Maika Monroe as Jay in 'It Follows'
Anyone that's watched
Friday the 13th,
A Nightmare on Elm Street,
Halloween, or any of the other many slasher copycat horror films may remember that almost all of them contained nudity, sex and dead teenagers. One of the big "rules" of those movies is that if a character has sex they've tainted themselves and opened the door to being killed by whatever evil menace that's at the heart of the story. Many have
argued this takes advantage of regressive sexual attitudes in pop culture, where an apprehension to sex is coupled with the audience being titillated by sadism against a female protagonist. Beyond just horror movies, there's an argument that depicting a woman with sexual agency is still problematic in both fiction and real-life. There's a "virgin whore" dichotomy that Freud would have a field day with, where the culture sexualizes women, but if those women actually enjoy sex it tends to be either ridiculed (i.e., "
slut shaming") or seen as a sign that something is wrong or weird.
The other side of the argument is that many of these horror movies are some of the first films to have strong female characters that weren't dependent on men to "save" them.
Writer-director David Robert Mitchell's It Follows is a coming-of-age story where the monster is treated as curse by way of sexually transmitted disease. The film has been effusively praised by critics, generating a lot of positive buzz at the Cannes and Sundance film festivals, and been called the "best American horror movie in years." It Follows recycles many familiar tropes of the genre, couples it with a really unsettling mood, and produces a story that can be interpreted in different ways.
Follow beneath the fold for more.
As It Follows begins, we see a suburban Detroit, middle-class neighborhood that seems like a slice of idyllic Americana. Out of one of the homes a young girl runs out into the street, looking behind her at something the audience can't see. The girl runs in circles like she's being chased. Her father appears and asks what's going on, but the girl ignores him. She runs back into her home, grabs her car keys, and takes off. We next see her taking refuge on a beach at night. While shivering in fear, she makes a phone call to her parents telling them she loves them and she's sorry. The film flashes forward to the next morning and we see her body mangled in impossible directions on the same beach.
The main conceit of It Follows is that it's a metaphor for how the consequences of life follow us. In this case, it's a nameless shapeshifting monster dubbed "It" that does this constantly and eternally. Mitchell, whose first film was 2010’s The Myth of the American Sleepover, sets up the story in a way that both pays homage and seems like a standard variation of the slasher story. But he then subverts it and, along with cinematographer Michael Gioulakis, creates a visual style and mood of claustrophobic dread.
The action of the movie is centered on 19-year-old Jay (Maika Monroe). She a teenager still figuring things out, including her feelings for an older guy that she's liked for a while, Hugh (Jake Weary). One night Hugh takes Jay to an abandoned lot, where they have sex for the first time in the backseat of his car. Afterward, instead of cuddling, Hugh drugs Jay and ties her up. Hugh then explains that, by sleeping with him, she will now be the victim of haunting-by-sex. Fears about sex are as old as dirt, and expressions of that fear in the arts are just about as old too. The entire vampire genre is similar in that it's the fear of death through seduction and murder (i.e., your lover may kill you) or a venereal disease that changes things forever (i.e., your lover may kill you, just slower).
In this instance, the rules are simple. There's a curse that's passed along through sex like a bad chain letter. The end of the sex chain is stalked by a monster that can take on any appearance, will follow the person slowly but forever, and kills horrifically if it should ever catch them. The only way to stop being the target of "It" is to have sex with someone else and pass the curse along. If "It" kills the person at the end of the chain, the monster will start stalking the previous victims of the curse all the way backward down the chain. So the threat of the curse is never over, even when you pass it along.
The film uses the monster's nature in unique and creative ways. Ever get freaked out by something seen out of the corner of your eye? Well, imagine if that something was real but easily avoidable. Out there in the crowd may be something no one else can see but is coming your way. You can outrun it, but you have to keep running. So one has to either spend their entire life jumping at every possibility, or try to live hiding their fear in a constant form of paranoia. Mitchell and Gioulakis put the audience in this position as well. Many of the scenes invite the audience to scan the frame to see whether something is or isn't there.
From Jen Yamato at
The Daily Beast:
It Follows melds the suburban paranoia of Carpenter’s Halloween with Mitchell's Euro-art house sensibility and gives its doomed teen a fuller emotional life, smarts, and the post-postmodern freedom of sexual agency.
“I think some people will read the film as having a puritanical method, which is not my intention,” Mitchell told The Daily Beast. “For me, it’s not just that the characters have sex and are then put in danger. In the film, sex is more symbolic of life itself—just the act of living opens ourselves up to danger.” ... Still, the dangers of the film seem so far away from the languid, hazy ‘burbs existence Jay and her besties live, in nice homes with raised pools and seemingly absent parents. Mitchell deliberately chose the greater Detroit area of his youth—and wrote all the characters as privileged white teens—for a reason.
It Follows is STD horror for a generation of sheltered kids from tree-lined neighborhoods seemingly removed from the worries of their urban counterparts—AIDS, stranger danger, alienation, and death. And once “It” infects Jay, she and her pals have something more to worry about than secret crushes and more to do with their lazy afternoons than sunbathing and drinking from their parents’ stashes. Only then do they leave the safety of the suburbs to find answers in the dilapidated decay of Detroit.
Most of all, this is a movie about adolescence. It's about that point in life where one is between the innocence of childhood, where everything seems structured and makes sense, and that moment where you step into adulthood and things become more complex. All of the fears and excitements of sex are things to be explored, the possibility of death is an aspect of life you start thinking about, some of the people who've been friends all your life start drifting away, and the safety of home is sacrificed to chart a new path.
What makes this movie a step above the usual Final Destination line is that it creates a world that's both surreal and grounded in these issues. Jay, along with her Scooby-Doo gang of Kelly (Lili Sepe), Yara (Olivia Luccardi), Paul (Keir Gilchrist), and Greg (Daniel Zovatto), are believable teenagers who do both smart and dumb things that one would expect teenagers to do. And the film is also helped in that, while it lays out rules, it never really explains the monster too much. There's a lot to be said about that what makes the unknown scary is that it's unknown.
- Final Girl Theory: The term "final girl" was coined by Carol J. Clover in her book Men, Women, And Chain Saws: Gender In The Modern Horror Film. The book analyzed the slasher genre from a feminist perspective, and Clover argues that instead of being driven by misogyny and sadism against women, these movies put the male viewer into the mindset of the female protagonist, or the final girl alive. The final girl usually has a unisex name (e.g., Ripley, Sam, or Jay in the case of It Follows) and is usually portrayed as an idealization of female innocence and purity. She's probably not sexually experienced, doesn't drink, doesn't smoke, doesn't do drugs and more likely than not is a bit of a Mary Sue. As many have noted, the final girl seems to be based on conservative attitudes of what they think women "should be." On the other hand, the final girl is usually separated emotionally from her parents and the horror of the story tends to be connected to the sins of the parents, which is hidden behind a facade of family values.
- The Idiot: Throughout the film, the character of Yara reads Dostoyevsky's The Idiot. For those that have never read the novel, a big theme of The Idiot is the illusion of purity. Dostoyevsky presents an argument that existence itself is inherently corrupting, and believing otherwise is worthy of a sanitarium.
- Synth soundtrack: Another allusion to Halloween is Rich Vreeland's (aka Disasterpeace) score, which seems very John Carpenter-esque.
- Fairy Tales: In last week's piece, I mentioned how many of the elements for most modern romantic comedies can be traced to Cinderella. Well the slasher genre shares many of its features with Little Red Riding Hood. In some of the fairy tale's original incarnations it's quite gruesome, with the Big Bad Wolf actually feeding the grandmother to a naive Little Red Riding Hood, and then persuading her to disrobe and get in bed with him. Perrault's version of the story is intended to be a moral to young women about all wolves who deceive. The red hood was added to the story by Perrault and has been interpreted as a symbolic representation of sin, sexual awakening, and lust. Add into this that the Big Bad Wolf is the archetypal slasher villain. He's a predator who shows almost (or true) supernatural abilities to deceive and manipulate his victims, which are almost always mainly women. Throw in Perrault's sexual symbolism, and you have the virginal final girl of many horror films.