If Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby set the tone for the “psychological horror” film back in the late 1960s, David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows is the culmination of nearly 50 years of psychological terror along with so many other important tropes of the genre mixed in.
And speaking of tropes, we open with a mainstay–the opening death scene, which takes place in a Detroit suburb. A girl named Annie flees her house and seems to be followed by … something. She makes it as far as the beach but can’t escape whatever is terrorizing her, as her dead body is found the next day.
We then meet Jay, our college student protagonist who has a new boyfriend named Hugh. As she’s out on a date with him, he keeps seeing a mysterious little girl that nobody else can see. Later on in the film, they have sex and Hugh chloroforms her. When she wakes up, he’s tied her to a chair and tells her that he passed some sort of curse onto her–she will be followed by an entity that only she can see and it won’t stop until it kills her (where it will then go after the last person it pursued, which happened to be Hugh).
The rest of the film is basically the story of Jay and her friends trying to avoid, escape, and then ultimately fight back against whatever is following her, although we never actually know what it is except that it takes the form of various disheveled-looking people, including friends and family members. And unlike, say, Final Destination, where the characters were being killed off in increasingly ridiculous and cinematically staged ways by a “death” entity, It Follows chooses to have fun with the “audience mindscrew” by offering very few jump scares (thank God) in favor of creating a constant feeling of uneasiness. Like Rosemary’s Baby, the film has a sense of real place (although Mitchell keeps the time period of its setting deliberately ambiguous) and while this does follow the same pattern of “photogenic white kids in the suburbs getting offed after getting off” of your average slasher flick, it’s quite aware of that.
In fact, Mitchell plays with that knowingly–after all, the entire premise of the movie is the Scream-established rule that having sex in a slasher movie means you’re going to die. And he sends his characters into the seedier parts of Detroit to either try to avoid the entity (although we know they can’t do that) or confront it directly, hitting upon what Polanski does in Rosemary’s Baby by pointing out that our homes are not safe and perhaps we need to second-guess their comfort. Furthermore, he avoids the “come at me bro” self-aware final confrontation of late-1990s flicks like Final Destination and has his characters make stupid mistakes and confront the entity in a way that feels at best like a desperate attempt to save Jay’s life (and at worst a trap Fred would try to spring on Scooby Doo: Mystery Incorporated) instead of the machinations of a protagonist who is too smart for the film in which he’s been placed and is therefore deconstructing the rules in order to win.
It Follows is a fun horror movie. You sympathize with its main character because she spends the film going more and more crazy while her friends can’t seem to figure out how to help her or what is even going on (that is, until they start getting killed) and the ending doesn’t go for a cheap twist or any big reveal that spoils re-watches; in fact, we never get “origin” or even the true identity of the entity and that’s fine. Plus, the ending is satisfyingly ambiguous and you leave wondering if everything is okay.