David Robert Mitchell – Bitch Flicks

‘It Follows’: More Dread Than Bloody Red

It’s not the best horror movie I’ve seen, but it’s a decent flick that can be added to the pantheon of solid fares to check out this year. Many of my horror comrades hated it or were disappointed, but I encourage everyone to see it just for the masterful use of dread instead of the usual one-note slasher or gore-riddled bloodfests that are passed off as great horror cinema. The genre I love is more concerned with spectacle rather than genuine fear.

Written by Lisa Bolekaja.

It Follows answered the question I was curious to know in the first seven minutes.

“What happens to you after it follows and catches you?” Short answer: you get jacked up. I’ve said this on Twitter and I will say it again here. I sincerely apologize to my fellow viewing audience for laughing with great joy after the first victim is killed. I do have home training. But I was giddy.

We are introduced to an unknown young woman, visibly anxious as she runs out of her family home wearing flimsy underwear and heels in the middle of the night. It’s like we caught her in a state of undress after a long day at work, or maybe after a date, but we never know because there is a great 360-degree camera pan that sets the tone for the rest of the film. The writer/director David Robert Mitchell is forcing the audience to not trust anything or anyone that moves within eyesight. The 360 camera turns are used to great effect numerous times in this film which creates a relentless creeping dread. We never see what kills our first victim, but we do view the aftermath, and it ain’t pretty. While the audience I was with had a collective “Oh shit” moment after gazing upon the unnaturally twisted remains, I laughed with giddiness because I was now fully engaged. The discordant sound design and music score added to the atmosphere of this slow deliberate terror. Imagine if Portishead had made a horror soundtrack without any singing. It caught my attention, and held it for the first half of the film.

Disclosure: I am a horror connoisseur.

This is a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing because I’ve enjoyed horror from across the globe and from every era. (I even enjoy bad horror. Stinkers can be a lot of fun to hate watch. I relish it.) It’s also a terrible curse because as hardcore as I am, it’s hard to impress me. I radiate so much joy whenever a new horror film comes out, but then I am quickly disappointed when it doesn’t live up to the hype. Granted, It Follows has a lot of hype surrounding it (“The scariest movie to come out in 10 years!” is a recent example), but most of the overblown hyperbole is because horror, in particular American Horror, is in a sad state of affairs. Overused tropes, clichéd jump-scares, little to no character development, plus sequel after goddamned sequel has stifled the genre. (Don’t get me started on re-makes.) So anything that looks a wee bit fresh and tries to be serious is pounced on as the next great thing. And alas, many filmmakers don’t respect horror. There, I said it. A lack of respect has given rise to a collection of recent horror films that are mediocre at best and straight trash at its worst.

It Follows in those first seven minutes made me believe there is some hope for us jaded Horror Hounds. It’s not the best horror movie I’ve seen, but it’s a decent flick that can be added to the pantheon of solid fares to check out this year. Many of my horror comrades hated it or were disappointed, but I encourage everyone to see it just for the masterful use of dread instead of the usual one-note slasher or gore-riddled bloodfests that are passed off as great horror cinema. The genre I love is more concerned with spectacle rather than genuine fear. (Remember all the Saw sequels that just gave us diminishing returns each time out? Yawn.)

What makes It Follows click on all cylinders in the first half is the empathy we have for our protagonist Jay (Maika Monroe). She reminded me of the classic old school white female heroines in the mold of Sissy Spacek or Jamie Lee Curtis. The set designs, the cars, and even the hairstyles have a retro 70s feel. The color scheme looked slightly muted, a little drab, and this added a dark texture to the film that takes place in Detroit. The mentions of 8 Mile and the demarcation line separating white Detroit and Black Detroit are quite evident. One of the characters talked of her parents warning her about crossing over that implicit physical/racial line due to safety concerns. Just as there is a transgression of the division between the supernatural seeping into the natural world, there is a definite class transgression between rich and poor (and the inferred racial one between Black and white).

What draws us to Jay is her longing to be loved and to have a boyfriend. She’s pretty much a dreamy-eyed plain Jane, but she spruces up quite nicely when she goes on a date with Hugh who uses the alias Jeff (Jake Weary), and this is where her troubles begin. What Jay doesn’t know is that Hugh is slumming with her. Pretending to be interested in Jay for companionship, Hugh has transgressed class lines. He uses the lower class Jay to save himself from the unknown entity that stalks his upper class suburban landscape.

After some hot sweaty sex in the backseat of Hugh/Jeff’s car (which she initiated), Jay eventually finds herself tied to a wheelchair still in her underwear from the afterglow of lovemaking. Hugh/Jeff quickly runs down what her fate will now be. Apparently fucking the wrong person in this world will give you something worse than an STD or AIDS. You now get the unwanted attentions of an “It” that will literally follow you around. And this It can be anyone you know or don’t know. It takes on the embodiment of anyone in order to get close to its intended next victim. Hugh/Jeff tells Jay that the only way to get rid of It is to have sex with someone else, passing on the creeping dread to them. This all smells of the influence of The Ringu Virus films and all the superior J-Horror/K-Horror that the U.S. has ripped off and repackaged. However, I respect David Robert Mitchell’s attempt to spin an oldie but a goodie into something new. The catch is, if you pass It onto someone else, and they get killed before they have sex with a new partner–Surprise!—It will come back after you. Ain’t that a bitch? This menace is truly relentless and inescapable.

Our emotionally bamboozled protagonist enlists the help of her younger sister and a rag tag bunch of friends to survive. This is what made the film work for me overall. Her friends are just regular teens, no snarky, overly beautiful, or unrealistic characterizations. Just awkward young people yearning to help her. They know something has gone horribly wrong in Jay’s life. They presumed a date rape, but when Jay tells them her new reality, they don’t shine her on or call her crazy, they support her even when they don’t fully believe in the supernatural weirdness. All of this works well, especially when Jay is the only one who can see It –random strangers of all ages, with pale flaccid faces (sometimes naked) , making slow and eerie movements towards her no matter where she goes. Much like many Asian horror flicks, the beauty of It Follows is that nothing is explained and we don’t waste time trying to figure out the mystery of how it all started. Jay either has to have sex knowing she’s dooming another life or forever be haunted until her own death. She eventually gives in to a form of protective weaponized sex that isn’t degrading. The teens-having- sex-and-then-dying trope (Ahem, Halloween and Friday the 13^th) is subverted into something new and dilemma-inducing.

Unfortunately, all promising starts often fizzle out, and halfway through the film the plot lost steam for me. There is some elaborate scheme to try and stop It, but the execution of said scheme doesn’t quite make sense. I also felt that some of the rules of the world got jettisoned, which led to a lackluster ending. There’s nothing wrong with open-ended finales, but I was bored the last 20 minutes, mainly due to the loss of character/plot momentum.

Love it or hate it, It Follows is a thoughtful addition to the horror genre. Hopefully David Robert Mitchell has more dread-inducing gems up his sleeve. But please, no sequels.

See also at Bitch Flicks: An interview with David Robert Mitchell and Maika Monroe

Staff Writer Lisa Bolekaja enoys watching classic Horror Films when they play at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in the summer. Co-Host of Hilliard’s Guess’ Screenwriting Rant Room Podcast, and a story editor for Apex Magazine, Lisa’s newest short story “Three Voices” comes out next month in Uncanny Magazine.

The Future Is Behind You: David Robert Mitchell and Maika Monroe on the Chilling, Thoughtful ‘It Follows’

The fact that ‘It Follows’ is a horror film, and a surprisingly effective one, is almost secondary to the respectful way it develops its characters, particularly its protagonist, Jay, portrayed in a breakout performance by Maika Monroe.

The film is a huge sleeper hit, by low-budget indie standards. This week, it expanded to an astonishing 1,655 theaters nationwide. I spoke with Monroe and Mitchell recently by phone about how the film was made and what makes it so unique.

This is a guest post by Josh Ralske.

In 2010, writer-director David Robert Mitchell made his feature directorial debut with the charming and insightful The Myth of the American Sleepover. Unlike many contemporary coming-of-age comedies, Sleepover evinces nostalgia for youth, but shows tremendous respect and honesty in its treatment of its adolescent characters, male and female, and is beautifully shot, with the smooth camerawork tracking the teens, and a gradually darkening palette giving a sense of the potential trials of impending adulthood. The influences, notably George Lucas’s American Graffiti and Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, are evident, but Mitchell has his own gently observant style.

In a way, It Follows picks up where Sleepover left off. Poignant drama over a first kiss or a missed opportunity at love is replaced with the uncertainty of first sexual encounters and an underlying genuine terror at the responsibilities of adulthood. The fact that It Follows is a horror film, and a surprisingly effective one, is almost secondary to the respectful way it develops its characters, particularly its protagonist, Jay, portrayed in a breakout performance by Maika Monroe.

After what seems a lengthy courtship, Jay has a sexual encounter with Hugh (Jake Weary), who infects her with a kind of sexually transmitted poltergeist: a malevolent entity that can take the form of any person, and will stalk Jay until it kills her, or until she has sex with someone else, passing it onto that unfortunate person. Hugh (who turns out to be using a fake name) tells the terrified Jay that if the slow moving entity succeeds in killing her, it will move back on to him. Jay has to balance the immediate physical danger to her life with the moral quandary of passing along the curse. She’s lucky enough to have a support system: her tough-minded sister, Kelly (Lili Sepe), brainy pal Yara (Olivia Luccardi), sexually confident dreamboat neighbor Greg (Daniel Zovatto), and her friend Paul (Keir Gilchrist), who’s had an unrequited crush on Jay since they were children. Once she convinces her friends the threat is real, the group goes to great lengths to help Jay save herself. In a way, the film is sort of like a more thoughtful, slowed down, and thematically denser version of the Final Destination films, with a relentless, inexorable force pursuing a group of kids, as they desperately seek a way to put a stop to it.

“Calm” is an odd way to describe a horror film, particularly one as chilling as It Follows, but that’s the word Mitchell uses, and it’s apt. This is a beautifully structured film.

“There’s a simplicity to it, to a certain degree,” Mitchell says, “and it’s actually quite complicated in other ways. It’s very simple and balanced, and calm most of the time, but there’s also a certain amount of staging and planning that goes into making it feel that simple and calm.” The film’s camerawork is intrinsic to its slow-burn paranoid terror. “We have a very steady, cool, objective camera a lot of the time,” Mitchell explains. “We often use a very wide-angle lens, and we leave a lot of space in the frame, so you can kind of see along the edges. If the characters are in the foreground, you can see into the background, and the idea was to actually place the audience within the environment that the actors are within. So that you are sort of an active participant within the film.” This effectively puts the viewer on edge, on the lookout for that slow-walking human-shaped monster on the edge of the frame. In one chilling sequence, when Jay and Greg visit a local high school looking for a lead on “Hugh,” Mitchell’s camera does a slow 360 degree pan around the pair, showing the entity moving slowly toward them outside the school, then unnervingly coming to rest on Jay and Greg, viewed through the window of a school office, and as unaware of the entity’s current location as we in the audience are.

“The goal is to be very deliberate,” Mitchell says. “Pretty much everything in the film was about being very precise and specific. Everything needed to be a choice. You don’t always hit this, but the goal is for everything to be a deliberate part of a plan. Nothing just happens because that’s what we have to do. I didn’t want to have to put a cut in a sequence unless I wanted a cut in the sequence. I didn’t want to have to move the camera unless I needed to move the camera. Everything had to be a very strong choice.”

For Monroe, in her first starring role, acting in the film was a strange, but intense experience. “It was just physically and mentally very demanding,” she tells me. “It was having to be in a dark place for almost the entire five weeks, which is not easy to do. Every day, screaming, running, crying. It’s not easy.”

Despite the intensity of the process, because of the way the film was made, Monroe had little sense of what its impact on audiences would be. “You’re filming it, and most of the time you just feel kind of ridiculous, or you’re just not thinking about trying to scare someone. I’m just more focused on the role and making it as real as possible. It only comes up with an audience, and seeing how an audience reacts, you think, ‘Oh, this might actually be scary!'” Having watched Myth before accepting the role of Jay, Monroe says, “When I was reading it, I wasn’t sure how it was going to translate into a movie, or how audiences would take it, but I had complete faith in David.”

Monroe also co-starred in another buzzed-about indie horror film, Adam Wingard’s The Guest and has a longtime interest in the genre. “Well, I grew up watching. I remember the first horror movie I watched was The Shining. My dad showed me that. And then Blue Velvet, Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street. Those were all movies that I really loved and that really freaked me out. They scarred me for life. I really like them.”

Monroe remembers Mitchell asking the cast to watch David Lynch’s suburban nightmare, Blue Velvet, before making the film. A big fan of horror, he cites a number of other influences. “There’s a lot [of] stuff I like, and it’s probably entered into this, in some way. Creature from the Black Lagoon is probably my favorite horror movie. Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the original, [and] the [Philip] Kaufman version from the ’70s is a tonal influence. The original Thing and the [John] Carpenter remake as well. I watched both of them religiously. The Shining. A lot of Cronenberg. Romero. Lynch. At least in terms of horror, these are some of the people that I love.”

Monroe was also struck by the setting of the film, a Metro-Detroit suburb that grows increasingly ramshackle and dilapidated as the characters approach the battle-scarred city.

“Detroit’s just a fascinating place,” she tells me. “So many abandoned buildings where nature has taken over. It’s quite cinematic, in kind of a darker way. It was very cool to explore. I probably never would have gone to Detroit if not for filming the movie, and I think it was a really cool experience. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a place like it in the United States. It’s pretty fascinating. I feel like everybody should go there at some point.”

Mitchell set the film in the area, as he did with Myth, in part because he grew up there and knew what locations would look right on film. But there’s an undercurrent of despair to the film that the location suits perfectly. “Within the story, one of the things that I wanted to highlight a little bit was people talking about the separation between the city and the suburbs, and how sad that is, and shitty that is, to be honest,” he explains.

When I asked Mitchell about the strong female protagonists of his first two features, he seemed hesitant to engage the question. “I write stories about all different kinds of characters, but these are the two that I’ve been able to make. I don’t know.” He went on to explain, “I guess it depends on the film. In regards to It Follows, it just seemed like an interesting perspective to take. I think we’re sort of playing on one of the cliches of horror films — this sort of female protagonist — and I guess I just thought I could maybe add something a little unique to that. I don’t know what to say other than I think it’s interesting to write a female character. It’s just interesting to me as a writer/filmmaker to try to see things from different points of view. When I write a character, I try to put a little bit of myself into their personality, or I try to imagine myself in that world.” Mitchell apologizes to me for that answer, but I think his empathy with Jay and the other characters is a salient and laudable feature of his work to date.

Despite the virtues of Myth, in a way, It Follows is a big step forward for Mitchell. It’s a more polished work and also one that lends itself to a wealth of interpretations. It’s a scary good time at the movies, for sure, but it also seems like the kind of film that will be studied and written about in thesis papers for generations to come.

“I’ve heard all kinds of interesting interpretations of the film,” Mitchell states, “some of which I intended, some of which I didn’t, but I love that. To me, this kind of movie is designed with that in mind.”

Josh Ralske is a freelance film writer based in New York. He has written for MovieMaker Magazine and All Movie Guide.