“THE QUIET LITTLE WALKING DEATH OF ‘IT FOLLOWS’” (BY ROBERT MEYER BURNETT)
“The movie’s logic is the logic of a nightmare.” — David Robert Mitchell, It Follows Writer-Director
That’s one way of putting it. It Follows is a horror film that moves like a half-remembered dream, equal parts suburban inertia and sexual dread. And yet, it’s also a rigorously structured film, one that hides its emotional chaos under a glossy, composed surface. It’s been widely praised for its “nightmare logic,” but what gives the movie its unnerving power is how insistently it doesn’t let us escape into dreamlike abstraction. This isn’t surrealism. It’s the sharp, unmistakable ache of being young, sexual, and doomed.
The premise is elegant and faintly absurd: a teenage girl named Jay (Maika Monroe, all soft fragility and slouchy self-awareness) sleeps with her boyfriend and becomes infected with a curse. From that moment on, she’s pursued by a shape-shifting entity that only she can see — an unhurried, relentless figure that walks toward her in silence, across playgrounds, parking lots, or high school hallways. It can look like anyone. If it catches her, it kills her, and then moves backwards to kill the previous carrier. You can delay it by passing it on, through sex, but you can’t erase it.
On paper, this could be a glorified PSA on safe sex, but Mitchell isn’t interested in scolding. He’s made a horror film that doesn’t moralize about sexuality — it mourns it. There’s no fire-and-brimstone logic to the curse. No moment of sin equals a moment of punishment. Instead, sex is treated like a loss of protection, a crossing over. It’s as if adulthood itself comes lumbering after you, naked and implacable. The monster doesn’t judge — it follows.
The most literal-minded critics latched onto the STD metaphor early on. And yes, the connections are obvious: sex transmits the threat; no one else can see what you’re suffering from; your friends can sympathize, but they can’t help. But the film is less about the consequence of disease than about the terrible loneliness that comes with awareness — of sex, of danger, of time ticking forward. Jay floats in her pool, detached from the world, not because she’s “contaminated” but because she knows something the others don’t: she can die. And worse, she will.
What Mitchell has really tapped into here is the horror of inevitability. The slow-walking entity is death, plain and simple. Death that wears the faces of your parents, your neighbors, even your childhood friends. Death that doesn’t chase you — it strolls, politely, giving you time to squirm and rationalize. Jay tries to fight it, trap it, ignore it. She even tries to pass it on (a scene involving a boat and some faceless strangers suggests a temporary, degrading reprieve). But it comes back. Of course it does. Death is not a metaphor you can shake off with a one-night stand.
The most grotesque moment in the film — one Mitchell stages with cold restraint — comes when Greg, the skeptic, finally meets his end. Jay passed the curse to him in a doomed act of desperation. When the entity returns, it appears as Greg’s mother, dressed in a nightgown, her face blank. She knocks on his bedroom door. He opens it. What follows is not exploitation, but something stranger and more perverse: a mother mounting her son in silence. It’s repellent, yes, but it’s not a joke, and it’s not sensationalism. It’s a horrifying image of reversal — the giver of life arriving to take it back.
Mitchell avoids the usual horror tricks. He doesn’t quick-cut, doesn’t raise his voice. The camera glides, slowly, deliberately. When Jay is at her most vulnerable, the entity appears in the form of her father — presumably dead, though the film never confirms it. Here again, the horror lies not in gore, but in recognition. The monster doesn’t just hunt you — it knows you. It wears your history. This is a horror of familiarity, not otherness.
Symbolism is everywhere, but it doesn’t overwhelm the texture of the film. Water, for example, recurs again and again. Jay’s pool is a symbol of comfort, a return to safety. But elsewhere — at the lake, or in the film’s climax, where the kids try to electrocute the monster in a public pool — water becomes ambiguous, even deadly. Like sex, like memory, it’s no longer pure. It’s complicated. And that complication is where the movie lives.
The monster’s shifting appearance — sometimes a child, sometimes an elderly woman, sometimes a naked man on a roof — serves as a perfect metaphor for youthful paranoia. When you’re seventeen, danger wears every face. Your mother might be a threat. So might your best friend. Or the strange man walking toward you in the quad. Mitchell weaponizes that disorientation. We find ourselves scanning every background, every hallway, for the next figure to arrive.
The score, by Disasterpeace, is a throbbing, retro synth wash that owes a clear debt to Carpenter’s Halloween, but it’s not nostalgia. It’s mood. Uneasy, electronic, dissonant. The music doesn’t tell you what to feel — it echoes what you already feel: the weight pressing in, the dread just beneath your breath. Like the film itself, it lingers.
By the final moments, Jay and Paul are walking down a sunlit street, hand in hand. Behind them, someone is following. We don’t know if it’s “It,” but that’s irrelevant. The horror is not in the appearance of the monster — it’s in knowing it could appear at any time. And this is where the film’s true theme emerges, in a line spoken softly from a hospital bed by Yara, quoting The Idiot : “The most terrible agony may not be in the wounds themselves but in knowing for certain that … your soul will leave your body, and you will no longer be a person. And that this is certain.” That’s the real horror: certainty. And Mitchell doesn’t flinch from it.
It Follows is a rare modern horror film that doesn’t beg to be liked. It’s not clever, not campy, not meta. It’s haunting, in the literal and emotional sense. Mitchell may work within the genre, but he uses it to ask larger questions. Not just “What happens if you have sex with the wrong person?” but “What do we do when we realize we’re going to die?” For Jay, and for us, the answer is unsatisfying, which may be the most honest thing about the film. You can pass it on, pretend, forget for a while. But it’s still out there. And it’s still walking.
