It Follows

It Follows

Retro Poster

Theatrical poster
Directed by David Robert Mitchell
Produced by
  • Rebecca Green
  • Laura D. Smith
  • David Robert Mitchell
  • David Kaplan
  • Erik Rommesmo
Written by David Robert Mitchell
Starring
Music by Disasterpeace
Cinematography Mike Gioulakis
Edited by Julio C. Perez IV
Production
company
  • Animal Kingdom
  • Northern Lights Films
  • Two Flints
Distributed by RADiUS-TWC
Release dates
  • May 17, 2014 (Cannes)
  • March 13, 2015 (United States)
Running time
 100 minutes[1]
Country United States
Language English
Budget $2 million
Box office $16.3 million[2]

It Follows is a 2014 American supernatural horror film written and directed by David Robert Mitchell, and starring Maika Monroe.[3] The plot follows a girl pursued by a supernatural entity after a sexual encounter.[4] Filmed in Detroit, Michigan, It Follows debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in 2014 to critical acclaim. It was purchased by The Weinstein Company's subsidiary, RADiUS-TWC, for North American distribution. It received a limited release beginning March 13, 2015, but after a very successful limited release, the film received a wide release on March 27, 2015.

Plot

A girl flees her house in fear and drives to the beach where she calls her father. By morning, she has been brutally murdered.

Jay, a college student, goes to see a film with her boyfriend Hugh. While they are waiting in line, Hugh starts talking about how envious he is of young children and how they have innocent, carefree lives. When they are inside the theater, Hugh spots a young woman at the entrance. He points her out to Jay, but she, however, cannot see her. Suddenly, Hugh starts getting afraid and demands to Jay that they leave the theater. On another date, Hugh and Jay have sex in his car, before he incapacitates her with chloroform. She wakes up tied to a wheelchair and Hugh explains that he has passed her a curse through sex. He informs her that an entity which can only be seen by those with the curse will pursue Jay at walking pace. If it catches her, it will kill her and then go after the person who passed it to her. A naked woman emerges from the nearby woods and approaches them, and Hugh drops Jay off at home.

The next day at school, Jay encounters an old woman in a night gown slowly approaching her and rushes to where her sister, Kelly, works. Jay's sister and her friends Yara and Paul, who has an obvious crush on Jay, decide to help and spend the night in the same house. Paul investigates a smashed kitchen window but sees no one; Jay sees a half-naked and bloodied woman walking toward her. Jay runs upstairs to the others, who cannot see the entity. When a tall man with gouged-out eyes enters the bedroom, Jay flees the house and rides a bike to a nearby playground, where her friends regroup.

Greg, the neighbor, drives them to Hugh's house, now abandoned, where they find a high school picture of him. With the help of the high school, they discover that Hugh's real name is Jeff Redmond and trace him to his mother's address where he is living. Jeff informs them he got the curse from a one-night stand and reiterates that Jay has to have sex with someone to get rid of it. They drive to Greg's lakehouse, where Jay learns to fire a gun. The entity, taking multiple guises, eventually catches up and attacks Jay on the lakeshore. She shoots it, only momentarily incapacitating it. Jay flees the house alone in Greg's car but narrowly avoids hitting a truck and instead crashes into a cornfield. She wakes up in the hospital with a broken arm, surrounded by Paul, Yara, Kelly, and Greg.

In the hospital, Greg sleeps with Jay to pass on the curse, and insists he does not believe in it. Later, Jay sees Greg smash the window to his own house and enter. She tries to warn the real Greg on the telephone but he does not answer. She runs into the house and finds the entity in the form of Greg's half-naked mother knocking on his door; it jumps on Greg and has sex with him as he dies.

Jay flees by car and spends the night by the beach. On a beach in the morning, Jay sees three young men on a boat. She undresses and walks into the water. Back home, Paul expresses his feelings about Jay sleeping with Greg and not him; offering to have sex with her.

The group plans to kill the entity by luring it into an abandoned swimming pool and dropping electrical devices into the water to electrocute it. On the way to the pool, Jay sees a nude man ("It") standing on the roof of her house. Jay, waiting in the pool, spots the entity and realizes it has taken the appearance of her father as it throws the devices at her. Firing at an invisible target, Paul accidentally wounds Yara, but shoots the entity in the head, causing it to fall into the pool. As it drags Jay underwater, he shoots it again and Jay escapes. The entity leaves a large cloud of blood but no body is present.

Jay and Paul have sex; afterwards, Paul drives past prostitutes in a seedy part of town. Sometime later, Jay and Paul hold hands and walk down the street while someone follows close behind.

Cast

Development and production

Writer and director David Robert Mitchell conceived the film based upon recurring dreams he had in his youth about being followed: "I had it when I was very young, the nightmare. I had it several times and I still remember images from it. I didn't use those images for the film, but the basic idea and the feeling I used. From what I understand, it's an anxiety dream. Whatever I was going through at that time, my parents divorced when I was around that age, so I imagine it was something to do with that."[5] The role that sexual transmission plays came later, from Mitchell wanting something that could transfer between people.[6] Mitchell started writing the film in 2011 while working on a separate film he intended to be his second feature film, however Mitchell struggled with this would be second feature and decided to make It Follows as his next film instead.[7] While working on the film, Mitchell realized that the concept he was working on was tough to describe and thus refused to discuss the plot when asked what he was working on, reasoning later that "When you say it out loud, it sounds like the worst thing ever." [6]

The film was shot in 2013 in Detroit, Michigan.[8] Director David Robert Mitchell used wide-angle lenses when filming to give the film an expansive look,[8] and cited the works of George Romero and John Carpenter as influences on the film's compositions and visual aesthetic.[5]

Release

It Follows premiered at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival on May 17, 2014. It was released theatrically in France on February 4, 2015 and in the UK on February 27. It was given a limited release in the US on March 13[9] and a wide release on March 27[10] in 1,200 theatres.[11] The film was released along the USA release in a limited screening on 27 March 2015 in Canada over Toronto based International Sales Agent company Mongrel Media.[12]

Interpretations

It Follows has sparked numerous interpretations from film critics in regard to the source of "it" and the film's symbolism.[5] Director Mitchell stated: "I'm not personally that interested in where 'it' comes from. To me, it's dream logic in the sense that they're in a nightmare, and when you're in a nightmare there's no solving the nightmare. Even if you try to solve it."[5] Some critics have interpreted the film as a parable on AIDS and/or other sexually-transmitted diseases,[13] the sexual revolution,[14] and tapping into "primal anxieties" about intimacy.[15]

Beneath the anxieties about sex (and STDs), the film is also about death, about existential dread in the face of death's inevitability, and about how we try (and fail) to postpone death through meaningless sex. There are three important quotations in the film that stress the theme of mortality. When Jay is in English class, her teacher is reading from T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," and Yara reads two passages on the imminence of death from Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Idiot.[16]

Soundtrack

The score was composed by Rich Vreeland, better known as Disasterpeace.[17] It was released on February 2, 2015 over Editions Milan Music in permission of The Weinstein Company with a digital booklet.[18] The digital version of the album went on sale March 10, 2015.

Reception

Box office

It Follows opened in limited theaters on March 13, 2015 in the U.S. and Canada. It earned $163,453 in its opening weekend from four theaters at an average of $40,863 per theater, making it the best limited opening for a film released in 2015.[19]

The movie made its international debut in the United Kingdom on February 27, 2015 where it earned $573,290 (£371,142) on 190 screens for the #8 position. The following week, the film dropped two spots to #10 with a weekend gross of $346,005 (£229,927) from 240 screens.

As of April 5, the movie has a domestic gross of $8.9 million and an international gross of $1.6 million for a worldwide total of $10.3 million.[20][21][22]

Critical response

It Follows received critical acclaim,[23] with critics praising the acting, plot, score, and old-fashioned scares. Critics also praised Mitchell's shift in tone and style, calling it "progressive" and "refreshing" and distant from his earlier works.[24][25][26] It currently holds a 96% "Certified Fresh" rating on review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes based on 157 reviews. The critical consensus states: "Smart, original, and above all terrifying, It Follows is the rare modern horror film that works on multiple levels — and leaves a lingering sting."[27] On Metacritic, the film has an 83/100 rating based on 37 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".[28]

Peter Debruge of Variety gave a positive review, saying, "Starting off strong before losing its way in the end, this stylish, suspenseful chiller should significantly broaden Mitchell’s audience without disappointing his early supporters in the slightest."[24] David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter said, "Creepy, suspenseful and sustained, this skillfully made lo-fi horror movie plays knowingly with genre tropes and yet never winks at the audience, giving it a refreshing face-value earnestness that makes it all the more gripping."[25] Tim Robey of The Telegraph gave the film five out of five stars and said, "With its marvellously suggestive title and thought-provoking exploration of sex, this indie chiller is a contemporary horror fan's dream come true."[26] Ignatiy Vishnevetaky of The A.V. Club said, "Despite all the fun-to-unpack ideas swirling around Mitchell’s premise, this is first and foremost a showcase for his considerable talents as a widescreen visual stylist, which are most apparent in the movie’s deftly choreographed, virtuoso 360 degree pans."[29] Mike Pereira of Bloody Disgusting described the film as a "creepy, mesmerizing exercise in minimalist horror".[30]

Sequel

Following the film's success, Radius-TWC co-president Tom Quinn announced that the studio is looking into a possible sequel.[31] Quinn has expressed the idea of flipping the concept of the first film around, with Maika Monroe's Jay or another protagonist going down the chain to find the origin of "it."[32]

References

  1. ↑ "IT FOLLOWS (15)". British Board of Film Classification. December 15, 2014. Retrieved December 15, 2014.
  2. ↑ "It Follows (2015)". Box Office Mojo. Internet Movie Database. Retrieved April 26, 2015.
  3. ↑ Kohn, Eric (May 24, 2014). "Cannes Review: 'It Follows' Is a Teen Horror Movie Like You've Never Seen It Before". Indiewire. Retrieved October 24, 2014.
  4. ↑ Kohn, Eric (May 24, 2014). "Cannes Review: 'It Follows' stars Keir Gilchrist ("The United States of Tara"), Jake Weary ("Chicago Fire") and Maika Monroe". Dread Central. Retrieved October 24, 2014.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 Rawson-Jones, Ben (2015-03-08). Exploring the horror of It Follows: David Robert Mitchell interview. Digital Spy. Interview with Mitchell, David Robert.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 Watkins, Gwynne. "The Yahoo Movies Interview: 'It Follows' Director David Robert Mitchell on His Surprise Horror Hit". Yahoo. Retrieved 17 April 2015.
  7. ↑ Dowd, A.A. "David Robert Mitchell on his striking new horror film, It Follows". The A.V Club. Retrieved 17 April 2015.
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 Whitaker, Richard (2015-03-26). "It Follows Goes Everywhere". Austin Chronicle. Retrieved 2015-03-26.
  9. ↑ "It Follows Debuts a New Trailer, Set for March 2015 Release". commingsoon.net. Retrieved January 13, 2015.
  10. ↑ Steve Barton (March 24, 2015). "‘It Follows Opening Wide; See it Friday!". Dread Central. Retrieved March 24, 2015.
  11. ↑ Brad Miska (March 24, 2015). "‘It Follows Press Release!". Bloody Disgusting. Retrieved March 24, 2015.
  12. ↑ Parkin, Nigel (March 24, 2015). "‘It Follows Canadian release today 27 March!". Fangoria. Retrieved March 24, 2015.
  13. ↑ Lyne, Charlie (2015-02-21). "It Follows: ‘Love and sex are ways we can push death away’". The Guardian. Retrieved 2015-03-26.
  14. ↑ Olszyk, Nicholas. "Pope Paul VI Make a Horror Film". Catholic World Report. Ignatius Press. Retrieved 2015-04-14.
  15. ↑ Bradshaw, Peter (2015-02-26). "It Follows review – sexual dread fuels a modern horror classic". The Guardian.
  16. ↑ Dawn Keetley, Review of It Follows, http://www.horrorhomeroom.com/it-follows-2014-film-review/
  17. ↑ Chris Tilly (February 1, 2015). "Disasterpeace From The ‘It Follows’ Soundtrack". IGN. Retrieved February 1, 2015.
  18. ↑ Chris Tilly (February 1, 2015). "Disasterpeace The ‘It Follows’ Soundtrack". IGN. Retrieved February 1, 2015.
  19. ↑ Brian Brooks (March 15, 2015). "Audiences Tracking ‘It Follows’ Closely In 2015’s Best Specialty Debut". Deadline.com. Retrieved March 16, 2015.
  20. ↑ "It Follows". March 15, 2015. Retrieved March 18, 2015.
  21. ↑ "‘It Follows’ Was a Pretty Big Deal At the Box Office". March 15, 2015. Retrieved March 18, 2015.
  22. ↑ "Box Office – Did Moviegoers Follow It Follows". March 15, 2015. Retrieved March 18, 2015.
  23. ↑ Alex Ritman (March 3, 2015). "U.K. Box Office: 'Exotic Marigold' Sequel Topples 'Fifty Shades'". The Hollywood Reporter. Retrieved March 3, 2015.
  24. ↑ 24.0 24.1 Peter Debruge (May 28, 2014). "Cannes Film Review: ‘It Follows’". Variety. Retrieved January 12, 2015.
  25. ↑ 25.0 25.1 David Rooney (May 17, 2014). "'It Follows': Cannes Review". The Hollywood Reporter. Retrieved January 12, 2015.
  26. ↑ 26.0 26.1 Tom Robey (May 18, 2014). "Cannes 2014 - It Follows, review: 'tender, ingenious and scalp-prickingly scary'". The Telegraph. Retrieved January 12, 2015.
  27. ↑ "It Follows". Rotten Tomatoes. Flixster. Retrieved March 28, 2015.
  28. ↑ "It Follows". Metacritic. CBS Interactive. Retrieved March 28, 2015.
  29. ↑ Ignatiy Vishnevetaky (September 5, 2014). "Toronto 2014, Day One: Judging Robert Downey Jr., catching up with Locarno and Cannes". The A.V. Club. Retrieved January 12, 2015.
  30. ↑ Ignatiy Vishnevetaky (September 5, 2014). "Mike Pereira referred to as a creepy, mesmerizing exercise in minimalist horror" when reviewed out of the TIFF". The A.V. Club. Retrieved January 12, 2015.
  31. ↑ Miska, Brad. "Radius-TWC Wants An "It Follows" Sequel". BloodyDisgusting. Bloody Disgusting LLC.
  32. ↑ Sullivan, Kevin. "It Follows sequel could take story in the other direction -- exclusive". Entertainment Weekly. Entertainment Weekly Inc. Retrieved 8 April 2015.

External links