'It Follows' sequel could take story in the other direction

No indie-film exec in his/her right mind could look at the critical reception (95 percent on Rotten Tomatoes) and better-than-expected box office numbers ($8.8 million and counting) of David Robert Mitchell’s horror film It Follows without thinking “Sequel?”

“It was supposed to be a small release, and then all of a sudden it’s doing incredibly well!” the film’s star, Maika Monroe, told EW Radio. “I read on Twitter, people are like, ‘It’s not playing here! We want to see it! I’m driving two hours to a movie theater to see it!’ So I think people are excited.”

Though the tale of teens trying to outrun a deadly shapeshifting demon that’s passed from person to person via sex ends ambiguously, there’s already talk of a follow-up. “I don’t want to give away too much, but we’ve thought about it,” says Tom Quinn, co-president of Radius-TWC, which distributed the movie with Dimension Films.

It Still Follows? It Follows Again? There are no concrete plans for a sequel, but the idea being bandied about would take the story in another direction, literally. “Flip the title,” Quinn says. “There’s so much you could do.”

If Quinn is hinting at the title Follow It—a really empowering reversal, if you think about it—the plot could have characters tracing their partners’ sexual histories to track the curse’s origin (while evading the killer creature), which would give the movie a strong allegorical element similar to the first film’s. The original’s heroine, Jay, or possibly an entirely new lead would have to take a literal journey through the messy ties of past sexual partners, a task that undoubtedly comes with its own lessons and parallels to the titular “it.”

Any potential sequel would like have to wait for Mitchell, however, since he’s a little busy at the moment. “I have a lot of different kinds of projects in many different genres, so I don’t know that a sequel would be the next thing that I would do, but I’m certainly open to it,” he tells Vulture (in a great interview about the ambiguous ending that’s worth reading). “I just kinda want to see how things play out.”

But would Monroe be on board? “I don’t know where the story would go, but I would love to work with David, the director, again, because I think he’s incredible, and what he created here was something else,” she says. “We’ll see how it does. Maybe! Maybe!”