It Follows at ten.

In the ten years since It Follows debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2014, several horror films have dropped to critical acclaim.

In 2018, Ari Aster mined the occult to give us family-based frightfest, Hereditary. A year later, he one-upped himself with a trip to Sweden to examine the day-glo delirium of Midsommar. 

Elsewhere, British indie Possum (2018) might have escaped mainstream detection. But, relative obscurity doesn’t diminish its effectiveness as a stylised study of childhood trauma.

Still, for all their brilliance, none of these films match the eerie cool of It Follows. David Robert Mitchell’s meditation on existentialism draws from familiar (and some unfamiliar) wells to give us the best horror film of the 21st century. 

What separates It Follows from the pack?

At its core, It Follows is a cat-n-mouse horror in the mould of John Carpenter's Halloween (1978). 

In Halloween, Michael Myers–debuting the flat-affect facemask and blue overalls he’d later become synonymous with–stalked Haddonfield, offing teens as a side quest to his ultimate goal of killing half sister, Laurie.

The It Follows entity–appropriating the image of friends and family instead of William Shatner–lumbers around an uncanny valley version of suburban Detroit, in pursuit of teens unable to shed a curse through consenting intercourse.

Neither Halloween nor It Follows is particularly cerebral. Then again, neither film suffers from bearing basic foundations.

In Halloween, Dr Loomis fills the detective in on Michael’s backstory and murderous intent. In It Follows, we get the skinny off Hugh in an abandoned building right after some questionable post-coital behaviour involving chloroform and our protagonist, Jay.

This thing…

...It's gonna follow you.

Somebody gave it to me. I passed it

to you... back in the car.

it can be a stranger in a crowd...

whatever helps it get close to you.

Sometimes I think it looks like people

you love just to hurt you... scare

you... make fun of you.

You can get rid of it. Sleep with

someone else as soon as you can. Just

pass it on. If it gets you, it'll come

after me... you understand?

Never go anywhere that doesn't have

more than one way out. It's very

slow, but it's not dumb.

So far, so STI allegory, right? Maybe. But once we’re armed with the antagonist’s modus operandi, It Follows gets going in earnest. And, over the course of a brisk 90-minute runtime, It gathers a few excellent parts and stitches them together to create the best horror movie in years.

Cinematography

‘[T]he idea was to keep [people as] a small dot in a wide frame,’ said cinematographer Mike Gioulakis, ‘and having the movement from a realistic perspective create suspense.’ 

It Follows gives itself whiplash with its widescreen nods to Carpenter. Possessing a villain that can ‘be a stranger in a crowd’ or ‘someone you love’, the film’s ‘wide frame’ creates an interactive element, instilling extra vigilance in an audience keen to scan more of the background for potential Its. 

The opening tracking shot–a 360-swivel around a suburban street–reveals a well-dressed and very distressed damsel running in circles (and heels).

Why is the girl running in heels? Is it dusk? Is it dawn? From the outset, the film wrongfoots audiences through deliberate choices in mise en scene.

Mal-a-props

‘On the design end, there was a large effort by Michael Perry (designer) to amass as many props / design elements from different eras with hopes to craft a look that wasn't specific to any one time period,’ said director of photography, Mike Gioumakis. ‘This really helped in creating a unique look in which the world of the film exists.’

To create the ‘unique look’, scenes are jumbled with all sorts of tchotchke. In Jay’s house, cathode ray televisions beam black-n-white sci fi films to a group of kids sitting in a low-light living area. Swaddled in dingy 70s-styled muted greens and browns, Lana scrolls through Dostoevsky’s The Idiot on a Polly-pocket, clamshell Kindle. Corded landline telephones populate kitchens and bedrooms. 

Upstairs, a brief peek inside the mum’s bedroom reveals an old-fashioned radio. Jay stands in plain underwear looking into a bathroom mirror hanging on Avocado-coloured walls. Her own bedroom contains polaroids on a free standing mirror, yet the decor screams old woman; not teenage girl. 

Jay’s neighbour, Greg, drives an old-fashioned car. When the gang set off in it to find Hugh and get some answers about the curse, Paul finds a stack of Playpen magazines in the bedroom. As he leafs through the pile, all the matte-effect magazines are strangely undated. However, the perm-haired models on the covers suggest they’re publications from a bygone era.

Outside, seasons go undefined. Jay swims in a pool. Characters wear coats and shorts at the same time. Most of the action takes place at dusk or dawn.

Alone, an assortment of anachronistic props might not have been enough to create the dreamlike quality present in the final film. To crystallize the effect, Gioumakis and Mitchell looked beyond the film industry and entered the world of photography for inspiration.

‘We’re both big fans of the still photographer Gregory Crewdson and David had him in his look book from day one,’ said Mike. ‘[Crewdson’s] photographs have the same kind of surreal suburban imagery that we wanted for It Follows.’

For almost 50 years, Gregory Crewdson has been staging elaborate, meticulously-choreographed scenes to create disquieting portraits of Americana - suburbia through a prism; Edward Hopper paintings as highly-stylised photography.

The DP borrowed this ‘surreal imagery’ and transposed it on top of It Follows. Once you understand Crewdson’s influence, it’s hard not to see his fingerprints all over the film. 

These fingerprints inform the mood of the film and add to the intangibles, especially as It Follows eschews gore in the main. While Michael was busy introducing abdomens to the business end of his kitchen knife in Halloween, It Follows builds and sustains uneasiness through a combination of widescreen compositions, disorientating props, and, of course, the surreal imagery of a master photographer.

Sound 

When John Carpenter showed an early version of Halloween to a film executive in a private screening, he got vacant stares and a few shoulder rolls. Apparently, it just wasn’t that scary. How could this be? 

Music. More specifically, a lack thereof. Despite being miffed at the poor reaction, Carpenter vowed to save his film with a score. Burrowing himself in an LA sound studio, Carpenter got to work: over the next two weeks he used synthesizers (and a weird 5/4 time signature his dad had taught him on bongos as a child) to produce the most iconic score in film history.

Sneaking a peek at an early screening in 1978–this time with the music attached–Carpenter beamed as the audience reaction lined up with his ambitions for Halloween. Music–a spare, haunting synth masterpiece he knocked out in a couple of weeks–had indeed saved his film.

Disasterpeace–AKA Richard Vreeland–didn’t have to save It Follows. But, as the man tasked with creating its score, he found himself under a certain amount of pressure.

‘With It Follows, we had three weeks to score the film,’ Richard writes on his website. ‘So right off the bat I was like “Okay, here are some things I probably can't do in three weeks”.’

If the visual aspect of It Follows is inspired by multiple influences, the sound Richard dreamed up comes from various wells.

Richard’s background in scoring video games was one such influence. The plinky, chiptune sound found on 2009’s sidescroller Fez lives on as sonic residue, detectable in parts of It Follows’ final score.

To achieve the big, moody sound we can hear in the film, Richard leaned on an old faithful.

‘I don’t own any hardware synths,’ Richard told me via email. ‘I’ve always preferred software.’ 

This ‘pretty powerful’ soft synth is Native Instruments’, Massive. Where Carpenter used analogue synths to create his masterpiece, Richard used Massive to produce his own doom-laden synth score — a score that acts as both a buttress and a booster for the movie.

Did Richard take much from Carpenter while composing? 

‘I wasn’t super familiar with his work beforehand,’ Richard said, ‘but I definitely found the temp score to be very inspiring.’

It

Surreal visuals and Carpenter-esque shots established? Check. Moody synth score in place to drive action and complement the visuals? Check.

Waiting until the final part of an article to discuss the main antagonist of a horror film that’s supposedly the best in the last 20-odd years? Check.

While it might seem strange to leave the antagonist to last, it’s mostly because the villain is subordinate to the other elements that make It Follows so great.

The creepy, lumbering Its are spooky, sure. But they’re spookier thanks to the music. The dopplegangers lurching after the teens are creepy, sure. But the uncanny valley version of Detroit they lurch through is creepier still.

As mentioned, the film is less cerebral meditation and more cat-n-mouse adventure. Still, the filmmakers use the internal conventions they establish to create a number of clever scares and drive the story to denouement.

While there are more than enough japes to maintain narrative interest, they come second to the experience — resulting in a narrow victory for style versus substance.

Is It Follows a cautionary tale about the dangers of wanton sexual abandonment? Is it a reminder that death—lumbering from all angles, at all times—is inescapable? It doesn’t matter. 

Subsequent Halloween films required a backstory and motivation for Michael to justify their creation. But, as he stalked Haddonfield for the first time in 1978–offing teens, accompanied by an eerie synth in 5/4–it was enough to nsimp[l know that Michael Myers was an escaped patient, best avoided.

‘I think maybe if the film is about anything,’ Richard told me, ‘it's about the consequences of making foolish choices, and about sticking with your friends.’