In a world where a movie like Get Hard can exist, it’s nice to see a true success story. At least so far, It Follows has found itself a niche that’s almost impossible in today’s movie market. The film premiered at Cannes in 2014, and it was then purchased in June by the Weinstein Company to be distributed by their Radius division, which basically means that Weinstein had designated If Follows for a primarily video on demand release.
Then, something nice happened.
In the following months, It Follows made a few more appearances at film festivals, racking up more praise from critics as it went along. Which, when considering the fact that we’re talking about a horror movie, is in itself a small miracle. It Follows then got a limited release in just four theaters on March 13 (two in New York; two in L.A.) and was due to hit video on demand today. Instead, due to its critical success (see, this is proof that critics can have a positive impact) and remarkable per screen average in its limited release, Weinstein is giving It Follows a true wide release this weekend. David Glasser, Weinstein’s chief operating officer said, “The movie is performing big, so we are going to chase it.” In 2015, this never happens.
I have an aversion to horror movies because (A) I scare easily, and (B) I don’t particularly enjoy being scared. What I hate most of all are jump scares, an easy way to make a movie “scary” without any substance. It’s a cinematic device so lazy, a person might as well just play with a jack-in-the-box. “Oh, something’s going to jump out at me, but when? Ah!” Jump scares and found footage — often combined — are the backbone of the modern studio horror movie. (At least we’ve moved on from the “torture porn” era.)
What’s remarkable about If Follows is that is feels like a movie. Directed by David Robert Mitchell, there are scenes that feel like they could fit in a well-made non-horror independent film (mostly the scenes without murder), and this is certainly not a film dependent on jump scares. In the film’s opening scenes, we meet Jay (Maika Monroe) who’s on a date with Hugh (Jake Weary), but, by the end of the evening, Hugh has passed on a sinister curse to Jay through sexual intercourse.
There’s something spooky about an evil entity walking towards a potential victim, and this is the whole premise of It Follows: Once a person has this sex-passed curse, they will be constantly chased by a walking death machine that takes a different human form every time, forms that no one without the curse can see. (There’s a lot of “Can you see that person? Oh, you can? Good, then it’s not a monster,” type questions in It Follows.)
Yes, the curse can be passed on by having sex — is this the first STD horror curse? — but that only puts you one notch down the list. Let’s say you have the curse. Now, the curse doesn’t go away after sex. It just puts someone else as the prime target. If that person gets killed without passing on the curse, well, you are back at the top spot again. The question becomes: Do you pass this curse on to some poor sap in exchange for a better chance of survival?
(I fear I’ve made it sound more convoluted than it actually is.)
In a way, It Follows emulates its own demons. It’s just chugging along and doesn’t look like much of a threat, but then surprises you when it’s too late. It’s hard not to root for a movie like It Follows because there’s really no such thing as a “sleeper hit” anymore (which used to happen all the time), but maybe these kind of things can still happen. Maybe it is still possible for a small movie to make it big. If It Follows has a big weekend in wide release, maybe this will set a precedent.
More importantly, It Follows is good, and it is scary, but because of the world it creates, not because we’re all sitting there wondering when the clown is going to jump out of the box at us.
Mike Ryan has written for The Huffington Post, Wired, Vanity Fair and New York. He is senior entertainment writer at Uproxx. You can contact him directly on Twitter.
