It Follows [Blu-ray]

“You’re not going to believe me and I need you to remember what I’m saying.” After making out in the back of a car, Maika Monroe’s new boyfriend Jake Weary tells her she’ll now be followed by a nameless entity that will kill her. It was following him but he’s passed it on to her, through sex. It can look like anyone, he says, but there’s only one of it. It’s slow but persistent: “Don’t let it touch you.” Weary tells her she must pass it on. It should be easier for her, he says, because she’s a girl. Badly shaken, Maika thinks she’s losing her mind. Is this some awful prank? A supernatural daisy-chain in which the risk of STDs is somehow made manifest? Her friends rally round when Maika is indeed stalked by a succession of purposefully trudging figures of baleful aspect. Set in a suburban town that could pass for Halloween’s Haddonfield after a couple of recessions, It Follows is a creeping-dread horror that reshapes The Casting of the Runes in the roaming widescreen style of John Carpenter. Yet, despite an ominously swirling synthesizer score, this is no slavish tribute. Writer-director David Robert Mitchell’s striking debut feature, a dreamy American Graffiti-like mosaic called The Myth of the American Sleepover, found fresh poetry and humour in hackneyed teen-pic themes. It Follows is similarly impressive, a witty reversal of standard horror movie tropes in which promiscuity is punished by death. At the same time, it plays constantly into adolescent anxieties surrounding sex and its consequences. Because salvation comes at a cost. With its immersive sound design and jolting moments of dreadful threat, it’s the kind of movie that restores faith in the power of modern horror films to be seriously freaky without resorting to buckets of blood or grisly torture scenes in dimly lit basements.

It was enjoyable, but with too few explanations about the "horror" matter. It would have been better with a bit more depth to the story. There were a couple of suspensfull moments, and it was filmed fairly well. It was, I suppose a novel idea based on STDs (sexually transmitted demons).worth watching.

American Horror film cliche 101: teens have sex and are punished by a serial killer/ghost/monster/etc...It Follows pushes that idea to a clever and intriguing extreme in which sex, literally, invites consequence: a haunting transmitted like an STD. The special effects are applied sparingly making for real impact when they appear (so many films just smother them on in a big pile of 'who cares?') The central character isn't some squeaky-clean cipher, she makes morally ambiguous (and even horrible) choices, but she always retains empathy - it feels like it matters that she's under threat. It's also great that there's no attempt to turn her into the overused Sarah Connor/Eleanor Ripley kickass female lead either: she's an every-girl suburban teen under immense stress and in a situation she can barely control - her decisions feel realistic and all the more terrible for it. Meanwhile, 'the monster' is kept, wisely, away from the spotlight so it never becomes some kinda perverse star like so many movie monsters before - nor does it lose its edge. The final few minutes are subtle and grim all at once.On the other hand, while the heroine and two male friends are well-drawn (and morally compromised), her two female friends lapse back into blank scream mode. And, really, after the initial chill has started to thaw, the film runs out of things to do with the idea and winds up with a run-of-the-mill 'monster killing' effort elevated only by some stark images. A lot of what actually happens, ultimately, is no different to the usual obstacle course run by characters with something on their tail - and the 'monster' isn't exactly complex, complicated or intriguing in and of itself...But those really are minor reservations. This is a taught, concise, intelligent, ambiguous film! A real 'what would you do?' experience.

This movie seemed a bit quick off the mark at first, when a young girl flees her home and then waits on a beach to die, and does 20 seconds later. Whilst you don't see the actual event, her mangled corpse lets you know something brutal is out there somewhere.Now the story actually starts, after a short period, you come to realize the first instance was merely a preview of what was to come. Whilst the plot is a little weird, and the writer has a fascination with naked and almost naked women, you find out that the evil in the story is merely a sexually transmitted deranged spirit of some kind. Once you have slept with someone who has survived long enough to pass on this walking STD it passes on to them and they then have to survive it long enough to pass it on to somebody new. If you die without passing it on, it goes back to the previous individual.I was a little worried when I heard the musical score on this to start with as it was a little cheap and tacky, made me think all they had to make it was a broken electric keyboard with several broken keys. Never fear though it gets better and certainly more gripping.Most of the horror in this is psychological, as there is nothing that could be classed as horror in this (except for the of some of the naked and almost naked visions of what look like dead or almost dead people). As one of the individuals in this says (not an exact quote) "it is slow but it isn't stupid" and "it is always walking in a straight line towards you" and that is really all it does, it walks towards its intended target, the current bearer of this strange and vicious STD. Only the current carrier and its previous carriers can actually see it and sometimes you don't know if your seeing a real live person or this spirit.Interesting points to note, if this is a ghost, it can be shot and falls over, even bleeds which makes you wonder if it is actually a spirit or something else. Secondly a teen lad goes into a dirty old house, sits on a dirty old mattress and finds a stack of porno mags covered in scrunched up tissues and actually brushes them aside and picks up the mags to have a read. Seriously? he touched those? NASTY!