It Follows - directed by David Robert Mitchell, starring Maike Monroe.
It Follows is aimed at the people for whom the question “Do you like scary movies?” can only have one answer. “Hell yes…” - for it is as scary as a montage of heck.
For a start, like the eighties classics that seem to have inspired it, it’s chillingly minimal.
Jay (Maike Monroe) goes on a date with her new boyfriend Hugh, and all seems to be going swimmingly. Until Hugh gets a bit nervous at the cinema. He thinks he sees someone he doesn’t want to talk to.
So he and Jay take off to his car, and Jay passes out, waking up tied to a chair in a parking lot. It’s not what you’re thinking, says Hugh.
It is a new kind of monster chasing her – a shape-shifting, slow-walking thingy that never lets up. You can easily run away from it, but you have to stop sometime, and when you do, it catches up with you.
Unlike the usual horror film, which depends for its effects on fast-cutting close-ups and buckets of blood, It Follows is all icy suspense. And its lethal weapon is the wide shot. You spend the whole movie scanning the horizon looking for something heading our way.
If you want to have the pants scared off you, It Follows will certainly do that. Like Let The Right One In, The Terminator, Halloween and The Ring, it’s the idea that’s so scary. And once you hear about it, it’s very difficult to unhear about it before you go to bed.
