Review of It Follows (2015) by Anthony A — 13 Oct 2015

Hmmm where do I start with this one? I don't hate it like some people do. But I don't actually love it like others. For me, it fell in the middle. It was another great first half, marred by a dull second half.

First, let me go over the good. The soundtrack is amazingly awesome. It may have the best horror score in decades. It's reminiscent of old John Carpenter. Speaking of Carpenter, this movie is so heavily inspired by his movies that it almost comes off as a shameless ripoff. It Follows is basically the best Michael Myers movie that doesn't actually have Michael Myers. The way things are shot and characters interact is very reminiscent of Halloween. Like I said before, the first half of this movie is great. It's full of wonderfully creepy ideas and the teenagers actually act like teenagers. There's a nice slow, tense build, and the car scene and the dilapidated building scene are well done and creepy.

But that's where things started to go bad though. Not so bad the movie sucked, but just underwhelming. The first major issue is the "it" itself. It really should be just one monster with one identity. The whole ambiguous "it can look like anyone" thing just made it less terrifying when you see it on screen. I get that they were probably going for an STD-type metaphor, but I just don't find old ladies, chubby naked girls peeing themselves, and hipsters to be all that frightening. Why not have the "it" be faceless? Maybe make it naked, but with no discernible gender. Just an idea, but that would be creepy and it would give more of an identity to the monster and make it scarier when it appears on screen. Or maybe the idea of "it" being faceless would make the obvious connections to Halloween a little too obvious.

Another issue is there is no real way to fight the monster. That would be fine, but since there is no way to kill the monster the characters just stand around and wait till it shows up, run away, and then do it all over again. There needed to be some sort of goal the characters were working towards. How about a Ring-esque plot where they're trying to figure out where the curse started from and how they can solve it? They could go from place to place until they end up in even worse parts of Detroit (the city by the way is one of the best parts of the movie). Maybe they do or don't find the origins of the curse, but at least it would give them something to do.

The ending with the pool seemed confusing and pointless. Their plan was to electrocute it? Did they realize how stupid their plan seemed and that throwing toasters in an olympic-sized pool wasn't going to work anyway? They could actually interact with it, even if they couldn't see it, so why not try to trap it? Then the movie just sort of ends abruptly.

So while I enjoyed most of the movie, it really suffers for being underwhelming. It's like everything was in place for a true horror classic to stand next to Halloween, Night of the Living Dead, and A Nightmare on Elm Street, but it falls way short of hitting it over the fence. I can't help but imagine how amazing this would have been if it were pretty much the same movie, but with a Michael Myers-like killer and a Ring-like plot to keep it interesting. It Follows just isn't that scary, despite having some of the most terrifying concepts and ideas to come to a horror movie since masked killers and reanimated corpses.