Pretty much everyone and their grandmother (please make sure that actually is your grandmother walking towards you) has been talking about David Robert Mitchell's latest horror film, It Follows, and I've got no intentions breaking that cycle. If you haven't seen it and you have any interest at all, GO SEE IT! Then come back and read what I've written here if you care enough. And to those of you who aren't interested in the film at all but still read this: U da real MVPs.
I'm just going to go ahead and get this out of the way: I really enjoyed It Follows. Like a lot. Sure it has some problems and I can see why some people might not dig it as much as I do. But on the whole it's a beautifully shot and amazingly scored and acted film. It's also both one of the best films I've seen from this year and one of the most suspenseful films I've seen in a long, long time. But really, even given how viscerally tense the film was when I first watched it, I think what actually makes It Follows such a potential horror classic is what lingers with you long after the credits roll.
And no, by lingering I don't mean the STD metaphor that everyone has been touting the film as being. While you can read it that way, I think doing so is frankly selling the film way short and doing yourself a disservice by sticking to a surface reading and not digging a little deeper. (Just a disclaimer: any statement that is construed as a crude double entendre isn't my fault. That's on you, pal.) I'm not going to go into why I think it's a faulty interpretation, that's not why I'm writing this, but I will just say that if that's how you interpret it, you need to ask yourself whether or not sleeping with someone else gets rid of an STD.
There's also the idea that maybe all of the forms the monster takes are either those of victims of sexual abuse (the old woman in the hospital gown, the half naked women in the kitchen peeing on herself) or a perpetrator of some kind of sexual abuse (we see Greg going from girl to girl through the early parts of the movie, the way the monster presents itself as his mother, the voyeuristic little boy who kept trying to sneak peaks of Jay naked). While some forms the monster chooses make this somewhat of a stretch too, I think the idea of one act of sexual abuse perpetuating itself into a vicious chain of similar actions - where the abused becomes the abuser - is much more plausible and an overall more poignant, powerful statement than a simple metaphor for herpes.
But, believe it or not (at this point I'm sure it's not hard at all), even THAT's not what I wanted to talk about going into this. Though admittedly I've spent a lot of time on it already. No, what I actually wanted to talk about is what It Follows has to say that really, truly terrifies me and I'm sure terrifies every man and woman at some point in their life. And how it maybe suggests to combat it.
I think ultimately the reason why the monster in It Follows is so genuinely scary is because it represents one of the greatest universal fears of mankind. And it's not death necessarily. It's the inevitability of time running out.
While all the characters in the film differ in age, they all, especially Jay, are either about to or find themselves entering that strange post-high school world where you're not really a kid anymore but you're not quite ready for what's next. Jay herself is already in college and finds herself reminiscing about her girlhood dreams of being old enough to go on dates with boys without parental supervision. Her friends similarly often seek comfort in childhood memories of first kisses, sleepovers and finding secret stacks of Playboys by accident. In an early scene where Hugh takes Jay to a movie before passing the curse onto her, the pair play a game revolving around who in the crowd of strangers you'd most like to switch places with. To her surprise, Hugh chooses a little kid out with its parents. "Imagine," he says to her, "having your whole life still ahead of you." The characters in It Follows aren't just running from a mysterious, deadly shapeshifter. They're running from adulthood.
Take the use of technology for instance. Though it doesn't really play any major role in the plot, the presence of television and other media is almost constant. Nearly every time the characters are in a room together, there's a TV. And most of the time it's on and showing some kind of magical, escapist film from a bygone era. Then there's Yara's strange, clamshell e-reader. Anytime the gang isn't on the run, she's got it open and is reading from Dostoyevsky's The Idiot - unsurprisingly a book about a young person trying to adjust to the various tensions of life. Though perhaps not intentionally on their parts, the characters are constantly searching for forms of escape from the reality that is swiftly approaching them.
"But what about all the sex?!" you say. I'm getting to that! While I can see the above interpretation of it representing sexual abuse (and to a much lesser extent STDs), what I saw the portrayal of sex as was another form of escape. For me, it's a more positive representation of sex - the idea that sex has the power to make us forget about death, to free us of even our most deep-seated anxieties if only for its duration. Sure, literally the kids have sex in an attempt to pass the monster on to another person, but in those moments where it's simply two people sharing an unparalleled intimacy, every worry and fear about the future, about time running out is gone. For those few beautiful moments, what's happening is all there is and it feels like it might just last forever.
But it can't. "Do you feel any different?" Paul asks Jay after the two finally have sex. "No, do you?" she replies. Despite how it seems in the moment, the reality of adulthood and of the future is inevitable. And so Jay ends up in a community pool surrounded by plugged-in appliances.
If I may get a little English major-y on you for a second, among the plethora of things water can symbolize, typically when there's a body of water playing a major role in a story, a character is going to face a great decision and/or engage in some major introspection. Though water often symbolizes life and generally cleanses a character, it inevitably becomes a symbol of a crossroad - a point where a character or group of characters have to deal with an extremely difficult life situation. How appropriate then, that the community pool is where It Follows decides to have its characters' final confrontation with the monster. And though it's unclear whether or not they actually defeat it, it seems very clear that it is where the characters - Jay and Paul in particular - make the difficult choice that leads to the end of the film.
It is here that they seem to decide, perhaps even unconsciously, to accept their fates and decide that no matter what happens in the future, they're going to enjoy their lives together for what it is and for however long it lasts. It is here that they decide to accept who they are, take life as it comes and try to not worry so much about adulthood, death and everything else that awaits them down the line.
It's that famous quote "find what you love and let it kill you" and it's all right there in the final shot - Jay and Paul holding hands as they walk together down the street mutually clad in white like a bride and groom walking down the aisle, a "marriage" signifying the pair's advancement into adulthood. In the beginning they were both nondescript college kids with no real lives or motivations, avoiding all thought of the end of the their childhoods. But now, here at the end, they are able to build identities for themselves, embrace the horror of the unknown, let go of their guilt and resolve to enjoy their lives for what they are now without fear of the inevitability of time running out that follows them and that follows us all.
