When Jay (Maika Monroe) decides to have sex with her strange-acting new
friend Hugh, he uses the opportunity to violently reveal that she has now been
cursed by a dangerous demon that will follow her until she can pass it on by
sleeping with someone else. She, her two
sisters Yara (Olivia Luccardi) and
Kelly (Lili Sepe) and long-term
friendly neighbor Paul, (Keir Gilchrist)
all initially think that this is a cruel abusive joke so try to confront Hugh
about it, yet Jay begins to be haunted by disturbing figures slowly approaching
her that others cannot see. This leads
to the friends all trying to figure out a way to ‘cure’ Jay of her curse, that
ultimately leads to tensions between the friendly men in her life who want to
help her…
The premise is so simple, and feeds into
such a pervasive fear among teenagers and young people (fear of sex / fear of
sexually transmitted diseases), that the difficult ‘horror’ work of the film is
instilled very early on without actually having to provide many twists or
scares. The very idea that casual sex
can be deadly goes against every urge in teenager’s minds and is therefore a
brilliantly uncomfortable theme to play out in such detail for 100 minutes…
The early part of the script is full of
references to card games, board games and fart jokes, all used to highlight the
immaturity of the characters that will soon have to confront their burgeoning
sexualities. Later, one of the first
premonitions that Jay sees is a haggard looking young woman who looms towards
her with her clothes ripped and urine running down her leg – an expressive
representation of decaying physical beauty and sexual health.
This decay is also expressed in the characters
surroundings, a post-recession Detroit full of boarded-up and crumbling
middle-class homes. It's as if their (political) environment has grown sick and old around them and has led to a corrosive
effect on its inhabitants…
The film is littered with subtle (an
inspired John Carpenter-esque soundtrack for example) and not-so-subtle
(characters sat around watching ‘50s horror B-movies) references to horror films from the
past. But the two tropes it manages to
combine really effectively are the eeriness of slow-moving zombies (or demon, or
whatever) with the necessity of ‘transmission’ to stay alive (like with vampire
narratives). These classic horror elements are combined to create a new kind of internal and external threat to Jay's safety.
At one point she reflects on an ex-partner
that “We slept together once in high school; it was no big deal…”, which in view
of the larger narrative reveals a dangerously complacent irony concerning her later
situation. At no point does the film try to regard all sexuality as immoral - in a way that classic '80s horror did so explicitly and was so brilliantly parodied by the Horror Rules in '90s masterpiece Scream - but instead tries to realistically capture what it is like to be young and sexually active at the same time as making viewers think about the consequences of this activity.
What The
Ring managed to do so effectively a decade ago with our collective fear of
the dangers of consuming too much media (in that case VHS), I think It Follows is attempting to deal with
societies increasing forgetfulness concerning the possible dangers of casual sex. The AIDS catastrophe of the ‘80s is almost
completely absent in the consciousness of younger generations. And a reminder of that nightmare this stark is actually very,
very scary…
No comments:
Post a Comment