'It Follows': Supernatural STIs Provide Horrific Sex Ed Class in New Film

It Follows begins with a swooping shot of a tree-lined, suburban street. A teenage girl comes barrelling out of a nondescript house, apparently running from something. She doesn't stop to take off her incredibly high stilettos, leaving the viewer to admire her ankles' tenacity, or to talk to a neighbour who asks if she needs help. A minute later, the viewer is treated to a shot of the girl lying, dead, on a beach, her right leg bent back towards her face with its shinbone poking out like a piece of driftwood.

"Don't worry, I have orthodics."

So begins writer/director David Robert Mitchell's nightmarish exploration of sex, life, and, most of all, death.

We're soon aligned with a young woman, Jay (Maika Monroe), who, after finally having sex with Hugh, a man she'd been seeing, is brutally tied to a chair in a deserted parking lot and made to watch a nude woman walk slowly, zombie-like, towards her with horrific intensity. Of course, this isn't the optimal post-coitus situation, and it only gets worse for poor, nymph-like Jay. Hugh informs her that the nude woman is "It," something that will follow her until it manages to kill her. The only way to get rid of it is by passing it on to someone else--through sex. Hugh has used Jay, and Jay must now decide whether she would rather die than live with the guilt of knowing she was responsible for someone else's death.

Pictured Above: A Romantic Night Out

Though It Follows is far from being a perfect film, it delivers on several fronts. Mitchell's approach to the film effectively establishes a dream-like quality through his use of a wide-angle lens and the jarring, retro-sounding soundtrack by Disasterpeace (Rich Vreeland). The characters appear to be drifting through their lives, existing in this nightmarish space without any goals or ambitions. The quote read in Jay's English class, from T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," is, then, brilliantly selected. Just as Prufrock measures out his life in coffee spoons, and struggles to make even the simplest of decisions, the characters surrounding and including Jay basically exist as zombified human beings.

The use of a sort of sex-monster is a lot more than simply a warning against unprotected sex, or STIs. As"It" simply works its way down the line of people "infected," "It" can never ultimately be outrun. David Robert Mitchell's film looks at this inevitability of death not as a nightmare, but as a reality, which makes "Its" presence all the more terrifying. Even his uninfected characters, like Jay's sister, are being followed by some sort of presence, some surety of death.

"What do you see?" "Literally all of us just killed in brutal ways, nbd."

All of this works to make It Follows a nightmarish -- but fun! -- horror film, full of jumps and scares of a more traditional approach (no red corn syrup here). However, it does have a few drawbacks, namely in the performances of Mitchell's young cast. As Jay, Maiko Monroe is fairly two-dimensional--good with the wide-eyed, terrified moments but lacking in emotional authenticity in many of her line readings. These performance choices could be just that--choices that Monroe and Mitchell made to construct Jay as a young person dozing her way through life. However, the ultimate effect is of Jay as a cardboard cutout with a pretty face. As her sister's friend, Yara, comments: "[Jay] is so pretty, it's annoying."

Yara, played by Olivia Luccardi, is one of the film's standouts, displaying a comedic and fiery edge lacking in the other characters. The real standout performance, however, comes from Keir Gilchrist as Paul, longtime romantic admirer of Jay. His eagerness to help Jay is endearing, while his lovelorn expressions break from the emotional flatness many of the other characters evoke.

Paul (Keir Gilchrist) pining for Jay's (Maiko Monroe) affections

It's unfortunate that the performances detracted from an otherwise innovative and explosive new horror film. What's truly exciting about Mitchell's film is its gesture to a potential new movement in the horror genre, one that takes a postmodern approach. His grainy images, synthesized score, and use of a dilapidated Detroit as a backdrop lend Mitchell's film a feeling of pastness, of nostalgia. In a film like It Follows, which is all about running against time, this nostalgic leaning is especially poignant. Though some might argue that using a sort of 1970s aesthetic might be uncreative, merely recycling old styles, I see it as the potential to create new, hybrid styles that can attack our tastes and explode onto our senses.

It Follows could be one of the first films to explore and experiment with the postmodern horror genre. (Or the post-postmodern genre, if you're of that camp. Why not even post-post-postmodern?).

If the buzz surrounding Mitchell's film is any indication, It Follows is bound not to follow the horror genre into the future, but to lead it into new forms and experimentations.

I give this film 2.5/4 Supernatural STIs.

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