His Movie Review: It Follows (2014)

Why he watched it: Positive reviews

His rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

His review: I don’t really like horror movies in general. I’m not drawn to the tension of waiting to see what ‘surprise’ will jump from behind a dark door, or a dark room, or a dark woods—its always dark, right? And too often, the scares rely on that ‘fake out’ scare. For example, in this movie, there are two of those. One time, the protagonist is sudden surprised by a noise hitting her window. Turns out, it was a ball from a neighbor kid. Another time, as she and her friends walk through a derelict (and thus creepy) home—at least this was during the day—a wall suddenly collapses as the protagonists looks in a closet. Turns out, this was her friend in the other room opening a medicine cabinet. The director admitted that the first ‘jump’ was get the audience on edge, making the rest of the film scary.

That doesn’t work for me. I want to leave a film ‘scared’ by the ideas, not by the quick camera edits and thumping music. The Exorcist and The Exorcist III are good horror movies (skip the other Exorcist movies); Alien is a good horror science fiction movie; Night of the Living Dead is a good zombie horror movie. All these movies last not because of the scary moments, but because they explore ideas that we’d rather ignore. That is was makes them scary.

Aside from those two movements, this movie is much more like those good horror movies than those bad ones. It has an idea, about the links between sex and adulthood and death. It is scary not because characters die gruesome, bloody deaths, but because they are stalked by a slow, but unrelenting, personified death. There is a metaphor at work here, one I found myself teasing out hours later. I like that this movie made me think. The acting was fine, the lead actress is sympathetic, and the ‘monster’ is indeed disturbing.

There are some inconsistencies in the monster’s actions and points where the metaphor takes precedence over the logic of the characters (where are the parents?). But a movie worth seeing, better than most of the horror movies typically put out by Hollywood.