It Follows (2015) Dir David Robert Mitchell
It Follows doesn’t look or sound like a horror movie. There’s no thunder and lightning, very little screaming and most of the action takes place in daylight. The main characters – a group of friends in their late teens - are unremarkable and ordinary. The photography – slow, patient, extended shots, pale, washed out colours – is a constant reminder of how banal these people’s lives appear to be.
The terror experienced by the main character, Jay, is hidden behind this veneer of suburban normality. Hers is a private hell made worse by that very privacy. She alone can see the ghostly figures that begin to follow her soon after she has sex with a new boyfriend. It turns out that the boyfriend had been haunted in the same way and through having sex with her he ‘passes on’ the torment.
As the film progresses Jay, in an attempt to defer the advances of the demons that have begun to follow her, tries to 'pass on' the curse to others. She succeeds but the relief is only temporary. The ghosts come after her again after they do away with the men she'd slept with/sacrificed in appeasement.
There ain't no cure for sexually transmitted haunting. The film ends with one of the 'followers' slowly, inexorably walking after her and her boyfriend.
The pessimism of this film recalls the paranoid, reflex association of sex with death that was common wake of the AIDS epidemic twenty years ago. But there's something more chronic and general at work here. This sex = death equation points to a profound pessimism in the culture that produces and consumes this kind of movie.
At first this pessimism seems to be a repudiation of romantic love. Soon after Jay first has sex with her boyfriend she's dreamily lying on the back seat of her car, playing with a weed/flower growing up through the gravel while she dreamily muses on life. Without warning he chloroforms her and when she comes to she's tied up. The dream date turns absurdly nightmarish when he reveals to her the horrible truth that now she's 'infected' as he once was.
However, this isn't just a moment of overcoming the naivete of teenage romance to arrive at a more knowing or worldly-wise take on love and sex. Sex is no longer now a private, pleasurable, voluntary act. It is a lethal act. True, it is also the only way in which that death sentence can be stayed but even that is a losing battle. The film ends but the future - a brutal and vain race against the inevitability of sex-induced death - is easy to imagine.
The pessimism of this transformation in sex doesn't even have the 'consolation' of perversion that David Lynch might offer. Sex is not an unruly force erupting from the unconscious in this film. It is a public and lethal necessity that has more in common with heroin addiction or wage slavery than with any kind of personal idiosyncracy. Sex therefore becomes a symptom of a sick society rather than of sick minds. What's more, the illness is a general one, a 'heteronormative' one - the scapegoat is not gay sexuality as was the case in AIDS - epidemic paranoia. Sex=death for everyone; not just the gays.
This message is so pessimistic that it fills me with hope. It Follows is a rejection of the most cherished of the rites and routes of sexual and familial conformity - fall in love, have sex, make children, build a future and consume onto death.
I said at the start that It Follows didn't look or sound like a horror movie. It's quite muted stylistically. But it's stil very scary! This is because of its subject matter. Its pessimism about sex means that it doesn't have to bother with gothic bumps, screams and flashes in the night at all. Like any good horror movie it holds up a mirror to show the greatest fears of its time. These fears are terrifying enough without any stylistic supplement.
What I like about this movie is that, in it, the scariest things of all are not the aberrant, the exceptional and the supernatural; the worst nightmares may actually be made of the stuff that lies in plain sight.
There ain't no cure for sexually transmitted haunting. The film ends with one of the 'followers' slowly, inexorably walking after her and her boyfriend.
The pessimism of this film recalls the paranoid, reflex association of sex with death that was common wake of the AIDS epidemic twenty years ago. But there's something more chronic and general at work here. This sex = death equation points to a profound pessimism in the culture that produces and consumes this kind of movie.
At first this pessimism seems to be a repudiation of romantic love. Soon after Jay first has sex with her boyfriend she's dreamily lying on the back seat of her car, playing with a weed/flower growing up through the gravel while she dreamily muses on life. Without warning he chloroforms her and when she comes to she's tied up. The dream date turns absurdly nightmarish when he reveals to her the horrible truth that now she's 'infected' as he once was.
However, this isn't just a moment of overcoming the naivete of teenage romance to arrive at a more knowing or worldly-wise take on love and sex. Sex is no longer now a private, pleasurable, voluntary act. It is a lethal act. True, it is also the only way in which that death sentence can be stayed but even that is a losing battle. The film ends but the future - a brutal and vain race against the inevitability of sex-induced death - is easy to imagine.
The pessimism of this transformation in sex doesn't even have the 'consolation' of perversion that David Lynch might offer. Sex is not an unruly force erupting from the unconscious in this film. It is a public and lethal necessity that has more in common with heroin addiction or wage slavery than with any kind of personal idiosyncracy. Sex therefore becomes a symptom of a sick society rather than of sick minds. What's more, the illness is a general one, a 'heteronormative' one - the scapegoat is not gay sexuality as was the case in AIDS - epidemic paranoia. Sex=death for everyone; not just the gays.
This message is so pessimistic that it fills me with hope. It Follows is a rejection of the most cherished of the rites and routes of sexual and familial conformity - fall in love, have sex, make children, build a future and consume onto death.
I said at the start that It Follows didn't look or sound like a horror movie. It's quite muted stylistically. But it's stil very scary! This is because of its subject matter. Its pessimism about sex means that it doesn't have to bother with gothic bumps, screams and flashes in the night at all. Like any good horror movie it holds up a mirror to show the greatest fears of its time. These fears are terrifying enough without any stylistic supplement.
What I like about this movie is that, in it, the scariest things of all are not the aberrant, the exceptional and the supernatural; the worst nightmares may actually be made of the stuff that lies in plain sight.
