It Follows review
Hello everyone and welcome to my blog. For those who know me you know about my love for horror films so once a month I’m going to review and discuss a scary flick. We’ll look at the classics, some new films, and I want your suggestions on what I should review. I’ll do my best to cover all the different genres within the genre – slashers, ghosts, monsters, etc.
SPOILER ALERT! – These will be reviews so if you haven’t seen the movie you’ll want to watch it first before you read this. Let’s do this.
IT FOLLOWS
We see a young woman run out the front door of a house barely dressed in high heels. She runs across the street, then down the block then back inside her house. The camera slowly pans 360 to capture the whole scene in one unbroken take. Nothing exciting though, right? Nothing happens. No special effects. That’s kind of It Follows overall. This is not a big budget film in any way but it’s very effective to use a cliché term. Sorry but it’s true. Oh, and that poor girl meets a nasty demise on a beach soon after the opening scene by an unseen entity.
David Robert Mitchell’s 2014 delight never looks amazing because it doesn’t need to. It has at least one, if not many metaphors. A young woman – Jay – has sex with her boyfriend in a car who then gags her with a chloroform rag. She wakes up and he tells her he passed on some sort of curse to her and now it will follow her everywhere she goes and kill her if it gets her. I would like to go on record to say I would not enjoy this. Death – or whatever it is – certainly follows her and it’s very disturbing throughout the rest of the film. Again, nothing fancy, no flashy CGI effects, just a good story. Old women who look like they are in their last days at a hospice tracking her down in the halls of her school, a crazy naked dude on a roof of a house, a seriously spooky kid pursuing her at a lake house. My favorite is when she’s hiding out in her bedroom and she opens the door to let her friend in. Only right behind her is this crazy, jacked up tall dude that only she can see and it’s a great jump scare. The nightmare man for sure. These are not people you would see out on a walk with your dog. These people are – if they really are people – very frightening.
A solid cast and just a tense feel add to the simple basics that make this film what it is. I think the term I have heard is that it lingers with you. We said it’s about metaphors, right? The obvious being an STD that gets passed on when having sex but that’s just one example. Fear of death of course, of disease in general, being an adolescent and overall anxiety too? If I had to use word association for this film, it might be decay. Shot in and around Detroit, it really shows off the degradation and death of a once mighty city. Just another simple device to make this movie very enjoyable.
Enjoy the trailer - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkZYbOH0ujw