It Follows is probably the film that put writer/director David Robert Mitchell on the map. There’s a good reason for this. It’s a confident and exquisitely made low-tech horror movie with a good sense of dread permeating throughout, impeccable visual flair and a whole bunch of potential interpretations and implications. The trouble is… it seems kind of hard to care too much about it? The characters are aggressively bland. Boring teens have sex, maybe die. Or not. Whatever. So yes, the set-up is that our everyteen heroine makes the beast with two backs for the first time with her new boyfriend, who proceeds to tell her that he’s passed on to her a curse and now she’s going to be stalked very very slowly by a white-clad shapeshifter who wants to wreck her shit and the only way  to get rid of it is to pass it on to someone else (by fucking, obviously), which he encourages her to do before peace-ing out as when it’s done with her, it’ll come for him, and then whoever he got it from and so on and so forth.

…What a terrible idea for a film in the year of our lord two-thousand-and-fourteen.

It makes up for this with a glorious sense of design and a very real sense of dread and suspense, despite its questionable ‘70s exploitation flick level premise. It takes it all quite seriously and not particularly exploitatively, imbuing everything with that phantasmagoric feeling that the best horror films tend to have, which at least somewhat relieves the nagging question of 'can they not keep going back and forth, or doesn't that count and it only gives a shit about one night stands?' (to be fair, the ending does suggest the answer to that). It does go in for some jump scares a bit though. Boo.

I say earlier about a ‘bunch of potential interpretations and implications’, but the most obvious and surface-y one (and thus seemingly the most popular) is naturally that the eponymous ‘it’ represents an STD or some such, which seems like colossally lazy analysis that doesn’t really hold up much to scrutiny. As we all know, only one person can have AIDS or whatever at a time with it being thoroughly transferable, and it works backwards from the most recent person. Seriously there’s some more interesting examinations of intimacy and memento mori and all that jazz going on in the film than that gubbins. (Indeed it feels like most of the possible interpretations I could come up with didn’t really hold up to scrutiny beyond the director’s memento mori stuff, which makes it feel like many of the implications of certain scenes are more incidental than anyway.)