Five-Legged Iguana

¡Qué horror! 2015

Candidate #11

IT FOLLOWS

(May 2014)

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
--T.S. Eliot

Premiering at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, It Follows utilizes the blasted zones and landscapes of economy-ravaged Detroit as the backdrop for a tale shrouded heavily under a veil of dread and unease.

While I will refrain from revealing the film’s premise (best to come into this one as cold and unknowing as possible), I will say that it’s the kind of cinematic experience that gets underneath the skin, that leaves the audience, post-viewing, acutely aware of anyone and everyone you see out on the streets, and the unnerving threat potential they represent.

Things of note that I choose to speak of, in lieu of What the Film is About:

1)      Along with the excellent thriller The Guest (from the director-writer tandem of Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett*), It Follows is part of lead actress Maika Monroe’s resounding one-two punch on the face of the genre landscape. Keep an eye on this girl… Aside from appearing in The 5^th Wave (J Blakeson’s long-awaited follow-up to The Disappearance of Alice Creed), she’s also going Big Time Hollywood in Independence Day 2!

2)     Though I have yet to see writer/director David Robert Mitchell’s feature debut, The Myth of the American Sleepover, based on what he displayed in It Follows, I’ve now become more curious to check it out.

3)     I particularly appreciated the Creepy Classroom Scene orchestrated to a reading of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (along with some help from Richard Vreeland, AKA Disasterpeace). And speaking of Disasterpeace? The soundtrack for It Follows… Creeptastic awesome sauce!

4)     One of the most potent takeaways from It Follows: it's not so much that these kids have no future. Perhaps even more tragically, while they do have a future, it's a future that's going to be constantly weighed down by the dread and unease I mentioned earlier...

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

--T.S. Eliot

* Whose names should be familiar 'round these parts for their work on A Horrible Way To Die and V/H/S.

(It Follows UK quad & French OS courtesy of impawards.com)