Will Sorg – Entertainment Columnist
David Robert Mitchell’s low budget, indie horror film It Follows is a perfect example of a cult classic. With a 1 million dollar budget and a modest marketing campaign, the film was able to drum up enough hype to gross over 20 million dollars at the box office. Even now the film is lauded in horror circles as a poster child for independent horror.
The film follows a college freshman named Jay and her friends as they live out their fall in an idyllic Michigan suburb. Even ignoring the spectacularly harrowing opening scene in which another girl is killed by an unseen assailant, there are many signs that something is off about the setting. Cars vary in style from modern to 1950s, clothing and architecture follow a similarly anachronistic pattern, and cell phones are completely missing from the typically phone-heavy world of a teenager’s life. These purposeful inconsistencies allow the audience to more easily suspend their disbelief and find the notable lack of any parental guardians or easy ways out of the conflict to be much more believable and engaging. Simply put, when the audience views a world similar to their own, but missing key details and with strange changes, they will become on edge and tense without even having to encounter anything scary.
This tension of an uncanny reality is only truly turned into horror after Jay sleeps with her boyfriend for the first time. At this point we know nearly nothing about her boyfriend, aside from that his name is Hugh and he seems to always be nervous about something. Only after he knocks Jay out and ties her to a chair in a way clearly meant to be reminiscent of serial killings from the 70s and 80s, do we learn his full motivations. Hugh has been haunted by a creature that slowly walks after him with the intention of killing him. It can only be gotten rid of by passing it on through sex with another person, and if that person dies it goes back to its most recent host. The scene in which the rules of the monster are explained is horrifying in its own right. Here we see Jay’s agency ripped away from her as Hugh forces her into an unimaginable ordeal. As she is restrained to a wheelchair Hugh tries to persuade her that he’s doing this to try and help her better understand the monster, a hypocritical and shallow gesture made out of guilt as he was the one who tricked her into receiving the curse in the first place.
It Follows deals with the idea of agency constantly. Obviously the film is primarily a horror film meant to excite and terrify, and secondarily an allegory for STIs. However some of the most harrowing, frustrating moments of horror is when Jay is ignored. The monster is visible only to her and we are told the story primarily through her perspective. We feel Jay’s fear and anger when her friends are incapable of caring or helping. To us and Jay, the monster is right in front of our eyes, slowly following. So of course when no one else in the film shares our feelings, we relate with Jay and her own paranoia and isolation.
It is very hard for a film to explore these feelings of alienation and paranoia so deftly, and remarkably it’s probably the best part of the film. We end up assuming Jay’s perspective and build a great deal of empathy for her. This also makes the eventual catharsis of Jay’s friends believing her and helping her all the more impactful as the film subverts typical horror tropes and refrains from the typical one by one murdering of teenagers. Instead, we see friends band together to try to help Jay escape from her phantasmal stalker.