Stream It Or Skip It: ‘It Follows’ on Netflix, an Indisputable Cult Classic of Existential, Offbeat Horror

David Robert Mitchell’s 2015 cult classic It Follows (now streaming on Netflix) is oft-referenced as a benchmark in the modern arthouse horror movement – with good reason, since it’s a virtuoso directorial effort in its use of distinctive and methodical visual language to craft deeply unsettling atmosphere from which metaphors burst forth like blood flowers from a fresh grave. It was most of the world’s introduction to Maika Monroe, who’s no stranger to unsettling films (see also: The Guest, Watcher), and a bold reminder that horror movies can be so much more than shock, gore and jump scares.

IT FOLLOWS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: A teenage girl darts outside her house. She wears lacy, silky, skimpy clothes and red pumps. She stands in the middle of the road in a snoozy suburb, scanning the scene, panicked, as the camera spins and pans. Then she runs into the house and grabs the car keys and drives off and we see her on a beach bathed in headlight beams, calling her dad and telling her she loves him and by morning her mutilated body sits in the sand like twisted driftwood, if driftwood had legs and one of them was bent in a manner in which legs don’t ordinarily bend. 

Elsewhere, in the same – or possibly different – it doesn’t really matter – snoozy suburb, Jay (Monroe), who has all the mannerisms of a perpetually bored teenager, casually drowns an ant in her backyard swimming pool, then yells to the young boys peeping over the fence, hey, I can see you back there. Her sister Kelly (Lili Sepe) and friends Yara (Olivia Luccardi) and Paul (Keir Gilchrist) all seem so… sedentary. Blasé city. Even more so than Jay, who at least has a date with a guy who seems nice enough, Hugh (Jake Weary), who takes her to a movie until he suddenly urges them to leave because he insists he sees a girl in a yellow dress even though Jay doesn’t see anyone there. Odd, but that doesn’t stop Jay from liking him, or having sex with him in the backseat of his vintage boat of a car on the next date, after which Hugh drugs her with chloroform and ties her to a chair and explains that an entity is going to follow her now. I guess Hugh is not nice enough after all. 

Now let’s just call the entity It, as in, you know, It Follows. Hugh explains the Rules of It: Having sex transfers the curse to your partner. Jay will heretofore be stalked by a menacing figure who’ll change form, sometimes resembling a loved one and sometimes resembling a stranger. Only those carrying the curse can see It. It can kill you, and if It kills you, It will work backward to Hugh and whoever had sex with Hugh before, and on down the line. The goal is to pass It on to someone else and hope It never catches up to you. This is all rather hard to believe, and that’s why Hugh ties Jay to a chair, so she’ll see It – in this case, a haunted-as-hell nude woman – and realize It is absolutely real and not a figment. You can R-U-N-N-O-F-T all you want, but It will walk and walk and walk and always eventually catch up to you. 

The rest of the movie is about Jay dealing with It. Hugh dumps her on the street in front of her house. Her sister and friends tentatively believe her and try to protect her, and if they’re not wondering if the It thing is a symptom of her post-assault PTSD, then at least I am. Jay tries to go to school but there It is, in the hallway, in the form of a scowling old woman in a nightie. Sometimes It looks like a battered woman, and I swear that one time, It looks a lot like one of the peeping neighbor boys. Eventually, the friend group widens to include Greg (Daniel Zovatto) across the street, because he has a car, and he also looks at Jay in a certain way, because he’s horny and attractive. Jay’s horny and attractive too, but hey, look where that got her. And then there’s Paul, who seems to have been nursing a crush on Jay since that day long ago when they shared their first innocent adolescent kiss. There’s sexual energy and tension in the air at all times in this group, because these are teenagers on the cusp of adulthood, and remember, once you become an adult, you can never, ever go back. 

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: It Follows was preceded in release by Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook and followed by Robert Eggers’ The Witch, and right there, you have the holy trinity of modern horror (noting that Get Out trumps all of them in scope and influence, but arrived a couple years later). 

Performance Worth Watching: Monroe is revelatory as a young woman on the cusp of ready-or-not-here-it-comes change, after which she’ll eventually need to come to terms with the realities of existential dread, including the illusion of security and the fleeting nature of life itself. Happy happy joy joy!

Memorable Dialogue: Yara: “When I was a little girl my parents wouldn’t allow me to go south of 8 Mile. And I didn’t even know what that meant until I got a little older. And I started realizing, that was where the city started and the suburbs ended. And I used to think, how shitty and weird was that? I mean, I had to ask permission to go to the state fair with my best friend and her parents only because it was a few blocks past the border.”

Sex and Skin: A few scenes of lurking-dread coitus; some absolutely non-sexy full frontal.

Our Take: It Follows delivers the most potent coming-of-age metaphor in modern film of any genre. To say It is merely a deadly walking manifestation of sexually transmitted disease is to skim off the top quarter-inch of peanut butter and throw the rest of the jar away. It can be myriad things – loss of innocence, guilt, shame, sin, self-awareness. Whatever you want It to be or don’t want It to be, It is. The fact that the problem of It can never truly be solved, only managed, is true of all traumatic and psychologically affecting occurrences; It, and therefore fear itself, is universal, a key component of the human condition. 

Mitchell makes the idea all the more terrifying by couching it in a dreamlike reality where cues of setting and context don’t really add up; its most realistic component is the omnipresence of sexual tension, and the director often employs a leering male gaze to amplify subtextual creepiness. It Follows is surreal and hypnotic like Lynch, and it’s atmospheric and scary like Carpenter (who also informs the Disasterpiece score, which leans on the synths like it’s straight outta ’84). The film also winkingly subverts the old gross, puritanical slasher-flick conceit where teenagers are punished with murder for having sex, and instead asserts that sex is an inevitable rite of passage to adulthood, where human psychology dictates that the things you don’t deal with and try to run away from will inevitably catch up to you and wreak havoc, whether in corporeal form or intrusive, haunting thoughts at 3am that have absolutely no intention of letting you fall back to sleep. It could also be the burden of responsibility, or the existential fear of cancer or loss or the plane crashing or whatever you take with you into the tree, Luke.

Mitchell sustains the tension throughout the film and on past the credits, into the lives of the characters well after the credits roll, because Jay and friends aren’t getting younger. Time is a one-way road, and it seems to go so agonizingly slow for teenagers, and so agonizingly fast for adults. All this weighty contemplation and reflection and analysis springs forth from a movie so conceptually minimal, it can be appreciated simply as an exercise in suspense where we scan the corners of the screen looking for something to scare us down to our marrow, and still be considered highly effective horror. Its meticulous directorial vision and thematic ambition are what make it a modern masterwork.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Once you see It Follows it will follow you forever.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.