It Follows

Maika Monroe at Cannes 2014 

IT FOLLOWS             C+                    

USA  (107 mi)  2014  ‘Scope  d:  Robert David Mitchell

From the director of THE MYTH OF THE AMERICAN SLEEPOVER (2010), a film that magnifies the adolescent experience of teens in search of love and sex, this Michigan native has shot a campy teen horror film set in the lavish Detroit suburbs.  Borrowing from other horror classics, including an 80’s sounding synth score right out of John Carpenter, the creep master of low budget horror films, none more influential than HALLOWEEN (1978), which reinvented the slasher film set in the safe suburban communities, introducing the idea that “you couldn’t kill evil,” Mitchell opens the film in the undisturbed quiet of a suburban setting when a young girl dressed only in underwear bursts from a front door racing down the street in terror.  Porch lights turn on as onlookers curiously peer out wondering what’s going on.  The girl runs back inside her own home (street address 1492, which coincides with the discovery of America) where her father asks if she’s all right before bolting out the door again without a word, hopping into a car and driving away.  In no time, however, we see her dead and mutilated body left on the beach.  Cut to the screen titles.  This is a film that enjoys doing riffs on other horror films, where it’s largely an homage to the horror genre itself, as the playful spirit throughout is meant for pure enjoyment, using sex as the trigger for the sheer terror that follows.  While this is a low budget, no frills effort that doesn’t rely upon special effects, instead it uses old-fashioned cutting and editing to heighten the element of surprise, using almost entirely unknown actors to leverage the story while recalling the paranoia established from early 1950’s sci-fi B-movies like the original THE THING (1951), a flying saucer ghost story where military experts are unable to eradicate the worldwide threat by this extraterrestrial creature from outer space, leaving the audience hanging on the final warning, “Watch the skies, everywhere!  Keep looking.  Keep watching the skies!”  Here the same message is translated to looking over your shoulder as something is following you. 

19-year old Jay, Maika Monroe from Labor Day (2013), is your typical teenage suburban girl, where her natural good looks attract plenty of male attention, as she’s used to being the object of desire, where normally she’d be fending off flirtatious advances.  Her first sexual encounter, however, with a guy named Hugh (Jake Weary) takes a strange turn for the worse.  Hopping into the back seat of Hugh’s car, she allows him to have sex with her, going into the trunk afterwards to get something, bringing back a chloroform-soaked rag where he drugs her unconscious.  Next thing you know she’s strapped to a wheelchair dressed in her undies where she’s forced to look upon a slowly approaching creature, where Hugh informs her that no one else can see this entity except her, but it will continually follow her until she has sex with someone else and passes this ghostly curse onto them.  Should she allow this creature to touch her, she will die, where the creature will then follow the previous host.  Having diligently informed her, he helps her escape and drops her home afterwards, relieved of the overriding tension he’d been carrying around with him.  For Jay, however, she begins to see phantom figures approaching her, terrifying, half-naked bodies that resemble ghoulish zombies, causing her to continually flee from unseen forces.  These creatures can only walk, however, while she can run or drive away from them, buying some time before they catch up to her.  With the help of her sister Kelly (Lili Sepe), along with a handful of friends, they attempt to comprehend her nightmarish visions, keeping her surrounded by their constant presence, trying to protect her from forces they can’t even see.  Her male friends are intrigued by the idea that she needs to have sex with someone else, scoffing at the idea that this could present problems, volunteering their services, exhibiting a kind of fake macho courage in the face of her rising fear, where eventually she is literally petrified.  Continually interchanging the viewer perspective, occasionally the audience can see the creatures (yes, there are more than one), while at other times they remain invisible, equally creepy either way, but also humorous in the way this continually pokes fun at the horror genre. 

Deliberately paced, infused with an ominous atmosphere of inescapable dread, using 360 degree pans to recreate the unsettling feeling of a continual presence of some invisible force lurking nearby, her friends drive her to a nearby lake where they curiously attempt to avoid the approaching terror while also having a little party fun of their own.  The mood quickly changes when Jay’s hair is mysteriously lifted up into the air, and when a friend attempts to intervene he is knocked silly, where they run and take cover in a nearby shed, but the forces attempt to batter the door down while the others can’t see anything.  In this way, the director reminds us of a similar apparition attacking Barbara Hershey in The Entity (1982), based on actual reported events where her son admitted to seeing his mother tossed around the room, and when he attempted to intervene, he was thrown across the room as well by an unseen force.  Like CHRISTINE (1983), these films are inspired by the effects of demonic possession continually haunting their helpless victims, where off-balanced camera angles reflect the victim’s deteriorating mental state.  Immersed in an atmosphere of teenage sexual confusion, where of course there are no adults anywhere to be seen, they are not only forced to confront their fears, but also face the hideous consequences of sex.  Like many horror films, however, the looming presence of panic is much scarier than actually showing a threatening monster, where it all leads up to a climactic swimming pool sequence where they inexplicably attempt to lure these threatening invisible spirits.  In a mix of Jacques Tourneur’s CAT PEOPLE (1942) and THE THING (1951), with a bit of LET THE RIGHT ONE IN (2008) thrown in for good measure, it all grows a bit ridiculous by the end when Jay’s friends devise a plan to eliminate the monster at a dilapidated indoor swimming pool on the other side of the tracks, an area in stark contrast to the sanitized suburbia of their homes.  While it’s obvious the director is throwing everything but the kitchen sink into this mix of the macabre and the terrifying, creating a demonic ghost story that is more about ghoulish vampires and the power of suggestion, but it’s always the kids themselves left to their own devices that must restore balance and order into their world after it’s been turned upside down.  Much of this Carpenteresque parody is a pale imitation of the real thing, where sex and horror have always been an unhealthy mix onscreen, though the idea of a girl trying to avoid having sex altogether is a novel approach, nonetheless while this has its moments, it never adds up to much, failing to get below the surface and feels more like a bunch of sequences thrown together. 

The Entity

Doris Bither's modest Culver City home

Conjuring up the ghosts, an arc of light is photographed (Doris Bither sitting on the bed)

THE ENTITY              B                     

USA  (125 mi)  1982  ‘Scope  d:  Sydney J. Furie 

Welcome home, cunt!              —The Entity

Today, the biggest film at the Box Office is PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 2 (2010), bringing in a whopping $40 million dollars in just the first week, while much of it resembles the paranormal section of THE ENTITY made nearly thirty years earlier based on a true incident in Culver City, California in 1974 where UCLA parapsychologists set up cameras in the room where a woman reported being brutalized by repeated sexual assaults from a powerful invisible being, including bruise marks all over her body.  The victim was Doris Bither who lived in a typically mainstream neighborhood, but whose life was substantially upgraded for the movie version.  In real life, Ms. Bither was a chain-smoking alcoholic who spent most days in a drunken stupor, continually abusive and belligerent to others, whose house was in such a state of squalor that it had been condemned twice by the city.  She was the single mother of three sons and a six-year old daughter.  The eldest son admitted seeing his mother being tossed around the room, claiming when he tried to intervene, he was thrown across the room by the unseen force. 

In 1974, paranormal researchers Kerry Gaynor and Barry Taff investigated the case, witnessing objects move about her house while capturing photos of a stream of lights, including an arc of light above Ms. Bither’s head, but never witnessed any physical attack.  Ms. Bither suffered abuse her entire life and appeared to have an intensely personal relationship with the “entity,” continually taunting the creature and screaming abusive language at the top of her lungs.  When she moved away, the entity apparently followed her, while future residents of the house report nothing out of the ordinary, where the house today remains ghost free and is in good condition.  Canadian director Sidney J. Furie attempts to recreate the victim’s altered mental state by telling the story virtually through a series of off-balanced camera angles, while creating a Stephen King-like CHRISTINE (1983) demonic possession effect. 

In the movie version, Carla Moran is played by Barbara Hershey, a beautiful, intelligent, and sympathetic woman who is inexplicably sexually attacked by a brutally aggressive unseen male creature on a regular basis in and out of her home, where the director always accompanies the rapes with aggressively pounding industrial metal music which feels like the blaring noise of some torture you can’t escape.  Carla seeks out immediate medical help, where Freudian psychiatrist Dr. Sneiderman (Ron Silver) believes it’s a classic case of suppressed trauma, which suggests these are delusional episodes, a figment of her imagination.  Yet they persist with even greater frequency and severity, where even her son gets injured attempting to rescue her, leaving the entire house traumatized by this poltergeist monster.  Purely by chance, she overhears a couple of guys converse on paranormal activity at a bookstore, so she invites them to her home to observe, where their initial skepticism is met with a rude awakening, as in their eyes, there was clearly an unseen force in the room, which gives her sanity a momentary reprieve. 

While there is a certain despicable factor to nearly all the men in her life, also a nicely developed ambiguity about whether the incidents are real or imagined, what’s most interesting is Hershey’s self-assurance throughout the entire ordeal.  Getting no help from science, alternative science, friends, fiancé’s, or family, she has to resolutely fend off this creature single-handedly, retaliating with a kind of feminist fury, bringing an apocalyptical Resurrection Day standoff between herself and this thing, where Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.  But what’s interesting is how, despite a dazzling architecturally designed, giant set piece fraught with potential life-threatening hazards where the paranormal scientists actually try to capture this thing, they’re met with their own puny human insignificance due to scientific limitations while she’s instead forced to internalize this standoff, which continues to wreak havoc in her life, even as in real life she moves from place to place.  The film predates POLTERGEIST (1982), produced by Stephen Spielberg, and GHOSTBUSTERS (1984), originally planned for a 1981 release, but the U.S. release followed a September 1982 international release three month’s after POLTERGEIST, opening in the United States in February of 1983, two years after the completion date.