6. It Follows
Whenever someone thinks the horror genre has just become brown-stained remakes and derivative straight-to-video nonsense, a movie like It Follows comes out and shakes the foundations. A brilliantly written movie, superbly acted and masterfully directed, It Follows is tremendous in every sense of the word.
Like a urban legend you never knew, It Follows tells the story of young and naive girl Jay (Maika Monroe) who innocently sleeps with a boy from her school, only to discover that he’s passed something to her. This ‘it’ is now following her, manifested in a physical form. But only she can see it, and it won’t stop following her until she is either dead or passes it on to someone else.
It Follows is quite obviously a metaphor for sexually transmitted diseases and the dangers that come with them. It’s not exactly the most subtle of metaphors and even the dumbest of folks can work this out, but It Follows never acts smug about what it’s saying. It knows that the audience will twig to what David Robert Mitchell is trying to say, and therefore it doesn’t act like it’s better that you for being so ‘clever’…
Read the rest of Luke Owen’s ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ review here.
Originally published July 13, 2015. Updated April 15, 2018.
