The 2010s gave us some great horror films:Hereditary,A Quiet Place, andGet Outare just a few that come to mind. Each one of those examples comes with a terrifying scene that changes everything. InHereditary, that happens when poor Charlie (Milly Shapiro)is shockingly decapitated in a car accident. InA Quiet Place, it comes with the heartbreaking death of the Abbotts' youngest son, Beau (Cade Woodward), at the hands of an alien. InGet Out, most of us look to the paralyzing fear in the scene when Chris' (Daniel Kaluuya) mind is being overpowered by Missy (Catherine Keener), forcing his consciousness into the “Sunken Place.”
Then there’s directorDavid Robert Mitchell’sIt Follows. The 2015 horror film is a twist on what we’ve seen before, sitting somewhere betweenHalloweenandA Nightmare On Elm Street, while being a completely different beast. It’s a slow burn of winding tension that releases in one shocking moment, with the arrival of the entity in its most nightmarish form.
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‘It Follows’ Is a Horror Film That’s Hard To Predict
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WhenSmilecame out last year, it reminded many ofIt Follows, withour heroine being hunted by some indescribableentity that could be anywhere at any time, ready to pounce and collect its next victim. WhenIt Followscame out, comparisons were hard to come by. It felt a little bit likeJohn Carpenter’sHalloween, with teenagers in suburbia stalked by a silent force with no motive. Thechilling synth score by Distasterpiecewas reminiscent of Carpenter as well.
Still,It Followsis not a slasher movie.The antagonist isn’t a human in a mask. It is some sort of a demon perhaps, something unfathomable that is spread like an STD through sex. This presence takes the form of whatever human it wants and slowly follows its prey until it can reach them and kill them in the most bizarre ways. One scene has a victim being killed by the entity in the form of his mother. She doesn’t break his neck or slice his throat or anything like that but grinds up against his body, water pouring out of her skin, as she seemingly tries to become one with him. If you want to avoid this disgusting fate, you’d better have sex with someone and spread this supernatural curse to them.
That supernatural aspect madeIt Followsfeel a little bit likeA Nightmare on Elm Street, where teenagers are hunted by a man who can haunt their dreams. Once you’ve been chosen, you can’t escape. One scene, with Jay (Maika Monroe) rushing to Greg’s (Daniel Zovatto) house to stop the entity from going after her friend, feels very much like Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) trying to save Glen (Johnny Depp) from Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund). But the killing force inIt Followsis nothing like Freddy. It doesn’t speak. It has no one-liners. And that’s howIt Followshooks you in its first act. It shows you familiar conventions you’ve seen a thousand times, then turns them upside down into something you can’t figure out.
The Entity’s Home Invasion Pushes ‘It Follows’ Into High Gear
InIt Follows, the entity has been spread to Jay. Jeff (Jake Weary), the guy who gave it to her, has told her all about this creature. She even experiences a bit of this firsthand, first with Jeff strapping her to a wheelchair and showing it to Jay, as it slowly approaches in the form of a naked woman. Jay then sees it again at her college, when an elderly woman in a gown shuffles her way, prompting Jay to ditch class and get the heck out of there. It’s creepy but beatable. Just walk faster than this slow-motion monster and you’ll be okay.
The monster takes its scariest form heading into the second act. Jay is scared and, naturally, afraid to be alone. She invites her friends Paul (Keir Gilchrist) and Yara (Olivia Luccardi) over to spend the night with her and her sister, Kelly (Lili Sepe). Jay’s father has passed away and her mother is who knows where. We get one glimpse of her drinking in the background, and while not much is explained, we gather that this is a woman battling her own kind of demons who is absent from the lives of her children. These teenagers are on their own.
If this was a slasher movie, this is the point where the kids would start having sex and doing drugs until the man in the mask broke the door down with an axe. ButIt Followsis not that. Instead, Kelly and Yara are upstairs asleep whileJay and Paul watch a scary movie in the living room. Paul has a crush on Jay, that much is obvious. He’d do anything for her. As they sit there talking in the middle of the night, we know something is going to happen, but we can’t predict what. We don’t know the rules of our monster. Everything unwinds when we hear glass from a window break in another room. Whatever it is, it’s now inside the house.
The Tall Man Is the Scariest Part of ‘It Follows’
Frightened, Jay curls up into a ball. “Go look,” she implores Paul. He leaves the room without even thinking twice. “Might as well go investigate a strange noise,” Ghostface might say. This is the part where Paul should stumble back in, his guts hanging out before he drops over dead, but this isn’tScream. We don’t know what he’ll find. The tension becomes so tight we can barely breathe. Paul comes back, very much alive, telling Jay that there’s a broken window in the kitchen, but no one’s there. “Whoever broke it must have run away.” Sure, Paul. We might not know all the rules, but we know nothing ran away. If you’re not infected, you can’t see the entity. However, we, the audience, are going to get a terrifying look at any second. But how? What will it be? What will it do? Whatcanit do?
When Paul goes upstairs to wake up Kelly, Jay decides to check out the kitchen for herself. The unnerving score starts to kick in as Jay walks in slow motion into the room. Something is going to pop out, but what?!It Followsthen cuts to a younger woman half naked, her eyes black and lifeless, water dripping from her most private of parts, very slowly walking towards Jay. It has caught up with her. If that’s not scary enough, the way the Disasterpiece soundtrack kicks in will make you jump.
Jay screams and runs for the stairs. She gets to the top and locks herself in her bedroom, slumping against a wall. Her concerned friends knock on the door, wanting her to open up. “It’s in the house,” she tells them. They insist there’s nothing in the house, but they can’t be trusted when they can’t see it. Kelly and Paul convince Jay to let them in. She does and they shut the door. It can’t be this easy, right? That creepy woman is still in there somewhere, ready to pop out. Then comes another knock at the door. “Mom?” Kelly calls out to no response. Paul arms himself with a broom. As they approach the door they hear Yara on the other side. “Don’t open the door,” Jay implores. They do anyway, and there stands Yara all alone, nothing behind her in the hallway.
“Everything’s okay,” Yara says, but then, out of the darkness behind her comes a man in a white t-shirt, a very tall slender man (played by 7'7"Mike Lanier, who sadly passed away in 2018), his eyes also black. It’s a huge jump scare. We know something is going to happen, it’s not a surprise that the entity appears. But to appear in the form of this huge man who has to crouch through the door frame is too much. Every minute,It Followskeeps updating the rules of this world. We can’t handle the unpredictability and Jay can’t either. She runs again as the tall man follows, her friends blind to its presence. She is able to make it out of the window to safety, but the audience is no longer safe. The tall man is only inIt Followsfor all of three seconds, but his arrival sets everything loose. If this movie can do that, if it can show up in a form that terrifying, what else can it do? It makes the last half of the film a non-stop panic attack. While the entity will take many more forms, nothing is as unnerving as this home invasion scene.
