Youth culture moves fast, and Hollywood barely makes an effort to keep up. Year after year, a host of screenwriters line up to offer their best approximations of the adolescent experience, most of them drawn from reminiscences some 20 years past their sell-by date.
The new teen horror movie It Follows, out in the UAE on May 7, deftly sidesteps these pitfalls by recognising the impossibility of distilling teen culture into an easily digestible 90 minutes. Instead, it approaches the unwieldy subject of adolescence sideways. Indelible newcomer Maika Monroe plays 19-year-old Jay, a softly sardonic US high-schooler, whose life is thrown into chaos when an impulsive fling with enigmatic heartthrob Hugh (Jake Weary) goes badly awry. After diligently guiding her through the set menu of teen romance, Hugh reveals an ulterior motive. Moments earlier, he was the bearer of a deadly curse, and now he’s passed it on to her. In a scene that’s both plainly expositional and dazzlingly tense, Hugh takes Jay to the top of a multistorey car park and gestures out at a shadowy figure moving in their direction. This is the “it” of the film’s title, a shape-shifting ghoul that stalks its prey with methodical patience. Jay will be forever at the mercy of this slow but unyielding predator unless she too elects to pass the curse along, by means of sexual intercourse.
The film’s creator David Robert Mitchell is carrying an infection of his own when we meet on a Tuesday afternoon in Los Angeles. He picked up a cold at the Sundance Film Festival, where It Follows had its US premiere, and it’s been following him around ever since. Unlike any of his characters, however, he nobly refuses to pass the burden on to me, instead dutifully raising a scarf to his mouth with every sneeze, splutter and cough.
Mitchell’s 2010 debut The Myth Of The American Sleepover followed four teens as they traversed a world of mumbled passions, wasted opportunities and lukewarm beer across a single Friday night in the suburbs. It Follows, which features some of the most visceral screen violence I’ve seen in recent years, might seem like an unlikely follow-up, but beneath their surface differences, the films share a central impulse: to explore what it is to be young.
If The Myth Of The American Sleepover got halfway there by favouring quiet realism and an aversion to dramatics, It Follows gets a whole lot closer with a throbbing electro score, a special effects budget, and a vertiginously high concept at its centre. Could the key to adolescent reality be a sense of the unreal?
Exhibit A: in It Follows, adult characters are used as empty vessels for the creature at large, so whenever grown-ups do appear onscreen, they’re eerie, unfathomable and lurking just at the edge of our peripheral vision; somehow both present and absent at the same time. It works as a smart metaphor for the relationship between teenagers and their parents. Like The Fly, Alien and Fatal Attraction before it, It Follows has been hastily identified in some quarters as an Aids parable. It’s not hard to see why: with most of its horror arising from the unforeseen consequences of casual sex, the film undoubtedly invokes the dread associated with sexually transmitted disease. I ask Mitchell what he makes of this as we ascend an escalator in the direction of JC Penney. “The truth is, a lot of people read it that way, and I don’t want to tell them they shouldn’t,” he says. “I made the film intentionally to be open to lots of different interpretations.”
This seems as good a moment as any to tell Mitchell that I have an interpretation of my own, and ask if he’d like to hear it. Short of a frantic dash back down the escalator, he hasn’t got much of a say in the matter. If you ask me, the looming threat of It Follows is not venereal but social. It’s not the creature that Jay is really running from, but the pressure of her classmates’ attention in the wake of a very public indiscretion (word of her relationship with Hugh spreads quickly after the police get involved).
In the 2010 teen comedy Easy A, Emma Stone propelled herself to high-school infamy after claiming to have lost her virginity at a house party. Soon, she discovered that her newfound notoriety was contagious, able to be transferred to a new host at will. Likewise, in It Follows, the focus is not simply on who’s done it, but on who did it last. “I like your interpretation. It’s cool.” I pause for further validation but find it unforthcoming. “Unfortunately, I’m not going to pick sides and say you’re right and they’re wrong,” he says. “The honest answer — and it’s probably the irritating one — is that I had several things in mind when I wrote the film.”
I confront him with my million-dollar question. Sure, his creature can follow me to the ends of the Earth, but what if I board a plane? “It would get to you,” he promises, betraying a certain pride in the tenacity of his creation. “If it could get onto the plane that you were on, it would.” Otherwise, he says, it would simply find another way to follow. He gives no specifics, instead allowing me to conjure my own image and lose myself in its horror. “The film is a nightmare,” says Mitchell. “If you find yourself in a nightmare, there’s no trying to explain the logic of it. You just try to survive.” By creating a world outside of our own, Mitchell hands viewers a blank canvas on to which they can project anything: “You put something into the world and people are going to have all kinds of interpretations.” He’s open to almost all theories, although he admits some frustration at people who take the film’s premise at face value and accuse it of demonising sex. Even then, he notes: “It doesn’t really matter what I think.”
