The first sounds of It Follows is of somebody running in heels. In a single shot, the camera catches up to a girl wearing white lingerie and red heels running out of her house into the street looking for…something. The camera pans around, but shows nothing for the girl to be scared of. She charges back into the house, past her worried dad, grabs a set of car keys, and drives away. Later on the beach, lit by the headlights of the car, she cries her apologies into a cell phone. Suddenly, she’s dead with her leg broken and bent. She’s still wearing the red heels, but the foot is turned so the toe is pointing down at her back. That detail is not important.
Set in the suburbs of metro Detroit, It Follows is a subtext-heavy horror movie where the main threat is very real but of a questionable nature. Our teenage heroine, Jay, spends her days lazing in the above-ground pool in her suburban back yard. She hangs out with her sister and a couple slacker friends, whiling away the days playing games and watching daytime television on an old CRT television. After a date with a strange and hunky “poor” kid from wherever, she has sex in his car. After the date chloroforms her, he ties her up and tells her that she will be chased by…whatever, and her only chance at survival is to sleep with another person. To close out the night, he unceremoniously dumps her in front of her house in a ball of tears and underwear before peeling out.
Suddenly, Jay starts seeing people slowly plodding after her, menacing her, until she freaks out and is left in a catatonic state. Unfortunately for her, nobody else can see these threats. All the neighborhood kids feel sympathy for her and try to help, but she’s the only one with the curse. The kids fight the seen and unseen threat and struggle to figure out what’s real, what’s not, what’s a threat and what’s safe.
To mutilate a phrase from David Schmader’s Showgirls commentary, the subtext of It Follows is so staggering and deep…until you realize there is no subtext. Director David Robert Mitchell has stated that he didn’t intend to make a movie about STDs or rape or with any sort of metaphorical intent. His goal was to make a modern urban legend with no deeper meaning other than to scare. But, horror is a largely metaphorical genre, preying on real world fears by actualizing them into real threats or moral lessons. Vampires are sexual predators, Mr. Hyde is the dark side to our soul, and the threat of It Follows is…nothing?
By being intentionally vague about a deeper meaning of Jay’s threat, the maddening and futile search for meaning threatens to overtake the visceral experience of the movie. It Follows follows in Ti West’s lo-fi horror footsteps, improving on the retro horror phenomenon in every manner. Mitchell’s camera constantly roams around searching for the threat, even when it isn’t there. He allows the varying threat to occasionally commit acts of violence, amplifying the feeling of impending death.
Filming in and around metro Detroit adds to the suburban mentality of inner city threat – a character comments that, as a child, she never understood the deeper meaning to 8 Mile Rd – constructing the tension of whitebread normalcy just outside the wilds of deep poverty. Rich Vreeland’s John Carpenter-esque soundtrack adds to the PTSD-esque stunned shock atmosphere where everything could possibly be a threat. The end result is nervous and jumpy without being terrifying, even if the sheer weight of dread becomes its own form of terror.
If It Follows isn’t necessarily scary, it is at least fascinating. But, it’s only fascinating in ways that depend on what we bring to the table. In order for It Follows to be complete, we have to fill in the metaphor on our own. It Follows would shine more if Mitchell had made a decision about the deeper metaphor, and made a film that adhered to that metaphor. Last year’s The Babadook was a similar horror movie about a metaphorical terror. Because The Babadook takes a stance on what the meaning to that threat is, the terror floats to the forefront of the movie. By not taking a stance, the terror of It Follows becomes secondary. It’s thoughtful except that it isn’t; it’s scary except that it’s more full of dread; it’s good except it has crippling issues. So is the complex quality of It Follows.
