'It Follows' Movie Review: Horror Like You've Never Seen, Even as a Promising Premise is Squandered

By Andrew Whalen Published 03/06/15 EST

NOTE: This article is a contribution and do not necessarily represent the views of Player One.

The UK poster for It Follows. RADiUS-TWC

It Follows has a horror premise that’s dreamlike in its nightmarish simplicity. A monster will follow you.

All it does is follow. This monster never stops walking toward you. This monster can take many forms, even become someone you love. And if this monster touches you, it will kill you. Of course, like so many dreams, sex is involved. In It Follows the monster can be passed on by having sex with someone else. It is a sexually transmitted monster.

From this oneiric platform, It Follows builds one of the most promising horror movies in recent years. And while It Follows may squander some of that promise by the end, the It Follows brand of creeping, shuffling horror is powerful enough to make the walk worthwhile.

It Follows Movie Review

It Follows opens with young people being young people. Jay (Maika Monroe of The Guest) hangs with her kind of annoying friends, including the love-struck nerdy guy friend, the bestie, and a peculiar Velma bookworm with a distracting, science-fiction e-reader. After a dream-date with Hugh (Jake Weary), him and Jay get it on in the backseat of a car. Then Hugh chloroforms her.

Jay, catching her first glimpse of the IT FOLLOWS monster. RADiUS-TWC

Jay wakes up in an abandoned factory, tied to a chair. She’s there to hear the rules. Hugh explains that she now has the monster, that it will follow her wherever she goes. Rolling the chair over to an overlook, Hugh points at the shuffling figure in the distance, this time a naked woman. No one can see the monster except people who it has targeted before. Jay is the new target. Run, because it follows.

Hugh dumps Jay in her front yard and disappears and now the It Follows nightmare has begun. It’s hard to overstate just how creepy It Follows can get. The monster appearing in doorways, plowing inexorably forward, as Jay’s friends try to understand a terror gripping her that they can’t see… It Follows will have you taking second glances down dark hallways for weeks.

The monster of It Follows is implacable and intelligent. It can take a deceptive form, such as a student in a school hallway, or it can try and make you panic. In its most frightening form the It Follows monster is an impossibly tall, trailer park man in a long white t-shirt. It’s hard to describe why his looming, determined yet vacant, presence is so chilling.

It Follows Trailer

The appeal of It Follows is the movie’s simplicity. The trailer plays up the unending, dreadful determination of its monster. The experience of actually watching It Follows doesn’t have the same simplicity. There are two ways It Follows could have developed. It Follows could have thrown out any sort of structure and been a more abstract journey guided by frightening dream-logic, like a less pretentious Under the Skin. Or It Follows could have launched from the original premise into a deeper mythos, subverting or defining the monster through new scenarios and hard-won knowledge.

It Follows settled on neither.

A significant chunk of It Follows is taken up with tracking down and interrogating Hugh so he can once again tell the characters the monster rules we already know. Once we “get” the monster, nothing new is added to the It Follows mythology, the characters falling into the same flailing patterns we see from its initial victim: a nameless dead girl, broken in half on the beach. Much of It Follows follows a simple formula: The characters drive somewhere, heave a sigh of relief, and wait for the monster to surprise them.

For a movie about sex, It Follows is oddly lacking in sex. It’s not that it needs to be more prurient, just more… messy. Despite It Follows being about a monster transmitted by sex, it never feels as if the dark metaphorical suggestions of STDs, regret, and vulnerability are explored. It Follows prefers to do its philosophizing in the open, setting up multiple opportunities for Velma to read Dostoevsky passages from her stupid clamshell e-reader. At times, It Follows gives off the impression that director David Robert Mitchell is vaguely embarrassed to be doing a horror movie and compensates with eye-rolling literature recitation.

Had It Follows built to a satisfying climax, then much would be forgiven. But the end of It Follows is a silly mess, with an over-elaborate plan that devolves into random gunfire. The final shot of the sequence, as blood fills a swimming pool, would be effective if it were something more than the set-up for a predictable cliffhanger conclusion.

Still, it’s hard not to rave about It Follows. It may squander a visionary and nightmarish premise, but along the way it treats the viewer to some of the finest horror movie moments ever witnessed.