It Follows, or The Grand Unification Theory of Monsters

So It Follows, like the previous year's The Babadook, was 2014's hyperbolic horror indie critical darling, getting some ludicrous score on Rotten Tomatoes and with most educated people falling over themselves to tell us how horror films have TRULY ARRIVED.

And let's be fair, It Follows is in alot of metrics a good film.  The cinematography is both entertaining and highfalutin enough to appeal to that year in college I took a bunch of film courses, the acting is low-key and generally acceptable, and the obnoxious "hey look we're adolescents time to talk like a Diablo Cody" dialogue stops when danger actually starts, rather than increasing like these sorts of movies are wont to fall back on.  Alot of people raved about the music, and it's nice I guess, but I'm honestly getting tired of every high-profile horror film sounding like a mixtape crafted by a guy that heard Perturbator for the first time a week ago.

But is it a good horror movie?  Enh.  While there's alot to technically appreciate in It Follows, ultimately my enjoyment was heavily, heavily tempered by the fact that its monster, that nasty 'ole shape-shiftin' stalker,* is really not very scary or effective due to the movie fundamentally failing to understand how monsters operate.

(Warning: I'm just going to assume you saw this movie and so the rest of this review will be RELENTLESS SPOILERS so be warned ya chucklefucks)

From a purely thematic standpoint, I understand the love people had for the monster, especially within this paranoid political and moral age.  And I also understand that some people will read what I'm about to write and accuse me of being didactic, of being a slave to horror conventions and don't you get that the monster is a metaphor this isn't real life you Fangoria-reading jackass.  These people are probably right to some extent, as I am getting old and thus clutching to my horror conventions as a sailor clutches to a piece of balsam during a storm.  But breaking those conventions shouldn't mean your film's menace is possible only if your victims are somehow dumber than your average 80's slasher victim group.

What do I mean?  Basically, a movie monster's scariness and effectiveness depends on two separate parameters.  The first is self-evident, that being how strong the monster actually is.  Is it super strong, does it have chainsaws for hands, does it have horrible weaknesses?  At first glance, the creature in It Follows seems to be pretty scary.   Ooo, a silent, slow being of indeterminate origins that will eventually find you and...well, that scene wasn't very scary, was it.  It's invisible to anyone that isn't affected by its curse, and can impersonate anything.  It's not harmed by physical means, and it has some sort of rudimentary intelligence.

But then you start to think, and realize there are some issues.  First, while it's invisible and a shapeshifter, it still occupies some sort of physical space, as evidenced by the final pool scene where someone finally has the idea of just draping a towel over the monster to reveal where it is to the non-cursed.  It's strong, but not really, as it struggles with opening closed doors or merely brushes away wispy nerd boys.  It also doesn't seem capable of wanting to kill anyone that isn't cursed.  The most effective scene in the film is about a third of the way through, where the protagonist sees the monster in Creepy Tall Man mode standing behind her friends through an open door.  It's clear that that's one of the film's big money shots, but it also locks the monster into being basically harmless towards anyone that isn't cursed.

Now let's be clear, I'm not complaining about the weaknesses.  The most effective horror creatures are those that aren't onmipotent; horror icons that basically dictate how they want to be, such as Freddy Krueger, are entertaining, but can never really be properly scary due to how inherently unfair they are.  An audience needs to feel like a monster, once properly understood, they can be felled.  Sure, the It Follows demon is a bit on the weaker side, relatively speaking, but surely the characters don't have to understand all that, and can struggle to comprehend what they're dealing with, right?

Oh.

So here's the second parameter, and where It Follows stumbles into a trap of its own making: how much knowledge do the characters have of what they're dealing with?  That is to say, when encountering the monster, does your hero at least have a rudimentary idea of what that monster does?  Take vampires for example.  While Dracula and his children of the night have always been pretty goddamned strong, most movies take place in universes where at least some people have previously heard of vampires and are thus aware of their weaknesses.  This balances the playing field to some extent, as placing vampires in a setting where almost no one has heard of them leads to situations like Bram Stroker's Dracula (the book, not the film), where one pretty lazy vampire basically shits on all of London for months.

In the opposite end, a lack of knowledge about the creature can help make a relatively harmless monster scarier.  Imagine, for instance, that The Blob touched down in a earth where aliens weak to freezing temperatures were a suppressed, but still fairly common, occurrence.  You'd have a movie where the characters were completely brainless in order to have any sort of real conflict.  The tension in The Blob films are that the characters are completely clueless how to deal with this anomaly, the discovery of its weakness only accidentally discovered at the end.

You can probably see where I'm going with this.  Due to the fact that the monster in It Follows goes back up the chain of cursed people after killing the latest victim, it's always in the curser's best interest to essentially give the newest victim a pamphlet reading So You've Just Been Targetted by a Sort of Unstoppable Evil Force.  The protagonist of It Follows is given a pretty good rundown of how the monster operates almost immediately, even seeing it with her own eyes so there's no period of "oh maybe that guy was just crazy" in the film.  In a parallel universe, there's a cheesier version of It Follows where the protagonist discovers a spooky message board of cursed people called FollowChan.

Therein lies the problem.  In a film where you have a fairly weak monster versus a group of people that understand how that monster works, how do you create any sense of danger?  This movie's answer is "make everyone completely brainless," and holy shit did it take me out of the film.  I'm not saying that every horror movie needs to have the characters going You're Next on the monsters, but when the characters assiduously ignore every possible logical idea that both me and the person I was watching with independently thought up, it gets a lot harder to be affected by what's happening on the screen.  It's entirely possible that attempts to mark the creature with paint, or trapping it in a deep pit, would be failures, but based on what they know, all the characters do in this movie is a) run, b) transmit the curse to the most disbelieving friend who lives next door, c) shoot it, and d) lure the monster to a pool and shoot it again.  I suppose that's the reason there's only one death after the opening sequence, in that both sides of this conflict are really not good at their jobs.  It's the Extremely Moveable Object vs the Wall That's Just a Shower Curtain, and that's not really all that fun to watch.

This just leaves me to ask: why even have the curser tell the protagonist about the monster in the first place?  I hate to suggest I know better than an actual artist, but if you're so focused on creating a film emulating a nightmare, wouldn't the notion of having sex and then being stalked by a silent, shape-shifting monster be closer to dream logic than having sex and being lectured about your imminent stalking by the monster?  Granted, I dream about being Max Payne and bursting into a courtroom only to argue with a judge for two hours about improper trial venues, so maybe I'm in the minority here.

Again, I didn't hate It Follows, and it was certainly better than The Babadook, in that at least It Follows didn't transform its effective monster into a shitty CGI version of Tasmanian Devil in tornado form for the third act.  It's just a shame that the core of a slickly made horror film is ultimately less consistent than your average creepypasta.

*:imagine this in a proper southern drawl