It’s hard to believe that it’s been 10 years since one of the defining horror movies of its decade. It Follows is one of the best examples of ‘art horror’, a subgenre that has found its creative resurgence with studios like A24 and Neon. The movie follows a group of friends who are relentlessly stalked by an unseen presence. It Follows understands how to make its characters vulnerable, not through them making stupid choices, but by keeping the threat far away enough to make it feel omnipresent in everything they do. The movie maintains an impressive level of tension by essentially making the movie a haunting game of hot potato, as the curse can be passed on to someone else through sex.
With this, It Follows drenches everything with hormonal angst and an impending sense of doom. The movie emphasizes how young these characters are and makes the idea of maturing as daunting as what will come for them if they refuse to have sex, thus putting their friends in danger. It’s a unique subversion of sex’s role in horror movies, less exploitative and more vital. It Follows makes the prospect of danger as scary as having to take the next step into adulthood, which turns the horror into a thematic exploration as well as a simple act of scares and fear.
It’s one of the best horror movies of the century so far because it understands that scaring an audience is more about implying than showing. It Follows has very few traditional scares and instead plays on the audience’s growing sense of the inevitability of danger rather than just thrusting the characters into it.
‘It Follows’ Fills Its Audience With Dread
One of the elements of horror that has become less prioritized in recent years is the effect the audience should feel once it’s finished. Lots of modern horror films don’t work towards a sense of ambiguity or a sense of lingering fear. It Follows is more interested in letting the viewer fill in the gaps and knows that they will likely trick themselves into being more scared with the less information they have. To create fear that lingers with an audience, a horror movie needs to know how to manipulate them into over-rationalization and try to predict what is going to happen because they are scared of being caught out.
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Then, a smart movie like It Follows shows them something relatively mundane, but by this point, the audience is so wrapped up in trying to predict the scares that it freaks them out more than the movie achieves so much with so little. It Follows creates a lingering fear because it never goes all out to throw jump scares at the audience or pummel them with loud noises. Instead, It Follows keeps things just vague enough to make the audience an active part of the mystery.
Maika Monroe Is Excellent in ‘It Follows’
Long before she was battling Nicolas Cage in Longlegs, Maika Monroe was an angsty teenager who was battling the horrors of growing up, as well as the monster who was stalking her. Monroe does so much with her character to elevate her beyond the stock role of the final girl. It Follows allows her to pivot from and into so many different positions of power as she slowly tries to convince her friends about what’s happening. At the same time, Monroe’s character, Jay, is only a teenage girl, something that It Follows uses against her when the themes of sex and maturation come into focus.
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Monroe is at her most vulnerable when she has to use her sexuality as a mechanism against the entity following her. It Follows uses these moments to underline how much our hero has to rely on others to save herself, which creates an intriguing dynamic of gendered power. She has to relegate herself to just a girl who has to ask the boys to save her when we see she is more than that. It Follows uses the value of sex against the characters, and as it constantly keeps from us exactly how this all works, the movie reduces the audience to their most primal sexual impulses as a tool for survival instead of a thing of pleasure.
The Final Moments of ‘It Follows’ Cements It as a Modern Horror Classic
It’s not until the final few moments of It Follows that the movie lets the audience glimpse at how the chain of terror works. We get to see moments before something might happen, and as the movie has done such a good job of keeping the threat broad, it could equally be nothing. It Follows is good at implying threats through the use of space. A person far away poses an equal danger to someone close, which makes everything that much scarier. The use of space also plays into the fear of the unknown that It Follows weaponizes. Everything around them is normal, and the threat is only after them. It makes the characters look like kids who are playing a game, which serves to add another layer of informational disconnect and further isolates the characters in their fear.
Few horror films from the last decade have achieved what It Follows does. It knows exactly how to keep an audience hooked on a lingering sense that something will happen, but we don’t know what. Combining themes of coming-of-age and horror, It Follows thrusts its young characters into a fight for survival that forces them to act like adults. It’s a simple thing, but it makes everything feel claustrophobic and reminds us that the characters are simply out of their depth.
It Follows is a great example of elevated horror in its purest form and doesn’t go for aesthetic shots like Midsommar. Instead, it manipulates its audience into vague understandings, which makes them more susceptible to the mundane realism of the scares. It Follows is available to stream on Max.
This story originally appeared on Movieweb
