Sexually transmitted horror: why It Follows is a modern Halloween masterpiece

The new breed of horror movie is minimalist and portentous, full of wide angles, synthy scores and eerily uncanny onlookers peering into houses and classrooms, their faces terrifyingly blank. For some reason, they’re often naked. But whether its Hereditary, It Comes at Night or Get Out, all in one way or another pay homage to It Follows, David Robert Mitchell’s languid sex-panic chiller, which enraptured and baffled audiences in 2014 and today stands as one of the most important films in modern horror.

Along with The Babadook, released that same year, It Follows arrived as closely indebted to the stalk-and-slash terror of John Carpenter’s Halloween as it was the slow-paced American indies that pop up every year at Sundance. The subgenre they’ve birthed, named “elevated horror” by those who are annoying, is often used as a catch-all for modern horror movies that are particularly good. Never mind that there have always been incredibly compelling and well-made horror films with loftier things on their minds than gratuitous sex and violence. Some even do all of the above at once.

But Mitchell’s subsequent work brings to mind how incredibly radical It Follows was in 2014. His 2018 follow-up, the much-delayed mystery Under the Silver Lake, is a sunlit Los Angeles noir grappling with themes of ambition, greed and the male gaze. It earned polarising reviews since its Cannes debut, along with comparisons to the similarly ambitious and infuriating Southland Tales, Richard Kelly’s doomed follow-up to his 2001 cult classic Donnie Darko.

It's pure rabbit-hole cinema, with Andrew Garfield’s reclusive protagonist diving head-first into an exhausting missing-person case that comes to involve, among many other things, a cereal box, sex workers and a surreally prolific songwriter. But it’s also not an enormous tonal turnaround from It Follows. Both are languid mysteries, both with a firm interest in keeping their audiences at a distance, and both understandably infuriating.

It Follows cast Maika Monroe as Jay, a pretty college student whose fling with a new boyfriend rapidly turns into a horror movie: he’s on the run from a supernatural presence that can take a number of different bodily forms and slowly pads after you like Michael Myers if he were sapped of all of his energy. The only way to escape it is to “pass on” the entity’s interest in you through sex – think of it as a sexually transmitted stalking.

But if the entity successfully kills you, it will once again go after the person that gave it to you. Jay unwittingly sleeps with her new boyfriend, and finds herself stalked by the presence, which manifests as everything from an elderly naked man to a zombified cheerleader.

It Follows is terrifying, uncomfortable and also makes very little sense. Quentin Tarantino memorably chastised Mitchell’s apparent inability to keep “his mythology straight” during a 2015 interview with Vulture, picking at the movie’s cavalier relationship with the “rules” of its own villain, how it kills and how it can be successfully harmed.

The film also inspired a particularly detailed letter of complaint to The Telegraph’s very own Tim Robey over his positive review. And while the mysterious correspondent, based in Oregon, was clearly either unwell or the world’s most determined prankster, there was a certain logic to his criticism. Why didn’t Jay just fly to Australia to escape her pursuer? Surely “It” couldn’t just walk all the way through the ocean until it arrived down under…

It’s important to remember, however, that It Follows, like so many of the horror films it inspired in its wake, is far more interested in mood than its own internal logic. It’s something that has made this new wave of spooky thrillers particularly polarising as a result, the dismal audience scores and underwhelming box office grosses of It Follows-alikes including The Witch and It Comes at Night sparking significant debate about the appeal of modern slow-burn horror, their sinister intensity only matched by their sometimes alienating pacing.

But removed from its slightly nonsensical rulebook is a sensory masterpiece, one that lifts from a number of cult horror movies but so dreamily that it constantly feels brand new. Take its opening sequence, which sees a young woman sprinting down a suburban street in heels, clearly at the end of a long night, and terrified by an unknown presence.

We don’t see what she’s running from, and the sequence is shot in a single, glorious long take devoid of editing effects or intrusive music, but it remains uniquely disquieting. The smash-cut to the girl’s dead body the next morning, twisted into a human pretzel on a beach, is just the cherry on top.

Produced on a relatively shoestring budget of $2 million, It Follows came to Mitchell in a dream. Speaking to Slant Magazine, Mitchell recalled a recurring nightmare during his childhood in which a figure in the distance would appear to be walking straight at him, though no one else could see it. “I knew, in the way you know in a dream, this kid was like a monster, he was going to hurt me, and in it, I felt like he was a vampire or zombie or some kind of thing I didn’t know. It was very strange, the way he just flowed, though he looked normal… It was the feeling of that anxiety and dread of knowing that something was always coming closer and coming toward you that inspired me.”

Fresh from his debut, the low-fi coming-of-age drama The Myth of the American Sleepover, Mitchell hadn’t necessarily intended to move into the horror space, but found that of all the scripts he had been developing that his horror idea was earning the most interest from potential financiers. It would also prove intriguingly oddball to many of the people Mitchell asked to read it – one even assumed it to be a “very warped nightmarish sequel” to his first film, wherein everyday teenage angst had unexpectedly melded with a murderous sex-ghoul.

But he was also aware that translating the minimalism of his first film to the horror genre would be tricky, particularly in making the image of a person walking slowly towards you into something actually scary. “I saw it in my head and it felt right to me, but that’s hard to express even on the page,” he told Anthem Magazine. “It’s very much about the visuals. It’s very much about the atmosphere and you need to be in that environment, hear that music, the sound, and have all those things working together to really feel it completely.”

A “lookbook” was put together as a result, with Mitchell curating a selection of images from photographers, artists and films that he felt captured the mood he was looking for, among them David Lynch, A Nightmare on Elm Street and Cat People. Notably, the photographers Gregory Crewdson and Todd Hido were well represented, their eerie, wide-lens snapshots of small-town Americana creatively replicated in the film itself.

In It Follows, characters are often positioned at the centre of wide frames, or seen moving slowly into shot, or filling sinister dead space. And by the time the film explains the mechanics of its villain, those widescreen frames suddenly become potential threats, your eyes inevitably darting to their corners to try and spot lurking presences or unbilled extras in the background who look just a tad too enthusiastic in their walking.

As Mitchell told MovieMaker: “The idea was that [the audience] can see into the distance, see along the edges, so once we set up what’s happening, they would start to scan the frame because we’re not necessarily spoon-feeding where that danger is coming from. Then the danger can come from anywhere and it can be anyone. Once you establish that, anyone and anything in the frame can start to frighten people.”

Shooting in his hometown of Detroit, Michigan meant that Mitchell had intimate knowledge of where and when to shoot, bouncing his cast and crew between the pristine lawns of the suburbs to the derelict ruins of Detroit’s abandoned industrial estates.

The central scene in which Jay is strapped to a chair and told of the entity now stalking her was filmed in both an disused power plant (for interiors) and an abandoned mental institution (for exteriors). Cinematographer Mike Gioulakis jokes to Filmmaker Magazine that they “didn’t have to add too much creepiness for those shots.” It was a last minute replacement for a previous location that the crew were barred from filming in due to a murder that had just occurred.

Mitchell had meticulously storyboarded his movie in advance of filming, but wasn’t afraid of shooting on the fly either. Several ultimately memorable shots and effects materialised that way, from Jay lounging out of a car door and picking at the flowers on the ground, to the disturbingly languid speed of the entity. A set piece at an outdoor concert, in which Jay and her friends incorrectly believe that they are safe within a sea of people, was also cut for budgetary reasons, Mitchell taking a while to realise quite how expensive that would be to shoot.

The film’s rapid production was only matched by the speed to get it before audiences. Accepted into Cannes in 2014, Mitchell was left with just three weeks to lock down the film’s sound, colouring and its score – a surprise to anyone who immediately fell in love with the by turn terrifying and oddly romantic sounds of composer Disasterpeace.

Mitchell had reached out to the musician, otherwise known as Rich Vreeland, after hearing the music he had created for the video game Fez, and the pair initially theorised a score heavy on guitars and acoustic instruments. This was quickly scrapped, Vreeland deciding to spin off from the temporary score Mitchell had used on his first edit of the film – one stocked with vintage John Carpenter and musicians including John Cage and Krzysztof Penderecki, along with extracts from his Fez score.

“David definitely developed a case of ‘temp love,’ as they call it, and I had to work with him to create something new but also in a similar fashion to those pieces,” Vreeland told Entertainment Weekly. “I often worked straight from those references pieces, but it was mostly about tone—getting a sense of what sort of approach works, what style and level of energy. I tried to boil those references down to adjectives and simple ideas and then rebuild the music back up from the ground as something new and different.”

Added Mitchell to Complex Magazine: “When we started talking, I said that I wanted something that could be beautiful and melodic in some places and then also an assault.”

It also helped set up a tone of perpetual uncertainty when it came to its era. While the score might nod towards the late-Seventies, the film’s costume design is decidedly modern, yet all of the television sets glimpsed on-screen are broadcasting black-and-white movies or classic cartoons. Even further, some of the props utilised are almost retro-futuristic. One moment, depicting a character using an odd palm-pilot device encased in a plastic sea-shell, has become a bone of contention among fans.

“It’s a Sixties shell compact that we turned into a cell phone e-reader,” Mitchell finally confirmed to the AV Club. “I wanted modern things, but if you show a specific smartphone now, it dates it. It’s too real for the movie… So we made one up. And all of that is really just to create the effect of a dream—to place it outside of time, and to make people wonder about where they are.”

Upon its release, It Follows was met with uproarious critical acclaim; reviews praised the film for its fresh take on horror tropes, its chilling score and its gorgeous visuals. There was inevitable backlash, from mass walkouts at a secret screening of the film by Odeon Cinemas weeks before its official release to criticism from sections of the horror community as to its actual merits. But today it exerts an unmistakably powerful grip on the horror filmmakers that emerged in its wake.

Where once It Follows felt like a horror anomaly in terms of its tone and aesthetics, they’re now easy to spot throughout high-profile horror, its influence felt in the naked cult lurking after Toni Collette’s family in Hereditary, or the relentless attack by uncanny, scarily static home invaders in Us, Jordan Peele’s follow-up to Get Out.

And with the release of Under the Silver Lake, Mitchell continues to prove himself one of cinema’s most fervent brain-fiddlers. Audiences are unlikely to emerge from his work without a strong opinion. One thing we shouldn’t be expecting anytime soon, however, is a sequel. Or at least one explaining the origins of the titular “It”, or why it does the things it does.

“The film is a nightmare, and to try to put some kind of magical starting point for it, to have a moment where it all began and to explain that logically, places it somewhere within the real world… Or it suggests magic,” Mitchell told First Showing. “And to do either of those two things, for me, robs it of being a nightmare. When you’re in a dream or a nightmare, you don’t need to have a terrible event to start the action that puts you within that terrible experience. You don’t need some kind of magical object. You don’t need those things, and, if they were in there, it’d be quite silly. If you were in a nightmare, there would be no logical step to be able to explain it. It just is.”

Tarantino won’t be pleased.