Film Review: “It Follows” (2014)

1 1/2 out of 5

There are accepted truths in the world of horror films: Dream Warriors is the best Nightmare On Elm Street Film, The Exorcist is a classic, the remake/prequel of John Carpenters’ The Thing sucks, etc. Some things are up for debate, like which Evil Dead is the best (you say 2, but I say the original) or what the meaning behind The Shining is. These are all standards of the genre and have the weight of years of analysis to bolster them. That’s not the same situation for the modern horror films that falls into the ungenre of Post-Horror. Post-Horror is, in essence, artsy indie Horror. Big budget horror films focus on gore and jump scares while Post-Horror focuses on characters. This explains how everything from The Witch to Heredity to It Follows gets the Post Horror stamp even though they’re all drastically different. In my opinion films like The Witch and Hereditary should be (and I assume will inevitably be) viewed as Horror standards. It Follows though, for all of its accolades and acclaim is in my opinion a pile of pretentious barf shit that barely functions as entertainment and does not function as satisfying Horror.
I can already feel people reading this cringing and possibly screaming at the above. Both Hereditary and The Witch are pretentious art films too, but they work. They’re moody, they look beautiful, they have fantastic performances, fleshed out plots, and most importantly they know how to manage their horror elements. In contrast It Follows is a loud example of style-over-substance. It looks fine and has a unique style but has a paper thin story, boring characters, little actual development from start to finish and is hinged solely on how hard you as the viewer get off on the films inversion of genre tropes.
So let’s talk about that. This film is an inversion of the 80’s slasher concept that if you are a sexually active teen you will die at the hands of the films villain. Instead of a marauding, machete wielding murderer that kills you for having sex we're given an amorphous shape shifting entity that you keep at bay solely by being promiscuous. This is where any fresh ideas the film has ends and we reach this point within ten minutes.
We’re introduced to a teen who after a casual hook up learns she has contracted the faceless It and that It will now follow her and kill her unless she goes out and porks someone else, creating a chain of people between her and It. What ensues is a group of teens working to help their friend fend It off. First they take her to the beach, then into a tryst with the neighbor boy, then to the community pool, and then into a tryst with her weird friendzone buddy who then goes out to fuck some prostitutes.
That recap is slightly more skeletal than the actual films plot. The plot and characters and their development is razor thin, all served up with a dollop of anticlimactic ending on top.
So why is this film so lauded? I honestly can’t figure that out. It seems universally acknowledged that the last third is flimsy and unsatisfying. It’s one thing to debate the ending of a film; I understand why some people feel the ending of Hereditary doesn’t work, but this is beyond that. The last portion is non-sensical and comes out of no where, almost as if the writer had no clue where to go or what to do. We are shown earlier on the beach that It is immune to guns or physical violence. It is an otherworldly force and not bound to the same physical laws that the imperiled teens are. This is a fact that is visually demonstrated to us. So when the teens stage their coup de grace and attempt to electrocute it at the public pool I'm left wondering why they thought that idea would work. Spoilers: it doesn't. The teens are back to square one after only having made it to square two and as a viewer I'm left pondering the point of all of this. If horror films are supposed to have set ups and pay offs that either frighten us or cut into some part of our psyche to shock and disturb then where does this fall? It's neither scary nor disturbing. Even worse, it isn't exciting.
I get the strong impression that director David Robert Mitchell would rather be making films about moody teens that didn't have any horror elements. That's a feeling that seems to permeate Post-Horror films. More often than not these films are indie films or mumblecore films that would be generic and forgettable if it wasn't for their horror aspects. The Horror, both in conception and execution, is second to moody people grappling with their sexualities or emotions or desires. Mitchell's first film, The Myth Of The American Sleepover, was about a group of teens in Detroit hanging out and mumbling at each other during the end of summer break. It's almost like you could throw a sex monster into that plot and get It Follows. Weird how repackaging your Indie film as a Horror film puts butts into seats and gets people talking.
I can rag on this film for days. I disliked it more than most things I dislike. Ultimately, as a fan of Horror films, I feel hoodwinked. This doesn't feel like a Horror film and doesn't elicit either the fun of slashers or the lurking dread of headier horror. It's an idea dumped into another movie and never really given the kick it needs to develop into something captivating. Conceptually I like the idea, it's a good seed, it's just doesn't germinate into anything interesting.
Horror is supposed to cut into the fears deep within our primal monkey brains and let us work them out vicariously through the characters and their decisions. Ultimately I don't know who I'm supposed to connect with or what I'm supposed to be afraid of. The kids are lethargic and so is the plot, the titular It is underdeveloped and one note.
Like other high concept art films masquerading as horror films such as Steven Soderberg's Unsane, critics are aroused and titillated, and I don't know why. It Follows is a nice idea, a great trailer, and a plurp of a Horror film.
Cut to shot of lead kids walking down the street with a guy walking behind them. Spooky!