Toddlers like pass the parcel. Young kids like chasey. Young adults like sex. It Follows provides a game which combines all three, and in this game it is no fun being ‘it’.
It Follows mimics The Ring via The Terminator, once you are ‘infected’ you are pursued. Slowly. Doggedly. Inexorably. There is no hiding from the pursuer, only keeping it at bay. Rest is for the prepared. Sleep is for the stupid.
The villain never hides, but it can – and does – change appearance readily and often, hiding to take on a guise that will boast maximum freak out potential for the pursued, as only they can see them.
Meet the sensible tortoise of horror, steadily trailing the dopey hare that is the horny youth. You cannot break the chain, you can only lengthen it, putting more links between you and your doom.
It Follows boasts a few taut and expertly conceived suspenseful sequences, and the moments where the tortoise nears the hare are genuinely spine tingling, even if they do raise a few questions. (If the pursuer cannot touch stuff, how can it break windows and push things out the way?)
I also think we’re good enough buddies by now to let you know that the infection here is sexually transmitted, which raises so many further questions; at what point does the ‘transfer’ happen? Is it second base? Does safe sex stop spectral forces as well? Are there currently ghosts haunting boxes of Kleenex in an otherwise empty dorm room somewhere?
It Follows makes the increasingly uninspired decision to maintain an 80s tone throughout, with cheesy synth music and slow drawn out scenes. It is thankfully less a ‘boo!’ film and more a building sense of inescapable dread. For that it deserves credit, but is it really an All Time horror film?
No.
Final Rating – 7 / 10. Is it the best horror film of 2015 so far? Probably; but the it’s been a crappy year for horror so far.
