It Follows (2015)

Maika Monroe stars in the eerie horror film "It Follows."

David Robert Mitchell, the forty-something writer-director of “It Follows”—a strange, eerie and highly effective new indie horror film—is around the age to have grown up during the heyday of slasher films during the 1980s. Perhaps the subgenre’s most successful and longest running franchise at the time was the “Friday the 13^th” series, movies that mainly involved the brutal murdering of sexually active teenagers at a secluded summer camp.

The theme of sex as the ultimate young adult taboo gets a reboot in “It Follows,” but in Mitchell’s film, instead of getting mutilated, eviscerated, garroted and hacked to death by a masked maniac, characters inherit a sinister curse after having sex in which someone begins to follow them. This is the fate that befalls our soft-spoken heroine, Jay (Maika Monroe), a college student living in Michigan.

After having a steamily intimate experience in the back seat of a car, Jay’s seemingly nice evening with her boyfriend Hugh (Jake Weary) turns ominous when he suddenly knocks her out with a mouthful of chloroform. She wakes up gagged and tied to a wheelchair in a dank, empty parking lot. It’s there where he tells her about the curse, explaining that the only way she can break it is to pass it along by having sex with another person. But don’t let the curse kill you, he warns, or it rewinds back to him, or something like that.

Indeed, the movie works surprisingly well even though the details are a little preposterous. That’s because Mitchell’s approach to the material relies more on subtle and atmospheric imagery rather than logic, building anxiety and tension with the use of stylishly creepy visuals, shadowy lighting, strange camera movements and a foreboding soundtrack.

Maybe the scariest thing about “It Follows” is the bizarre anonymity and randomness of the villain(s). Just what “it” is, is something we never quite know; but it often turns out to be a menacing, zombie-like figure—sometimes half-dressed like one of Romero’s living dead—with ghostly features, baleful eyes and a slow, stiff walk that suggests the somnambulist of the “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.”

One of Jay’s initial encounters takes place at school, when she looks out the window and sees the figure of a creepy old woman—which, as per the rules of the curse, only Jay can see—walking gradually towards her. The scene has eerie echoes of Jamie Lee Curtis seeing the killer for the first time in John Carpenter’s masterful “Halloween,” another film that, like “It Follows” (produced for a mere two million), was made on a shoestring budget back in 1978.

Aside from the doomed sexual metaphors of “It Follows,” Mitchell also tosses in a glimpse at sprawling urban decay when Jay and some supporting characters journey into downtown Detroit looking for clues to the mystery. As they pass burnt, abandoned and dilapidated buildings, they get a look at another genuine horror—the crime, poverty, suffering, hopelessness and desperation stalking the shadows in many of today’s inner cities.

It’s no wonder that at one point, the main character runs away and ends up on the kiddie swing at the park, as if hoping to magically backtrack to a younger time. In the nightmare world of “It Follows,” the thought of growing up is more terrifying than ever.