Garrett’s Grumblings – Why ‘It Follows’ Did Not Work—For Me
First of all, let me say that this piece is in no way meant to disparage anything concerning the success It Follows and the praise its writer/director David Robert Mitchell has received. When respected people within the horror industry -including John Carpenter himself- praises a movie for its originality in a genre which has supposedly ‘run out of ideas,’ it makes for some great water cooler talk and could only help people trying to break into the business. It Follows deserves each bit of success it has gotten, as it possesses one of the genre’s most affable heroines in recent memory with the main character played by Maika Monroe. Monroe’s Jay Height is strikingly beautiful, but not so much in the way that she is unattainable. So this is not going to be a bitter, meant to tear down what’s popular rant. What I am going to outline here is what I find scary and how It Follows missed the boat, with the highlighted ‘For Me’ portion of this article’s title being firmly stuck in its background.
When I think back to horror that scares me, the first thing which comes to mind is the first half of 1984’s A Nightmare On Elm Street. As far as horror and mood goes, I think the very first Nightmare on Elm Street contains the most well thought out and terrifyingly put together forty-five minutes of film to ever be put on celluloid. After an ominous scene of dirty hands putting together a razored glove, Nightmare starts us off with a woman being chased and stalked by an entity we know nothing of. It Follows obviously wants us to harken back to this scene, as its opening minutes sees—a woman being stalked by an entity we know nothing of.
Right from the very beginning, one of It Follows‘s biggest praises falls on my deaf ears. That would be its soundtrack. The reason people praise this soundtrack as much as they do baffles me in that it shows their starvation for something that makes them think of John Carpenter’s soundtracks of old. Yet unlike Carpenter’s musical works, the music in It Follows has absolutely no underlying theme. The entire film is filled with distraction each time the music comes on, as the majority of time it literally sounds like composers Disasterpeace fell asleep on their synthesizer. Halloween –again, the way people are praising this soundtrack is by comparing it to Carpenter’s best work, so I am too- always had a consistent theme wedged deep in our ears throughout. Michael Myers is stalking Laurie, there is a theme. Michael reaches a victim, there is a high pitched squeal of strings. This is all done in a way that enhances its action and aesthetic. It Follows feels random and inconsistent, as with the exception of the piece played during its final credits roll, there is nothing in its music worth thinking twice about. If it was made to unsettle, it did nothing of the sort. Even Nightmare‘s Charles Bernstein had the ‘one, two’ nursery rhyme and synthed stalk music that unsettled yet brought you into the film. It Follows follows none of it, and this is not the first time it breaks its own rules. Without rules being broken, there was nothing for me to be scared of.
Which brings me to the biggest reason I feel nothing but apathy for It Follows and its, uhhhh, followers. The way to get under my skin is to jolt me with feelings of the unknown. For example, if I walk in a room I am unfamiliar with and the lights are turned off, I am likely to lose my mind in fear until my hand frantically finds a light switch. What is near my hands and feet as my hand reaches for that switch, moving unaimingly toward what for all I know could be nothing but a nest on a wall? In Nightmare and The Exorcist, sets of randomness seem to happen to its characters and we are given no reason why. Why would an innocent girl be fodder for The Devil? Why are a series of teens getting stalked by the exact same razor fingered phantom for seemingly no reason? These are horrifying prospects of story for people watching these things happen for the very first time. Knowing all of this, where It Follows completely loses me is in its way of introducing the common thread stalking its main character. After going on a date and having sex with a man from out of town, Monroe wakes up tied to a chair. It is in this instant Monroe -and we the audience- are fed bits of exposition meant to get the story rolling. In other words, the man is a Bond villain telling our hero what is happening and how to stop it. How much scarier would this have been if she has sex with the boy and the boy disappears while she is suffering from its side effects? Again, it is what made me feel for Heather Langenkamp’s Nancy, and it is what made me feel for Linda Blair’s Regan.
Some would argue that Monroe’s bits of is it/isn’t it paranoia is what makes the film for them. Could she be crazy, and could her date be full of shit? Guillermo Del Toro was quoted a few years ago as saying what scares him most is what is unseen. As I stated earlier, that could not be more true for me. But this defense gets thrown out the window because it doesn’t take long for Monroe to convince her sister and friends that she is dead right. In fact, we have a scene consisting of the man who did this to her -after drugging her- sitting around her friends squabbling about why he did it. The concept of It Follows would have done much more for me if the man had disappeared and Monroe spent the majority of the film getting stalked by people and creatures she had no idea of. In Halloween, Laurie Strode knew something was coming after her. Yet it took a gradual realization -and a sequel- for her to find out why. After many instances of Nancy proving she is not crazy in A Nightmare on Elm Street, her (alcoholic) mother finally discloses where the man with the knifed hand came from. It Follows lets us know right away, and it is not scary. It is more of an 80 minute chase.
The subtlety in Mitchell’s homages are anything but. Its arguably best shot seems almost directly ripped from 2008’s Let The Right One In, and the abruptness of its ending runs into a lot of the problems that Wes Craven’s 1984 film did (‘I don’t believe in you’). Of course, this could all be intentional, and the movies I have praised here are not perfect. After a near perfect first half, the issues I have with Elm Street‘s Nancy turning into Kevin McCallister from Home Alone in its final minutes is a whole other issue to be discussed another day. But the positive attention layered on It Follows can also be sent to Starry Eyes, a film I happen to really like. A movie again set against a slowburn back drop, Starry Eyes also has a synthed soundtrack which serves its purpose a hell of a lot better than It Follows does. But the main issue I want to outline is that I am praising Starry Eyes’s strength at the slowburn for much the same reason It Follows is getting as much positive attention that it is. The evil of man taking a woman physically and psychologically apart is a very late 60s, early Roman Polanski way of storytelling. When will a modern day horror filmmaker make his own mark with his own aesthetic?