Best Recent Horror Gem With 95% on RT & Longlegs Star Leaves Netflix This Week
You better hurry up.
In his youth, David Robert Mitchell, director of the low-budget coming-of-age story The Myth of the American Sleepover, had a recurring nightmare in which he was pursued by a slow and mysterious stalker. There was no escaping him; he was always around.
Thus was born the plot for one of the best horror films of the 2010s – It Follows.
What Is It Follows About?
After a date at the movies, college student Jay (Maika Monroe) has sex with her boyfriend Hugh in a car in an abandoned parking lot. Then Hugh chloroforms his partner. Jay wakes up tied to a wheelchair in the middle of some ruins, and Hugh, standing next to her, explains to the girl how she will live on.
The thing is, he has just "infected" Jay with a curse, and now she will be haunted by an entity that takes the form of different people – close and strangers, living and dead. The spirit, which only the infected can see, moves slowly but always catches up with the victim. It cannot be stopped, but it can be passed on to another to buy time.
It Follows Wasn't an Instant Success with Investors
Disturbing dreams are a constant source of ideas. The image of the Terminator visited James Cameron one difficult night during the grueling shooting of Piranha 2, and Wes Craven came up with Freddy Krueger when he read in a newspaper about an epidemic of nocturnal deaths among Southeast Asian immigrants suffering from nightmares.
Mitchell remembered his dreams in 2011 and wrote the script in a week, but it took several years to find investors – no one believed it would be scary.
It Follows Is One of the First Examples of Post-Horror
It Follows premiered at Cannes in 2014, a few years before the term "post-horror" was coined to describe a subgenre that traded jump scares for existential dread and turned A24 into a smart-freaking-horror factory.
But Mitchell has almost all the ingredients of a modern indie horror film. The movie isn't set in the 1980s, but Disasterpeace's synths and long, voyeuristic takes evoke the retro aesthetic. It Follows is a typical slow-burner, slow and melancholic.
Mitchell, meanwhile, has only released one film since then, the Andrew Garfield neo-noir Under the Silver Lake, which was booed at Cannes. But next year promises to be a big one for the director. Warner Bros. will release his first big-budget sci-fi, Flowervale Street, starring Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor, and Neon will begin filming a sequel to It Follows, They Follow, which Monroe says will be bigger and darker.
It Follows Is Leaving Netflix
It Follows will leave Netflix on October 11th – so make sure you catch one of the best horror movies of the last decade. Because what better time to do it than in October?