Top Ten of the 2010s ☕︎ Horror: It Follows (d. David Robert Mitchell, 2014)

by Ollie Hoff

See the full list here.

As I wrote in 2019, It Follows dances lightly along a tightrope stretched tautly between allegory and contextless fright factory. It’s a masterclass in the social commentary of films by auteurs like John Carpenter, where the story itself is self-contained, following its own nooselike logic, but which suggests—incisively—so much about the culture from which it arises. Mitchell has a genuine vision here that distills and remixes the inexorable tension of stories involving demon possessions or ghost hauntings combined with the bleakness of the great slashers. Along the way, he engages adroitly with the anxieties of teen sexuality and figuring out one’s place in a dark, cruel world. It feels like a world unto itself, which means, of course, that it is only a dark mirror to our own fallen cosmos.

Honorable Mention: Midsommar (d. Ari Aster, 2017)

On first impression, Aster’s Hereditary is definitely the attention-getter, and the length of Midsommar is perhaps a bit offputting. But man, has it stuck with me. Entire swaths of this film are unaccountably burned into my memory. Even if Aster is lifting chunks of his film wholesale from The Wicker Man and other folk horror, he’s personalizing it and investing it with the sublime. This film is a real achievement, and if it’s a down payment on future greatness, then — wow.

Categorical Reflections

In the last several years, it feels like a lot of horror has really leaned into the literalizing grief with its images and protagonists (or antagonists, or both). Not that horror hasn’t done this for a long time already — Robert Wise’s 1963 The Haunting springs to mind, which is based on Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel. Ghost stories in particular have always rung with resonant sorrow across world cultures. Lately, though, it seems like when filmmakers want to do gentrified horror, they use it as a vehicle to work through grief. Everything from The Babadook to The Blackcoat’s Daughter pays tribute to grief, and Aster has made two films back to back that wallow in exorbitant grieving, and grief lurks in the background of Maika Monroe’s character in It Follows. One of the things I liked most about It Follows is that it bucks the therapeutic bent of so many other lauded horror hits of the last decade. But the same therapeutic bent is also what anchors the operatic grandiosity of Aster’s vision. In any event, it feels like horror is increasingly the place where our pop culture goes to mourn, and I find that to be a fascinating development.☕️

It Follows ☕︎ David Robert Mitchell, 2014

It is utterly invigorating to witness two essential ingredients of filmmaking come together in a big way: 1.) a director who knows precisely what he’s doing and 2.) a filmmaking team with the chops to make that vision happen. Even someone who is not a horror connoisseur (like me) can spot the influence of John Carpenter all over It Follows, but not at all in the way of imitation. It’s probably fair to dub it homage, but that doesn’t feel quite right, either. This is the work of a team of artists who have used Carpenter’s (and probably Dario Argento’s) toolkit to build something uniquely theirs.

Mitchell’s particular brilliance in this film is that the central conceit and how he plays it out is highly suggestive of multiple themes, but ultimately evades functioning as an allegory. As numerous others have already observed, It Follows sounds like an urban legend: an entity that tracks and tries to kill you because you have slept with the previous person the entity was following; if you die, the entity returns to tracking the previous quarry. The only way to stop the entity is to have sex with another person, passing it on to them and hoping that they pass it far enough along that it buys you sufficient time.

Based on this premise, it’s easy to imagine a film that treats It as a representation of the fear of venereal disease, or maybe a reactionary propaganda piece cautioning against sex positivity. But it’s really not. Not exactly. You might also think that it’s about the inevitability of death, or maybe about teenagers’ burgeoning awareness of how sex and death are related to their cosmic situation. That’s not exactly it, either. I mean, it’s about all those things, of course, but so are so many other horror stories.

A couple other elements really complicate this film. For one, the emotional arc of the main characters is less about sexual hangups and far more about the ethics of sentencing another person to death for the sake of your own survival. And if not your own, then what about the people who have passed it on before you? Should you simply let yourself die and throw the problem back on people who have already washed their hands of it?

Another facet of this is Mitchell’s use of location. Mostly, the movie hangs out in a Detroit suburb where it could be 2019 or 1981. What’s interesting is how the teens make use of urban and rural spaces. The city is where they go to get their needs met: Jay (Maika Monroe) goes there to hook up with Hugh (Jake Weary), who passes It to her; it’s where Hugh had his house away from home; it’s also where the teens go to confront the entity in the film’s climax, with an abandoned hospital as the site of their battle. The country is where they go literally to get away from It. They retreat to a beach house and hang out there attempting to recoup and gather their thoughts; it’s at a rural hospital that Jay first makes the decision to pass It along to someone else, and it’s in the country that she submits herself to a random encounter with some dudes on a boat. There’s something going on in the way that the major transactions in the film take place outside the suburbs, but the ‘burb is where they do most of their waiting and watching. No location in It Follows is free of dread, but the suburban neighborhood seems to be a place of stasis, the place to which all inevitably return.

Then there’s the shape of the entity itself, which in all but one instance takes the form of a dead—or seemingly dead—person. It usually appears in underclothes, to boot. What ups the ick factor is knowing that when the entity kills its quarry, it mounts the body in a ghoulish fit of ecstasy. Not every form it takes is someone that It has killed previously, but I strongly suspect that several of them are, raising the question of how previous hosts tried to get rid of It, and upon whom.

All of these choices—the location hopping, the forms of the entity—draw attention to the power dynamics involved in the life and death choices the protagonists make throughout the film, implicating a long, long line of previous hosts and perhaps suggesting something about how youth, race, class, and privilege factor into who lives, who dies, and when in America. Maybe.

None of these thematic suggestions would matter if the film weren’t so expertly shot (courtesy Mike Gioulakis) and edited (thanks to Julio C. Perez IV), if the score wasn’t so propulsive and haunting, and if the production design hadn’t absolutely nailed down the milieu. The performances in the cast are artless and winning, if not polished, and it works in the film’s favor. Mitchell’s careful attention to depth and framing really pay off throughout the film, accruing subtle power right until the final two shots of the film, in which the ambiguity of his themes culminate in the shocking realization of how far our protagonists have come and what they’re capable of doing. A final shot that in any other film might be a gesture of hope is framed by the relentless follower as a sign of both resiliency and damnation. The fact that we never cease to empathize is really a mark of Mitchell’s gifts as a storyteller. ☕️