In It Follows, the thrilling new horror film from David Robert Mitchell, walking — so often slow, deliberate, and relaxing — is something much more sinister than a stroll through the park. It becomes the mode of death itself: patient, focused, relentless, inevitable, a haunting presence that is slow but smart, and will never stop following you.
As the film, now playing at the Criterion, opens, Jay Height (Maika Monroe) is a beautiful, bored college student who lives at home in a sleepy suburb north of Detroit. She is on the cusp of adulthood, safely beyond her teenage years and beginning to yearn for whatever is supposed to be next. The film introduces her from across the street, partially obscured by a line of hedges, as she climbs into a plastic, above-ground swimming pool. She floats in a black bikini in the afternoon sun, her mind adrift, a little like Jeffrey Beaumont at the beginning of Blue Velvet — restless and naive, eager to discover something unpredictable in an idyllic and stultifying neighborhood.
Much like Jeffrey Beaumont, Jay doesn’t have to look far. Something terrible lurks just beneath the surface of this town, just around the corner, waiting for the right time and place to reveal itself.
After a few dates and a casual sexual encounter with a prospective boyfriend, Jay quickly learns that she has contracted an STD of both the body and the soul. Jay has been infected with a curse, a shapeshifting creature that will stalk her day and night. Visible solely to those infected, it can take the form of a stranger, or an acquaintance, or even a loved one. It can only walk, at the same slow and steady pace, but it never stops, and if it manages to touch you … well, you better not let it touch you.
The only way to shake it from your trail is to have sex with someone else, pass along the curse, and hope that the new victim is adept at eluding its grasp. But because the creature can only focus on one person at a time, if it succeeds in wringing the life from your most recent partner, it’s going to turn around and start coming back for you.
It Follows thus unfolds around a vexing ethical dilemma. If you’re in immediate danger, and the only way to buy yourself time is by putting someone else in your place, what do you do? The boy who passes along the disease to Jay is more pathetic than malicious. He’s afraid of the creature and sees no reason why he should have to bear the brunt of its curse. The best he can do is convince Jay of the severity of the threat, let her know how best to delay its consequences, and then get as far away from her as possible. He’s not happy or proud of his behavior. He’s just a survivor.
It Follows thus suggests that the conviction that self-preservation is worth endangering others is just as malignant, and infectious, as any haunted STD. Over the course of the film, Jay has a few sexual encounters — sometimes with unsuspecting strangers who are doomed not to last long if Jay fails to divulge her secret, sometimes with male friends who want to help “protect” her, yet insist that they have to sleep with her first to fully appreciate the threat. Jay rarely displays the same willingness to deceive as the boy who infected her did, but they share at least one key trait: an all-consuming fear that marks everyone and everything around them as worthy of suspicion and dread.
This tone and texture of dread, which underscore and amplify the horror of Jay’s dilemma, are exactly where It Follows succeeds the most. Every element contributes to a tension so great that one cannot look away. The sinister, industrial, synth-heavy score by Disasterpeace, which is just as melodic and forbidding as anything John Carpenter wrote, is giving critics hope for a new golden age of horror movie music. The camera often lingers on Jay’s right hand, her fingers wandering gently, aimlessly, capped by a seductive red nail-polish. The banal suburban mise-en-scène is infused with patches of darkness and an implicit suspicion of one’s neighbors and friends.
And, of course, there’s the walking. The creature doesn’t approach with a zombie-like lurch, drooling for brains and comically inept. It moves like a regular person, in short, pragmatic steps, expressionless and determined. Sometimes its visage is terrifying, a hissing boy with a blood-stained mouth; sometimes it’s just unsettling, a naked man standing on a rooftop, watching Jay and her friends like a Biblical prophet watching the damned.
It Follows knows that the prospect of violence is often much more unnerving than the depiction of violence itself. The mind wanders, filling in each dark corner with the worst visions imaginable. Which is what makes a walking curse such a wonderful conceit — for mortality, for STDs, for bad decisions and great horror movies. You can see it coming, you know it’s not going to stop, and you can only imagine what it’s going to be like when it finally catches up with you.