by Peter J. O'Connell
It Follows.
Released: March 2015. Runtime: 100 mins. Rated: R for disturbing violent and
sexual content, including graphic nudity, and language.
In recent decades younger filmmakers often have sought to
achieve their breakthrough in the business by making a low-budget horror movie
with an unknown cast. Sometimes they profit notably, as, for example, with The Blair Witch Project (1999). Most of
the time, though, these independent works end up direct-to-video with never a
wide theatrical release.
Writer/director David Robert Mitchell's It Follows was slated for just a video-on-demand release when some
favorable critical buzz started to surround the film at festival showings. That
led to a four-theatre release, which then became a 1,600-theatre release.
The film deserves success, for it has a creative quality
that transcends its genre. It uses some typical horror tropes in a measured way
while ringing some interesting changes on others. We have the group of
teens—few adults are seen—menaced by a monstrous force. We have the illogical
flight for safety to an isolated setting. Etc., etc. But we have relatively
little gore and few “jump scares.”
Instead, to creep us out, we have a metaphor as the monster.
Call It Follows a metaphorical movie. Horror films often mix sex and
violence by having teens be killed after engaging in sexual activity. Call this
either “exploitation” or “a cultural comment on residual puritanism.”
In Mitchell's more imaginative movie, sex is followed by the
emergence of an entity—invisible to most of the characters--that assumes
various human forms and seeks to kill the teen who engaged in the sexual
activity, unless that teen has sex with someone else first, thus passing on the
curse. The entity as presented here could be a metaphor for many things—guilt,
regret, loss of innocence, possible unwanted pregnancy, STD (sexually
transmitted disease); even the process of growing older itself or various kinds
of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder).
Mitchell's teens decide to kill the entity rather than let
it kill their friend Jay (Maika Monroe). This decision leads to a very striking
sequence at and in an Olympic-sized swimming pool inside a deserted high school
in desolate Detroit during a thunder-and-lightning storm. Electrical appliances
play an important role and blood (mucho blood) makes one of its few
appearances.
Mitchell's direction eschews the hand-held “shaky cam” and
grainy look of many horror films. Instead, his shots are held steady, and his
color palette is richly saturated. Mitchell also has “hommages,” as the French
say, to some earlier classic films. The beginning sequence in a leafy suburb at
dusk reminds one of the town in John Carpenter's Halloween (1978). The sequence at the pool nods in the direction of
Val Lewton/Jacques Tourneur's Cat People
(1942), and the last scene, surprisingly, brings to mind Mike Nichols' The Graduate (1967).
Mitchell's cast is
adequate to their tasks, with Maika Monroe, a sad-eyed beauty, and Keir
Gilchrist as her dour friend Paul more than adequate. The syntho/techno score
composed and performed by Rich Vreeland (a/k/a Disasterpeace) is excellent. The
future careers of Mitchell, Monroe, Gilchrist and Vreeland all look like they
might well merit following by film fans.
“Footnote” to the
film: A curiously unsettling aspect of It
Follows is the fact that electronic devices are depicted—clearly
deliberately-- as types ranging from the 1950s to the present.
Thanks for the Flowers Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference. ~Winston Churchill The strains of Barbra Streisand and Neil Diamond singing, “You don’t bring me flowers anymore…. You don’t sing me love songs…” drifted into my room via the radio. The lyrics, designed to rip one’s heart out, matched my mood that cold, dreary January morning. I wrapped the poignant words around my heart as I dressed for an early morning speaking engagement. How true, I thought — the last time David brought me flowers was twenty-five years ago, when our youngest son Bob was born. This morning David had already left for work in our more reliable car. I bundled up against the cold and headed out for the dreaded task of starting the old Chrysler. The beast normally took great offense at the cold and refused to start without coaxing. To start it, one had to find the lever inside the grill to release the hood, lift it, and then find the stick to prop it open. Next, one had to remove the wing nut from the big round thing, take it off, push the little copper thing, get back inside the car and start it. If it went “Pfft,” one had to go back outside and push the copper thing again. If it started coughing and then actually turned... Click here to continue reading.
