Beware of spoilers! Proceed at your own risk!
The
new horror film It Follows (2015) has earned a tremendous amount of industry
and viewer buzz, and for good reason.
Not unlike The Babadook (2014) before it, the film is
unceasingly scary and smart. But horror
aficionados have additional reasons to rejoice, beyond the fact that the
movie delivers the entertainment it promises.
In
addition to being legitimately terror-inducing, It Follows succeeds
artistically on two dynamic fronts.
In the first case, it beautifully apes the
look, sound, and feel of a horror classic: John Carpenter’s Halloween
(1978). The film is a weird remake, in a sense, of that classic picture, but one that eschews the
slasher film paradigm and reveals why Halloween’s narrative and thematic
structure works on a human, rather, than formulaic, basis.
On the second front, It Follows possesses veritable layers upon layers of visual and
thematic subtext. Many critics and
audiences have rightly picked up and enumerated on the strong sexual themes. The film involves a kind of “curse” passed via sexual intercourse; a curse that can only be lifted by passing it to another lover.
It is not difficult, then, to read the film as a metaphor for
sexually transmitted diseases. Once you contract it, it follows you to your next lover. And behind you, on the same chain, are all the other people who were compromised before you were.
But
underneath that particular metaphor, It Follows actually features a
powerful subtext of an economic nature. One
apparent message of this horror film is that bad choices follow you around through
your life.
That's not just a personal, sexual thing...it's a civics thing too. It's a governance thing.
To wit, the film is set in post-Great
Recession Detroit, a realm rendered a post-apocalyptic-seeming nightmare through one bad choice
after another. The movie
could occur in no other modern city, really, because of its blighted, decaying landscape, and due to the visual notion that you can’t escape bad choices.
Instead, all you can hope to do is pass the suffering and misery onto the next generation, or the next unwitting victim. In some
fashion, this actually makes the film a close relative of Wes Craven’s A
Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) too.
No
matter how you choose to read or interpret the film, It Follows doesn’t follow the pack in terms of modern horror films and their cliches.
Eschewing jump scares for mood and atmosphere, and harnessing patient, diligent, perfectly-crafted camera-work, It
Follows leads the pack.
“It’s never about going anywhere, really.”
In
Michigan, young high-school student Jay (Maika Monroe) dates an older boy, Hugh
(Jake Weary), and decides to have sexual intercourse with him. Afterwards, Hugh drugs her, ties her to a
chair, and tells her a terrible and incredible story.
By
having sex with her, Hugh has given Jay a curse.
A strange, solitary monster --
one that can appear as any person -- will now follow her and attempt to kill
her. Jay can escape this curse only by
having sexual intercourse with someone else; by passing the curse on to someone else; someone who does not suspect the truth.
And if Jay or her victim dies at the hands of that monster, the monster goes down the chain, and kills the originator of the
curse. In other words, if Jay dies, Hugh
is in danger again. And if he dies, the girl who gave it to him is next in pecking order.
Jay
does not believe the story at first, but soon realizes that Hugh has been
truthful about the curse, if not about his identity, or even his name. Her friends try to help her deal with her new reality, but Jay is
hunted relentlessly by the monster, which follows her everywhere.
Another
boy, Greg (Daniel Zovatti) elects to have sex with Jay, but he doesn’t believe
in the curse. When he dies, Jay is again
vulnerable to attack. A
sexually-inexperienced friend, Paul (Keir Gilchrest), meanwhile, wants Jay to have sex with
him, but she is reluctant to endanger him.
Jay,
Paul and two other friends attempt to electrocute the monster in a swimming
pool in Detroit, hoping that the strange curse can be ended once and for all.
“Do
you feel any different?”
It’s
no great secret -- nor any great revelation -- that the horror film, as a format,
has always been intimately and inextricably linked with sex.
In the 1980s, this connection became clear again by sheer dint of repetition. Many post-Halloween slasher films repeated,
ad nauseum, the principle that “vice precedes slice and dice.”
In other words, if a young, unmarried
individual has premarital sex, or smokes weed, it’s a virtual guarantee in this
format, that he or she is “fair” game to the likes of Jason Voorhees or Michael
Myers, to name just two assailants. The (conservative) message underlining the 1980s slashers is that if you break the laws of man and God, a supernatural-seeming predator will hack you down in your prime.
It
Follows plays
an intriguing game with this idea. Here, sexual intercourse transmits a fatal
curse; pursuit by some malevolent being that can take various forms. Like
Michael Myers (and later, the Terminator) this boogeyman will absolutely not stop until it
kills the intended victim. Sex is the catalyst for the violence.
However, though sexual intercourse
is what passes the curse to the next victim, but -- and here’s where it gets
truly interesting -- by having intercourse with another stranger, the curse is
passed along. So sex is actually both the thing
that brings the curse to its victim; and the thing that takes it away. It is both damnation and salvation.
Like the best of horror movies that establish
such rules (think: Gremlins [1984]). It Follows doesn’t spend too much
time lingering on the exact specifics of the curse. For the sex to bring the curse, does it have
to be unprotected sex, so that fluids pass from one individual to another?
Does the sex have to be consummated by either
ejaculation or orgasm, or is penetration enough to bring it on?
And, what about non-heterosexual sex?
By
leaving the concept vague and amorphous -- and yet clearly understandable at the same time -- It
Follows opens up, much like Halloween’s "Shape" -- Michael Myers --a world
of interpretations and possibilities.
For example, the film clearly raises issues of morality and responsibility. Is it right to doom another person to this horrid curse if you know you are infected? And
again, relate that idea directly to STDs.
In this case, however, there’s
actually an another level to consider. The curse,
after it kills you, will go back along the chain of the infected.
So whatever a “cursed” person decides to do,
someone is going to die; either a total innocent (someone new on the chain who is randomly infected), or
someone who has been a part of it already (and passed it on intentionally.) This is a no-win situation.
In
some fashion, then, It Follows concerns the way that one bad choice (sex with
someone who may not be trust-worthy) can lead to another bad choice, and then
another. The film ends with a nod
towards the stability (and predictability?) of monogamy, as two of the cursed individuals -- Jay and Paul -- seek
each other out and stay together.
In the film’s final shots, we see them
walking together, holding hands, committed to each other. The monster, however, is still present in the background,
a visual warning that if either of them strays, the curse will be back.
At least that’s one possible interpretation.
What’s
remarkable about It Follows is the manner in which it nails teenage attitudes toward sex.
Jay believes that sex with Hugh will somehow liberate her. She will feel free,
and grown-up. Jay associates intercourse
with adulthood, romance, and freedom. What she finds, however, is that Jay used her; not
to get off, not because her loved her, but to save his skin. He “dumped”
the curse on her, and therefore their sex was not about romance, or respect, or
regard.
It was about a selfish desire.
By
contrast, Paul, a nerdy friend of Jay's, is so desperate just to have sex that he would happily risk the curse just to get laid. He knows he will be endangered by engaging in
intercourse with Jay, but he is so desperate not to be a virgin that he is
all-in, literally speaking. He acts, in a way, in the same manner that Hugh does.
He wants to have sex with Jay for his own selfish reasons. And by passing on the infection to him, Jay shifts her beliefs too. Now she is just being selfish too, not dreaming about what the act of sex can portend in a life, or in a relationship.
The film's monster, when we see it, adopts human form, and is a kind of twisted amalgam of human
sexuality. It is depicted, on at least
two occasions, urinating relentlessly. That's a reminder that humans often expel waste from the same region of the body where they make love; a connection that makes some folks believe that sex is, by its very bodily geography, a "dirty" process.
And
when it catches its prey, the monster seems to ride the victims to their death.
One embodiment of the monster also appears to be
the victim of rape, missing one sock, wearing smeared, garish lipstick. In this case, the monster is like a stalking, mobile, unsolved sex crime. Perhaps it is the embodiment or manifestation of sexual violence, even.
John
Carpenter’s Halloween featured a sexual subtext, certainly, involving the
virgin, Laurie, and her more promiscuous friends, Annie and Lynda. But It Follows, clearly, makes the sexual
material much more...overt.
What may
not be immediately apparent is that It Follows is indeed a spiritual remake of
Carpenter’s film, and, simultaneously, the best such remake of the material. David Robert Mitchell has captured the essence of the material, both in terms
of narrative and theme, but has done it outside the paradigm (and formula) which gave rise to Friday
the 13th (1980), Happy Birthday to Me (1980), Prom
Night
(1980) and the like.
In
terms of visualizations, it's fair to say that Mitchell goes full Carpenter, opting for long, slow
pushes in towards characters. He uses slow, meticulous pans extensively. In both cases, the patient, anddiligent
camera-work creates the impression of a real world, a real terrain.
Over-use of fast cuts would fracture the
space of this world and break the spell, and Mitchell is careful to avoid this pitfall. Instead, he lets scenes build and build,
creating powerful suspense in the process. The film plays as infinitely more real or true than many
recent horror films do because the camera is so assiduously planted in our
reality, moving through the space rather than violating it for the purposes of
shock.
It
Follows, like
Halloween, concerns an inexplicable being intruding into a real
town. Like The Shape, the “thing” in It
Follows walks, but never runs.
Yet it always catches up with its prey.
And also like Halloween, It Follows generates significant frisson from
showing not where the monster is, but where it is not. Knowing the landscape of the town, or the neighborhood, thus becomes essential. We have to understand the battlefield. We have to sense when something is off, or wrong.
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Halloween |
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It Follows |
Consider the final montage of Halloween,
wherein Carpenter cuts together -- in reverse order -- all the places that Myers
has been seen. These locations are now empty,
devoid of his monstrous presence. And yet
we still hear him breathing. We know he is there...somewhere. It Follows features similar montages mid-way
throughout, with a ruptured above-ground pool (signifying that something destroyed it…),
a half-open gate, and other visual signs of invasion, intrusion, or life disordered. We don’t need to see the monster to be
afraid.
We just have to know it is
close, and that it has been here; that it continues to stalk, or follow as the
case may be.
The
musical score from Richard Vreeland has earned a lot of attention in the press, and rightly
so, since, without stealing any cues, it sounds very much like Halloween: a kind of synthetic, trance-inducing drone, but one punctuated by moments of
harsh, angry repetition and intensity.
But the Halloween comparison is notable elsewhere. Many shots in Halloween establish “normality,”
the town with the wide streets, sparse trees, and long cement sidewalks. There
are scenes in It Follows that deliberately evoke these ground-level
moments. One scene, with Jay and a
friend walking and talking, is almost a perfect mirror for the scenes early in
Halloween of Laurie and Annie walking home from school.
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Halloween |
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It Follows |
Also consider that in Halloween, a horror movie marathon is on the television. Films that appear in the movie include Forbidden Planet (1956) and The Thing (1951). They comment on the action in a way. Michael is a Monster from the Id, like the creature in the former, and has been buried in the ice, in a way (locked in a mental hospital), like the monster in the latter.
Here, other 1950s horror movies are also often on screen. I was able to pick out Killers from Space (1955), for example. There, the solution to stopping the invading aliens involved electricity, and the final strategy in It Follows does as well.
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Halloween |
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It Follows |
And
then, of course, there’s the classroom.
In both It Follows and Halloween, our hero sits in a high school English
class, gazes out the windows, and sees the Monster that no one else can
detect.
Laurie sees Michael and his car
across the street, while a teacher drones on about “fate.” Nobody can escape fate, she says. It is like a force of nature. And Michael, therefore, is a force of nature too, meting out fates for the kids of Haddonfield on Halloween night.
In It Follows, Jay sees the monster as
an old, infirm woman, on the school campus, while the teacher discusses T.S. Eliot
(1888-1964), and quotes “I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,” in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
(1915).
Another line, quoted in It
Follows, establishes “I am Lazarus, come from the dead.”
In scholarly circles, there is great debate
about the meaning in Eliot’s work here. Some
believe the main character is talking to himself, discussing a romantic longing
for a woman he hopes to court. Others
suggest that the words reference mortality, and surely they do, on a literal basis. The moment of greatness that flickers is our mortal
life. And in Lazarus is a figure who has defeated death.
In
Halloween,
Laurie could not escape her fate -- to be hunted by the Boogeyman -- and in It
Follows, Eliot’s poem similarly diagrams Jay’s destiny. She is hungry for adulthood, for the freedom
and romance she has imagined it would bring with it.
Instead, however, she has learned that
adulthood has made her confront her own mortality, and its impending demise. Some of the figures that the monster assumes similarly seem to be of the dead or the soon-to-be-dead (Greg, for example).
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Halloween |
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It Follows. |
I
have written about the importance of the high school classroom in Halloween,
but also in A Nightmare on Elm Street.
In that film, the hero, Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp) is
explicitly compared to Hamlet in Shakespeare’s tragedy.
She is a character who,
like the literary prince, must dig and dig to discover the truth about her
parents and their sins. So It Follows
conforms closely to horror movie tradition by allowing some aspect of literary
philosophy to “leak” into the movie through a high school English class.
When
you consider the nature of the monster -- a thing which walks but doesn’t run,
and yet still catches you -- as well the soundtrack, camera-work, and settings
(a lower-middle class neighborhood, a high school class room, an intimate walk
with a friend), one can see how It Follows takes all the symbols of Halloween
and re-uses them for its own purposes.
There is even a scene in It Follows in which the hero hears
something outside, and gazes into the back yard, aware of a malevolent
presence.
In Halloween, Laurie sees Michael for an instant in the shadow of
a fluttering sheet on a clothes line.
In It Follows, a ball hits the window,
startling her, and she looks out, only to see nothing. But still, the presence of the monster hangs
in the air.
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Halloween |
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It Follows |
Many
diverse elements of Craven’s Elm Street are here too. For
instance, Jay has a single, alcoholic mother, and is estranged from her
father.
I believe -- unless I missed
something -- that he is either dead or otherwise abandoned the family. He shows up, however,
as a “Bad Father” (like Freddy) when the monster takes his form during the film’s
denouement.
Similarly, the film’s Greg character lives across the street from
the Final Girl, Jay, and she watches his house through her bedroom window. Greg, like Johnny Depp’s Glenn, also meets a
terrible fate that Jay attempts to stop, but can’t. The monster is her boyfriend now.
Much
more significantly, I have often diagrammed an economic reading of A
Nightmare on Elm Street, to the consternation of some, and the fascination of others. That Craven film is very much about a
monster who suffers the sins of the father upon the children. In real life, in 1984, that was a topic much very in debate, regarding America’s deficit.
The country was spending money it didn’t have to support tax cuts and military spending;
thereby visiting the sins of the father upon the next generation.
It
Follows
closely echoes A Nightmare on Elm Street in terms of the way it erects a
similar economic case. (And just for a similar analysis, read Stephen King’s brilliant description of The Amityville Horror
[1979] in Danse Macabre sometime to register how that horror film is also, about, finally, economic
concerns).
Consider: It
Follows is set
in Detroit, the largest city in American history that has ever filed for
bankruptcy protection. The city is some 14 billion dollars in debt (operating with a
deficit of over 380 million dollars) after decades of borrowing money to continue
running.
What
killed Detroit?
A series of bad decisions, or bad choices, one might claim. Not only did the auto industry shrink
nationally, it all but abandoned Detroit, taking most of the good jobs when it left. Whites
and blacks alike fled the city for the suburbs, reducing the city's population from over a million to approximately 750,000. That flight then reduced the tax base,
which meant that the city became even more starved for funds.
In It Follows, the camera captures
several views of urban blight, of a ruined Detroit that is, literally, a dead man
walking. Homes are abandoned, falling into decay, and Jay, Paul and the others explicitly discuss warnings from their parents not to walk alone beyond a certain point on 8 Mile
Road, the border between suburbs and privilege, and the city and poverty.
Significantly, the
film’s climactic scene is set on the wrong-side of the tracks, at an abandoned city swimming pool where the American flag is prominently seen hanging on the wall.
The implication seems to be that Detroit,
like Jay, is the victim of bad decisions, bad choices, made over a very long period of time.
The first time that we see
the monster in the film, importantly, she is actually crossing a set of
railroad tracks, coming from the side of the failed city to Jay’s suburban
side.
This moment qualified as a book-end image for the pool
scene, where the suburban kids attempt to lure it back to its side of the economic divide, and kill it.
Furthermore,
the monster takes the form of the “absent” or "bad" father at the pool in
Detroit, a symbol perhaps, for the abandonment of the city by its metaphorical
fathers; by those who fled to the suburbs. The absent father could be the city fathers, the state government, or the Federal government.
On a similar note, after Paul has sex with Jay, he passes the curse to prostitutes, to hookers working the wrong-side of the tracks again. Paul is making the curse their problem, not the concern of other suburbanites, like Jay, or himself.
So -- as every critic will tell you -- It Follows is about sexual politics,
and specifically, a sexually-transmitted curse.
But more than that, this horror film seems to concern bad choices on a global, collective scale, one including the economic background. Here, one bad decision is passed on to another generation or group, and
then that group is “screwed” (hence the sexual metaphor), forced to make another
decision (like bankruptcy) that screws up yet another group.
The infection of bad economic stewardship
keeps claiming additional victims.
In
my introduction, I compared It Follows to The Babadook. And there’s a very good reason for that which goes
beyond the fact that both movies are scary and well-made. Specifically, both films conclude with the idea that the
monster can’t be killed. It can’t be
destroyed.
In The Babadook, the monster lives on in the basement (a symbol
for the mother’s psyche, and her suppression of her fears about raising her
child).
In
It
Follows, the monster is seen in the background, still following, still
waiting for an opportunity to return.
Now, you might remind me here that Halloween ends with Michael Myers still prowling
(or at least vanished) and that A Nightmare on Elm Street literally
puts Freddy back in the driver’s seat for the final jolt.
But importantly, in both of those cases, the
monster is put down for an interval of peace. Loomis shoots Michael six times, and he falls from a ledge, into the
yard. At least momentarily, he is out of
action.
And Nancy turns her back on
Freddy, reducing him to no more than atoms, again, assuring at least a brief
respite from his murderous agenda.
In The Babadook and It
Follows there is no real relief, no interval of victory.
Instead, these 21st century horror movies tell us that we will have to learn how
to adapt to our lives, to the monsters that dwell in them, and that follow us each and every day. Defeating them, even briefly, isn’t really an option. They will always be there, in the basement, or ten paces back.
Unless we get our house in order, these monsters will follow us for the rest of our days. In It
Follows, as long as we make bad choices -- about sex, about commitment,
about our cities and our economy -- we will have a “monster” shadowing our every
move. Again, that's one possible reading of the images.
In
my books and here on my blog, I write often about how horror movies must always shape-shift
with the times, to be scary to us in the now.
King Kong (1933) or Dracula (1931) can be considered
great, classic horror movies, but they aren’t scary to audiences today because
the culture has moved on to a different set of dreads.
It Follows updates the
symbols, narrative and even subtexts of classic horror films including Halloween
and A Nightmare on Elm Street so that we recognize those dreads as
part of our twenty-first century Zeitgeist. The film injects fresh blood into old narratives and themes.
It
only “follows,” then, that David Robert Mitchell has directed one of the truly great
horror pictures of our Age.