with the Final Girl while maintaining some elements of the trope, playing a role in crafting a new, modern version of the Final Girl. To understand what It Follows accomplishes, it's necessary to assess the gender politics of the time of the trope's emergence ...
The Real Inspiration Behind It Follows Probably Isn't What You ...
RADiUS-TWC. "It Follows" is as deeply unsettling as it is picturesque, and intentionally so. The film's surrealistic portrayal of suburbia was inspired by the work of award-winning photographer ...
It Follows and Rape Culture: Critical Response as Disavowal
Volume 40, Issue 3, 2017. The independent horror film It Follows, written and directed by David Robert Mitchell, debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in 2014. The film follows Jay, a young woman from suburban Detroit, who is stalked by a supernatural force. "It" begins to pursue Jay after what appears to be consensual sex in the back of ...
It Follows (Film) Essay Examples
Browse essays about It Follows (Film) and find inspiration. Learn by example and become a better writer with Kibin's suite of essay help services. Essay Examples
It Follows and Rape Culture: Critical Response as Disavowal
This essay argues that Mitchell Lichtenstein's film Teeth (2007) is an exemplary appropriation of the femme castratrice, a sadistic and castrating female figure that subverts the patriarchal ...
It Follows Film Analysis
It Follows Film Analysis. 1196 Words5 Pages. In their chapter, Developmental Differences in Responses to Horror, Joanne Cantor and Mary Beth Oliver established three categories of fear inducing stimuli and events that are regularly seen in frightening media. They created the three categories after reviewing research on the issues of real life ...
'It Follows' 4K Ultra HD Review
The soundtrack's versatility stands out among the '80s synth worship that dominates modern indie horror. For its 4K Ultra HD debut, the UK's Second Sight has newly mastered It Follows in 4K ...
It Follows (4K Review)
It Follows - The Architecture of Loneliness: a video essay by Joseph Wallace; Limited Edition Contents. Rigid slipcase with new artwork by Thinh Dinh; 150 page hardback book with new essays by Anne Billson, Martyn Conterio, Kat Ellinger, Eugenio Ercolani, Matt Glasby, Kat Hughes, Jennie Kermode and Katie Rife; 6 collectors' art cards
It Follows (2014)
It Follows breaks a lot of ... There are new interviews with several members of the cast and crew who recount their time working on the movie, a video essay about the film, and two audio commentaries that go in depth into the making of the movie. The Limited Edition version also comes with a 150-page hardback book filled with essays about the film.
It Follows Film Analysis
The movie follows Jay Height: a teenager who is being pursued by a strange entity that is trying to kill her. This entity can take the shape of any person, stranger or loved one, and was passed down to her after sleeping with her boyfriend. The only people who can see the entity are those who have, at some point, been cursed by it.
It Follows Essay.docx
Ortiz 5 The 2014 horror film "It Follows" demonstrates the invulnerability of trauma through the life of Jay .The potential abuse her father inflicted on her, the sexual abuse she faced through the sexual pleasure of men, and the sharing past trauma leading vulnerability are all represented in the story through the hidden layers of Jay. "It Follows" shows the problems caused by the ...
It Follows (2014) Limited Edition Review
It Follows - The Architecture of Loneliness: a video essay by Joseph Wallace. Limited Edition Contents. Rigid slipcase with new artwork by Thinh Dinh. 150-page book with new essays by Anne Billson, Martyn Conterio, Kat Ellinger, Eugenio Ercolani, Matt Glasby, Kat Hughes, Jennie Kermode and Katie Rife. Six collectors' art cards
It Follows
It Follows In the opening credits of "It Follows" the movie seems to have a very suspenseful meaning towards it. As the young lady sketched out of her home, running quickly in heels, and eventually returning to the home to get her items was unusual for any human-being to say, "They're okay".
Essay Structure: The 3 Main Parts of an Essay
Basic essay structure: the 3 main parts of an essay. Almost every single essay that's ever been written follows the same basic structure: Introduction. Body paragraphs. Conclusion. This structure has stood the test of time for one simple reason: It works. It clearly presents the writer's position, supports that position with relevant ...
'Civil War' envisions a too-near future : Pop Culture Happy Hour
Directed by Alex Garland (Ex Machina), the film follows a small band of journalists led by Kirsten Dunst's jaded war photographer. They embark on a harrowing journey to the heart of the conflict ...

It’s Not Done

It Follows: Explained (Plot Analysis And Ending)

It Follows: Plot Summary

When is It Follows set?

Where is It Follows set?

Other Inconsistencies, or “What’s With the …?”

What’s With the Woman Running in Heels?

What’s With the Cans and Bottles Strung From the Doors and Windows of Jeff’s Hideout?

An Indistinguishable Woman and an Unidentifiable Man

The Climactic Impersonation

Why So Cagey?

It Follows: The Ending?

Why people interpret It Follows as sexual

No, Really, The End This Time

Movie Reviews

Simon Abrams

Now playing

Little Wing

Riddle of Fire

Brian Tallerico

Glitter & Doom

Film Credits

It Follows (2015)

Director of Photography

Latest blog posts

Ebertfest 2024 Announces Full Lineup, With Guests Including Eric Roberts, Mariel Hemingway, Larry Karaszewski, and More

How Do You Live: On the Power of Edson Oda’s Nine Days

Eleanor Coppola Was the Guardian Angel of Apocalypse Now

The Overlook Film Festival 2024 Highlights, Part 1: Fasterpiece Theater, Exhuma, All You Need is Death, Me

Review: In ‘It Follows,’ a Shape-Shifting Horror Stalks a Teenager

Anatomy of a Scene | ‘It Follows’

Explore More in TV and Movies

How the Cinematography in ‘It Follows’ Trains You To Be Paranoid

Watch “How Cinematography in It Follows (2014) Challenges Slasher Horror”

Who made this?

More videos like this

Recommended Reading

How ‘It Follows’ (2014) Re-Imagines the Final Girl

Share this:

The Real Inspiration Behind It Follows Probably Isn't What You Think

Childhood Nightmares

The Shape of Anxiety

Aesthetic Inspiration

‘It Follows’ 4K Ultra HD Review – Modern Classic Holds Up Nearly 10 Years Later

You may like

Gateway Horror Classic ‘The Gate’ Returns to Life With Blu-ray SteelBook in May

4 New Horror Movies Releasing This Week Including ‘Late Night with the Devil’ at Home

Spring 2024 Horror Preview: 12 Horror Movies You Don’t Want to Miss

Blumhouse and Lionsgate Join Forces for Brand New ‘The Blair Witch Project’ Movie!

The ‘Scary Movie’ Spoof Franchise Is Getting a Reboot at Paramount!

‘The Omen’ Franchise Ranking: All Six Movies from Worst to Best

It Follows (4K Review)

More Stories

Civil War (Film Review)

Swede Caroline (Film Review)

5 Classic Universal Monsters We Need To See On The Big Screen Again!

Bridgerton Season Three Trailer Released

Why Pyramid Game Is The Next K-Drama You Should Be Watching

Alternative Artwork: Alex Garland

Margot Robbie’s LuckyChap To Produce Monopoly Film

It Follows (2014) – 4K UHD Review

Drop us a comment Cancel reply

Discover more from Set The Tape

Registration

Pop Culture Happy Hour

'Civil War' envisions a too-near future

IMAGES

VIDEO

COMMENTS