It Follows, a brilliant new horror film by director David Robert Mitchell, has a curious distinction: it may be the most “sex-negative” movie ever made.
Self-aware yet irony-free, bathed in atmospheric dread,
It Follows treads a careful course between the “slasher” films of the 70s and 80s, its most superficially obvious forebears, and the distancing, overtly “post-modern” spoofy self-referentialism embraced by Wes Craven’s
Scream series. In the final analysis, however,
It Follows belongs with a more elegant breed of cinematic pedigree, deserving to be considered among classics like Fred M. Wilcox’s
Forbidden Planet and Alfred Hitchcock’s
The Birds, eerie films in which the source of the terror is never finally understood in an intellectual sense, but is rendered so primordially palpable on an emotional level that it haunts the viewer for days afterwards.
