[HorrorScience] It Follows (2014)

Reading time: 9 minutes

Qualification

It Follows

Year

2014

Duration

100 minutes

Director

David Robert Mitchel

Distribution

Bailey Spry, Carollette Phillips, Loren Bass, Keir Gilchrist, Maika Monroe, Lili Sepe, Charles Gertner, Debbie Williams, Olivia Luccardi, Jake Weary, Daniel Zovatto, Ruby Harris, Leisa Pulido

Script

David Robert Mitchel

Yes, last week I commented about an indie film of the genre that has had great success (Southbound), this week I will repeat the formula and talk about It Follows, an unexpected indie hit from 2014, which has managed to obtain excellent reviews from the public and press.

The film is one of those breaths of fresh air that sometimes come to cleanse the environment, after having been saturated by the toxicity of the constant repetition of formulas. Of course, it cannot be said that everything in it is original and that it belongs to that select group of films that represent the seventh art, but it can undoubtedly be classified within the new wave of independent cinema made by new directors, with little budget and unknown actors, who are offering a type of horror cinema with a more complex and intelligent approach, in what is the strongest card they have as a presentation since they could not compete in other sections that require much more money than they have available.

It Follows It quickly introduces us to what will be the main mystery of this story. An adolescent story of paranoia, in which although we will believe in what we see, we could also not do so and think that all this is nothing more than collective hysteria.

The story begins with a young woman running away from home in her car. He reaches a beach, and there calls his father, which seems to be one of those goodbye calls that people can make when they know the end is near. Cinema has us accustomed to these types of scenes occurring when the character will heroically give his life to save the lives of others, or when this person suffers or has suffered situations that lead him to make the decision to voluntarily end his life. In this case the film skips these conventions and opt for another option that, if you are a movie buff, will not be the first time you have seen, but you will agree that it does not happen frequently: the girl is facing something that she believes is inevitable, a destiny from which she has realized that it is impossible to escape, so she has decided to stop running and accept what happens. The next morning this same young woman is found brutally murdered..

After this introduction we will see one of the protagonists of this story and her boyfriend, who go to the cinema to see a movie. The boy is restless, and he tells his girlfriend something about a woman in a yellow dress who is at the entrance looking at him and smiling, but she cannot see her, causing the boy moments later to decide that they should leave, with the excuse that he is not feeling very well.

One night, the couple has sex inside the boy's car and then, unexpectedly for the protagonist and the viewer, the boy he puts his girlfriend to sleep with chloroform. She wakes up and finds herself in her underwear, tied to a chair in an abandoned place, and her boyfriend explains to her in a hasty and nervous manner that through sex a kind of curse has been passed on to her in which someone that only those who are cursed will be able to see, and who can take the form of any person, will follow her wherever she goes. It is not only about following it, but if you reach it will murder her, and after doing so she will go after the person who has passed that curse on to her and so on. The only way you can get rid of this is by passing it on to someone else, hoping that person will pass it on to someone else and the chain will become as long as possible.

Immediately we see a half-naked woman appear in the background of the scene who is heading directly towards both of them. The boy takes his girlfriend from there (who after such a situation we can call ex-girlfriend) and he abandons her in front of her house, fleeing the scene.

All this begins to go even more wrong when, after having made the report to the police, we find out that the law enforcement force not only does not find this strange woman who began to follow them, but they also do not find our protagonist's ex who was also living with a woman. false identity. To make matters worse, while in college class, Jay (which is the name of the blonde protagonist of this story) she sees an elderly woman dressed in a hospital gown walking directly towards her, and everything seems to indicate that it is invisible to others.

Will the movie be about strange old men and women and half-naked people chasing young Jay? Not quite.

We are faced with a film in which the fear factor is given by the erratic behavior of some people. It's like seeing someone on the street, in a place full of people, who is not behaving normally, and who suddenly fixes his eyes on you and goes directly to meet you, without stopping. You know that he is not a normal person and that he is up to no good, you can see it in his eyes, and the closer he gets to you the more desperate you become, knowing that the danger is closer and closer with each step. That feeling that would make you run away in real life is the same one that makes the characters in this story also run away., since suddenly, in any place that seems most normal, someone may appear and go directly towards them with the sole intention of murdering them.

But are these people who follow you people or is it an entity that takes the form of others? We don't really know, and we also don't know if they are really there or if it is a mental disorder of those affected that makes them see things that do not exist. However, we have proof that tells us inescapably that the danger is real: Remember that at the beginning a girl made a goodbye call on the beach, and the next morning she was found murdered.

It Follows It presents us with a different formula than usual. The teenagers who appear here are not the typical ones in American movies where we find the same group of people represented by different actors but always the same, where there is the hunk, the slut, the fool that everyone laughs at, and the one who is good but so good that she looks like a holy virgin. Here we find a group like anyone can find at the university or in their own group of friends, and each one behaves more or less logically and according to their way of being, ignoring some licenses that must be given for being the protagonists of a film in which the story is not about a normal, everyday situation.

It is, at the same time a horror story with a supernatural entity, a film that briefly explores that time of adulthood in which hormones can influence your decisions, and a story about paranoia and how it can become tangible even through contagionI no longer say physical, like the sexual transmission of this curse like a venereal disease almost at the beginning of the film, but also through the sensory and emotional contact that we can witness between Jay and her group of friends, who blindly believe in what she says and suffer, suffering it themselves even if they are not really seeing anything.

It Follows It is a truly recommendable film, with well-developed characters that make you care about what happens to them instead of the disposable prototype who you hope will die simply for your entertainment, with a story interesting enough to keep you on the edge of your seat and with a very careful and premeditated visual aesthetic. In addition, it contains some scenes with small, very sincere details about love and sexual desire, which add an extra point to the attempt at realism and everyday life that the director and screenwriter strives to show us, successfully.

Some curious details:

Like many films of the genre, this one includes some references to horror classics. Jay, for example, is short for Jamie. The leading actress of the famous film saga halloween Her name is Jamie Lee-Curtis. Jay's sister is called Kelly, also coinciding with Jamie Lee's sister, who is called Kelly Curtis. The tribute does not end here, since the girl who dies at the beginning of the film is called Annie, which is the same name as one of Laurie's friends (the character played by Jamie Lee Curtis) in the Halloween saga, daughter of the town sheriff.
Although the film is inspired by many horror films from the 60s to 80s, the time period in which the story takes place was intentionally made ambiguous. It is for this reason that we will see that there are televisions with traditional CRT screens, old cars and at the same time also modern cars, something similar to an e-book, and even a mobile phone.
The film's soundtrack is composed by Rich Vreeland, known as Disasterpeace, who completed it in less than 3 weeks. Disasterpeace is the one who composed the soundtrack of the video game Fez, of which the director and screenwriter of this film is a fan.