SUNDANCE 2015: Capone gets excited at the creeping death that is IT FOLLOWS!!!

Hey everyone. Capone in Park City, Utah at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival. Here are a few things I’ve seen recently on this particular festival circuit…

In 2010, writer-director David Robert Mitchell gave audiences a peak inside the lives and minds of teenagers in a quaint Michigan suburb with THE MYTH OF THE AMERICAN SLEEPOVER, for which he was rightfully applauded for presenting these pre-adults with a certain amount of accuracy, dignity and maturity, while still making it clear these kids were still kids. Shifting genres, but without abandoning his gift for painting young people as fully realized people, Mitchell has developed one of the truly creepiest films to make the festival rounds since its premiere at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival.

The plot and execution of IT FOLLOWS are so deceptively simple that one almost wonders why other horror filmmakers rely so much on computer-generated special effects, often with meager results. The film opens with a pretty young woman running out of her house looking absolutely terrified. She pauses in the middle of her street, then sees whatever scared her in the first place and runs again, eventually hopping in the family car and driving away. A masterful, thumping electronic score by Rich Vreeland tells us that we should be very afraid of whatever it is we can’t see and this girl clearly can. That night, we see her sitting on a beach, with only the car lights illuminating her. She’s staring into the dark waiting for something to come. The look of desperate resignation on her face lets us know she is ready to die, and by morning, she doesn’t look quite as pretty.

With very little in the way of transition, we meet 19-year-old Jay (rising talent Maika Monroe, recently seen in THE GUEST, LABOR DAY, and AT ANY PRICE), who is spending most of her time hanging out with sister Kelly (Lili Sepe) and friends Paul (Keir Gilchrist) and Yara (Olivia Luccardi). She’s also started dating Hugh (Jake Weary), a relative newcomer to the area, and their relationship is on the verge of getting quite serious.

While IT FOLLOWS frequently pays tribute to cheesy, no-budget 1950s science-fiction movies (the gang frequently watches them on television), it’s real influences seem to be stalker films of the late 1970s and much of the ’80s. Case in point, immediately after Jay and Hugh sleep together for the first time, he ties her to a chair so he can lay out an unbelievable scenario that he’s been living with for a while.

There is some sort of entity walking after him no matter where in the world he is. It can take any human form, including that of someone you know (but it often takes on the form of some horribly injured person, perhaps previous victims), and if it gets its hands on you, you’re dead. The only way to remove this curse is to pass it on to someone else through sex. But the kicker is, only people actively or retroactively cursed can see the slow-walking being coming at them. And if the person you gave the curse to dies, the curse reverts back to the giver (which seems really unfair).

The murderous force seems to be subject to physical laws (it can’t walk through walls/door; it can be injured the way we can, but it always seems to recover; etc.), so if you drive really far away, it will take a while to catch up to you since it can only walk at a medium pace. But when Jay starts to spot a strange old woman walking across her school campus through a crowd of people, or sees a completely naked woman ambling her way, or a giant of a man coming down the hallway of her house, you get how powerfully scary a dead-eyed creep can really be. Mitchell’s command of tension via pacing, sound design, lighting and camera work is extraordinary. But more impressive is the way he embraces and rejects certain aspects of the genre. Yes, sex is the crime that is punished by this evil force, but he’s not interested in exploitation or judging his characters.

Mitchell and cinematographer Michael Gioulakis present some tremendous 360-degree pans that give us a sense of Jay (or whomever might be cursed at a particular moment) looking around, in every direction, at all times. And eventually, the camera settles on the image we fear the most…and it’s getting closer. IT FOLLOWS spares us knowing winks or overt references to particular horror films. A specific nod to John Carpenter would have fit right in, but Mitchell chooses instead to capture Carpenter’s essence rather than ape his style or name drop one of his titles.

The climax of the film is, I believe, intentionally anti-climactic. This isn’t a horror film created to set up a franchise, but Mitchell also wants us to know that the curse hasn’t gone away. He thankfully also keeps the origins of this curse blurry, understanding that knowing the where something comes from makes it less scary. Instead, many of the evil’s nuances, weaknesses, and limitations (“the rules,” if you will) are left for us to discover as we go, making the entire experience that much more terrifying. Mitchell’s sidestep into horror feels more like the continuation of a natural, confident evolution in his filmmaking. Let’s hope we don’t have to wait another four years for the next step in his journey.

-- Steve Prokopy
"Capone"
capone@aintitcool.com
Follow Me On Twitter