It Follows (2015)

directed by David Robert Mitchell

Jessica Ward

An invitation lurking in the notifications of my moderately inactive Facebook account has reminded me of an impending 10-year high school reunion. It seems someone I used to know has taken the initiative to organize another late night at the basketball courts, this time raising a warm bottle of Colt 45 to the Class of 2014 and the decade passed since we tumbled out of our rural Nova Scotian incubator. When I first got the notification, I sent a screenshot to a few of my friends who grew up in cities far away from barred pedagogical windows and the endless sprawl of car dealerships, hoping that their laugh reacts would permit me a sigh of relief. It’s been almost a decade and I still find myself checking over my shoulder, sizing up the distance I’ve put between myself and the ever-encroaching seep of suburban eternity.

As my thumb hovered over the “decline” button, I was hit with the realization that this anniversary coincides with the release of another, more sinister beast from the clutches of suburban adolescence. It Follows (2014), the second feature film from director David Robert Mitchell, first premiered at Cannes the year I graduated high school and quickly became a horror cult-classic. It centers on Jay Height (Maika Monroe), as she’s pursued by an inhuman and unrelenting sexually transmitted entity that stalks the infected until it either catches up and kills them, or they pass it on to someone else. While the film is governed by an improbable premise riddled with upsetting scenes, body horror, and jump-scares, it comes to me now as an artifact of the strange feeling that began following me after I graduated high school.

When I first saw the film in early 2015, I was around the same age as Jay, and in many ways, in the same predicament. While I wasn’t running from an elusive metamorphosing demon, I saw my surroundings mirrored on screen in the rows of ‘70s bungalows, plastic above-ground pools, and porches flooded by the ominous glow of neighborhood street-lights. Like Jay, I lived with my parents while attending a local university not far from where I grew up and spent my free time daydreaming about impressing a less-than commendable boyfriend. After nights out at a local bar called “the Local,” with friends I’d known since elementary school, I clutched my bag close to my body and whipped my head around in 30 second intervals to make sure no one was following me home.

I’ve always loved horror movies and have a pretty thick skin, but as I stood blinking off the darkness of the theatre, I remember feeling completely exposed. Looking back, I think It Follows scared me more than other horror films, not just because I related to the protagonist, but because it conjured something about the human condition that I was just starting to understand. After the first watch I was deeply unsettled, and while my rational self knew there was no demon following me out, I started to wonder if Mitchell’s viral entity paralleled the same earthly force of destruction that had begun to torment me in real life. Freshly released from the structure of high school with not much of a plan, it was during this era that I first started to sense the unrelenting passage of time keeping a steady pace at my heels.

Time seems to play a strange role in It Follows. At the beginning of the film, it's almost entirely absent as the teenagers bask in endless hours of leisure, floating in the pool, playing cards on the porch, or casually reading Dostoevsky at the hangout. There’s nothing to indicate the year in which the story takes place, and frequent anachronisms, like a ‘40s TV set, ‘80s cars, and a seashell-shaped smartphone, seem purposefully placed to negate any clues. I was reminded of how I committed similar continuity errors in high school, plastering my bedroom walls with posters of the Beatles, taking polaroids to post on Instagram, or listening to the Arctic Monkeys on cassette. Mitchell’s choice to obscure time at the beginning of the film, while also being stylistically cool, evokes for me the easy time-travel of adolescence.

I once read a Simone Weil quote where she said, “Time does us violence; it’s the only violence,” and after rewatching It Follows, I have a suspicion that Mitchell might subscribe to the same idea. Jay’s world before the onset of the entity is a suburban incubator in which time seems to stand still. It’s only after the entity forces the group out of the suburbs and across the forbidden threshold of 8-mile that we see the destructive forces of time start to appear in the overgrown lawns and decaying houses. Cut loose from the umbilical of their suburban adolescence, the entity, like the passing of time, forces Jay and her friends to grow up.

After rewatching It Follows probably about 10 times over the past decade, I’ve realized it’s the careful inevitability of the entity that still terrifies me the most. Like time, it never speeds up or slows down, it just blindly marches on until finally swallowing its victims back into the void. The infected can walk, run, or drive away in an attempt to stave it off, but no mortal can defeat it. We can pass it off to someone else, hoping to continue our bloodlines, but it always works its way back up the lines of succession. It Follows mirrors my fear of the passing of time so well that it’s become the first thing I think of when confronted with birthdays, anniversaries, or (especially) 10 year reunions.

Since getting the invite to celebrate the class of 2014, my thumb has gone back and forth between “going” and “not going” countless times. My friends say I should go, if not for the chance to drink shitty beer from the back of a truck, then to see how many of my former classmates have become parents or gotten divorced. While I no longer suffer from the teen angst that defined the first few years of my post-high school meandering, I’m still just as scared of being sucked back into the eternal yawn of suburbia in which I was raised. I know that no matter how far I get from it, I’ll always be scanning the rear-view in a desperate attempt to gauge time as it follows.

Jessica Ward is a writer from the East Coast of Canada who currently lives in Montreal. Her work has been featured in Spectra, Soliloquies Anthology, and others.