Horror STD: It Follows (2014)

I recently rewatched It Follows (2014). Since it's Spooky Season, I decided to review it. Warning: SPOILERS.

After Jay's boyfriend gives her a supernatural STD, she finds herself followed by a slow yet relentless entity that will kill her if it ever catches her. With the help of her sister, Kelly, and her friends, Greg, Paul, and Yara, she tries to find a way to stop it.

The movie opens with a desperate girl running around, though there's no visible threat. Terrified, she drives to an isolated place. It doesn't work, and she turns up dead, her leg broken in a brutal way. Elsewhere, Jay is being ogled by a couple of little creeps in training while she floats in a pool. She's planning to go out with her boyfriend, Hugh, later that day. Jay likes him and not even the fact that he's seeing people who don't exist stops her from going with him to an isolated place to have sex. It's not really surprising when he drugs her. Afterwards, we even find out that he lied about his name and rented a house under a false identity just to fool her. What is surprising is that he's doing all this to pass a sexually transmitted curse to her. He tells her the rules, including the fact that the entity can shape-shift, usually choosing people its victims know to make it extra awful. We'll later see that most of those looks are creepily sexual. Now that Jay got it from him, it will follow her instead. Until it kills her. Then, it will go back to Hugh, and if he dies, it will go after whoever gave it to him, and so on, all the way to Patient Zero. So, it's basically like some weird MLM sex curse in which everyone tries to push the losses down the STD pyramid. What is this persistent walker determined to punish naughty behaviour with painful death? Why is it so judgy and sex negative? We will never know.

Jay didn't believe "Hugh",  but when a creepy old lady only she can see shows up at her school, she realizes he was telling the truth. Her sister, Kelly, and their friends, Paul (who's so desperate to have sex with her that he'll beg her to pass the curse to him) (for her own good, of course) and Yara, don't really believe her, but decide to enable her increasingly unhinged behaviour. Look, I get that they know she's traumatized, but from their perspective, she's outright hallucinating. Also, where is her and Kelly's mother? She doesn't want Kelly to smoke, but when Jay starts acting like a crazy person she doesn’t care? If she were just staying in her room it'd be different, but at one point she jumps out of a window, FFS.

With another friend, Greg, Jay and the others try to find "Hugh". Luckily for them, he left a picture of himself with a high-school jacket inside one of the porn magazines he used as a masturbatory aid in the attic of the house he had rented. Two questions: why did he leave it behind? Why was it there in the first place? Thanks to that suspiciously placed pic, they find "Hugh", real name Jeff. He tells them he still sees the entity and encourages Jay to pass it on to someone else. No, at no point does anyone object to the idea of giving someone a death sentence. To keep Jay safe, Greg takes them to a beach house. At first, everything is fine, but soon, the entity shows up. Turns out that, even though only Jay can see it, the entity can touch things. It gets hit with a chair, kicks in a door, pulls Jay's hair, and throws Paul to the ground. It's also immune to bullets. Jay tries to escape and ends up crashing Greg's car. She wakes up in the hospital, with a broken arm. Later, she and Greg have sex. He doesn't really believe the curse, but soon finds out just how real it is when the entity breaks into his house and fucks him to death while looking like his mother. Yes, really. After seeing him die, Jay runs away, and ends up near the sea. She sees three men on a boat and steps into the water, presumably so she can pass the curse to them. When we next see her, both her hair and her cast are wet, but the movie doesn't bother to make it clear if Jay had sex with the men in the boat. Because apparently, knowing if the lead character caused the death of three people isn't important.

Paul is jealous that Jay chose to share her sex curse with Greg and not him. So, he decides to overcompensate by coming up with a plan to electrocute the entity in a public pool. Because clearly a supernatural, shape-shifting entity that's impervious to bullets is totally killable. Naturally, it fails. Paul shoots it, which we already know doesn't work, and also Yara's leg. Weirdly, no one gets in legal trouble after a firearm was discharged and injured someone. And in case you're wondering, no, no one's parents show up wanting to know WTF is going on with their children. After failing to kill the entity and accidentally shooting their friend, Paul finally gets some death sex from Jay. Shortly after, he's driving around, checking out prostitutes. The movie ends with Paul and Jay walking hand in hand, while the camera films them from behind, as if someone is following them... Hmm, they don't look nearly as paranoid as they should be if Paul were still a target. Did he pass it on after all? Why does the movie not make it clear if another one of the characters just gave a death sentence to someone?

The idea of being followed by something that just won't stop is good. However, the addition of the sexual motif makes It Follows more unpleasant than scary. It doesn't help that we're basically being asked to root for characters that seriously consider passing a deadly curse to other people. There's also no mention of whether anyone is using condoms. It would’ve been very easy to have either Jay or Jeff talk about it. Just replace the mysterious entity with AIDS or any other STD, and Jay and her friends become a lot less sympathetic.

The entity is never explained and we never find out how all of this started, so there’s no cool mythology to compensate for the problematic stuff. Verdict: overrated.

By Danforth