It Follows: Fighting Back Against Death

1. A House Falling Upon You

I tend to take general horror criticism with a grain of salt. The horror genre at large seems to be treated with disdain, a lower form of art, a genre meant to titillate rather than educate, enlighten, etc. So every once in a while, there will be a movie released which is hailed as A Great Horror Film. It Follows certainly had a number of people calling it “refreshing” and saying it was maybe the best horror films in recent history.

Do I believe this? Not at all.

I think – and this isn’t a particularly uncommon thought, from what I’ve read and heard – that part of the reason horror is looked down upon is because it is what is called a “body genre,” meaning that it plays on our visceral reactions rather than our thoughts and brains. It feels like there’s an almost puritanical drive against horror. In the same way that sex is regarded as “sinful” or “impure,” so too, we are to believe, is horror. It, too, is a passionate and emotional genre. Instead of feelings of arousal, though, horror inspires feelings of fear, panic, dread, disgust and so on.

Having said that, back to the movie at hand.

It Follows is about, as you can probably gather from the title, an “It” that does quite a bit of following. The movie begins by making the stakes clear. A girl is running from her house early in the morning (or late at night? An ambiguity that will come back time and time again), seeming being pursued by something. A soundtrack from Disasterpeace, stage name of Richard Vreeland of Fez and Hyper Light Drifter fame, plays like a siren in the background. She takes a car and drives off in a rush, before arriving at a dark beach, car lights trained on her, keeping her eyes peeled on the horizon. She calls her parents, telling them how much she loves them, apologizing for doing things that, frankly, any teenager does.

Flash to dawn/dusk/whatever the hell time it is in this movie now. Our first character’s body lays, broken, twisted, missing a foot, bleeding all over the beach, now lifeless. One leg is broken in two places, bent backwards toward her face, in opposition to the almost bored look on her face. It’s beautifully framed horror – a great way to describe most of this movie.

We cut from that opening shot to glance into the life of Jay, who we follow for the rest of the movie. It’s a summer – more importantly, it’s any summer. There’s a weird disjointedness to the timeline of this movie. One kid reads a book on what looks like some sort of e-ink clamshell touch-screen flip-phone, while the characters watch what seem like 1940s or 50s movies on a tube television. This movie seems to take place in modern America, but there are so many inconsistencies and anachronisms to the point where it is clear this isn’t exactly our present. What the “meaning” of this is is open to some debate. Whether it’s to show that this movie is meant to be relatable no matter when it’s watched, whether it’s to add a layer of nostalgia, or whether it’s to show the way that trauma and abuse – and existential dread! – play on ones sense of time is a question that I’m still grappling with.

What is for sure is that this movie is meant to do one thing very well – wrench away every bit of certainty in your own safety, and show how trauma turns events that were once innocuous become the monsters themselves.

Jay’s story begins with her going on a date with some boy who, himself, seems to be pursued by something. When he spots a girl in a yellow dress that Jay doesn’t seem to see, he quickly runs out of the (old-fashioned!) movie theater they were going on a date in. When they go to a diner next, the camera pans over to the shadow of a man slowly walking toward the restaurant. Everything about him feels… off.

The two of them go on another date shortly afterward where they have sex and, shortly afterwards, as Jay is daydreaming about what she thought dating would be like when she was a child, about freedom, about those dreams disappearing with age, she has a cloth covered in some substance held to her face by her date until she passes out.

She wakes up tied to a wheelchair in an abandoned parking lot as her date explains the rules of this monster. It’s passed through sex (and, according to the director, it’s canonically also passed through protected sex and non-PIV sex). It’s a shapeshifter. It walks toward you, slowly, directly. It can be run from, but it can’t be destroyed. It will always find you, no matter where you go. It kills the most recent victim before moving on to the person who passed it on to them, and so on and so forth all the way down the line. “It’s very slow, but it’s not dumb.”

It’s also then that we see it for the first time. What appears to be a naked woman crosses the train track toward our characters, walking directly up toward them. The date runs away, Jay in tow, giving a few more pieces of advice.

It flashes back to the house. One of Jay’s friends, Yara, has a line that’s a little on-the-nose: “I think that if one is faced by inevitable destruction – if a house is falling upon you, for instance – one must feel a great longing to sit down, close one's eyes and wait, come what may…” It’s a line from Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, a repeatedly alluded to book, and it immediately precedes Jay being dropped off unceremoniously on the side of the road by her date, half-clothed and handcuffed.

The neighbors seem to dismiss that household as the “problem” household, unsurprised that Jay has gotten herself into some sort of trouble. As many other pieces have noted, parents are largely missing from the movie. The few images we do get of them are almost uniformly negative. It’s the monster in the form of Jay’s father, throwing things at Jay in the pool, presumably trying to kill her. It’s the monster in many of its forms – Greg’s mother, the old woman in the hospital gown, the woman that breaks into Jay’s house, etc. This is a young adult’s world. Someone stuck in that middle area between childhood and, well, the rest.

2. House On Fire?

I suffer from anxiety. Generally low-level, but occasionally it has its flares, becomes all encompassing, slithers its way into every moment, every thought. It comes out of nowhere, lingers, and eventually leaves.

While there are many facets to my anxiety – some have to do with trust, some with my abuser and the after-effects of that, some with my own insecurities and doubts – the worst of it has always been linked to one thing. If you have read any of my other pieces, I doubt you’ll be surprised to hear that it’s existential dread, a fear of mortality and of the unknown. And yes, it’s a normal fear that everyone has, but when the anxiety is bad, it takes over everything. I function in a fog, constantly feeling like I’m under pursuit, realizing that I can’t escape it, run from it, fight it, beat it. There is only the realization that it will come, and I’m going to have to figure that out somehow.

Perhaps that’s why I didn’t see It Follows as an allegory for STDs or sex, at least not solely, but as an allegory for coming to terms with mortality in your young adult life.

Whenever the monster appears, it’s twisted, yes, but it’s always human. It takes the form of their fears, to an extent. It takes the form of the ill. It takes the form of the elderly. It takes the form of an emaciated, too-tall man who seems to be missing his eyes. It takes the form of, it would seem, Jay’s abuser, her father.

Even viewing It Follows as an allegory for mortality is still reductive, though. It’s not just that. Hell, my own damn fear of mortality isn’t just about mortality. It’s about safety. It’s about the recognition that you will never be safe. It’s originally passed on to Jay via assault by Hugh. After that, Jay can not take for granted that she will be safe.  She can’t take for granted that people actually have her best interests in mind.

One line in particular stuck out to me on my recent viewing. After Greg winds up being killed by the monster – after he offers to sleep with Jay in order to pass it on and give her more time – Jay and Paul are sitting in a room together, discussing what to do next. Paul seems slighted, continually asking, why Greg, why not me? Why don’t you pass it on to me? And then follows this up by holding hands her and slowly trying to move in for a kiss. When Jay pulls away, he says, “I just want to help.” Jay’s response: “Do you?”

It’s hard to know what to trust once you’ve been through something traumatic. My abuser used many tactics to get at me, largely mental and emotional, and has made trusting people after her difficult. She would threaten me with spreading things I shared in confidence. She would threaten to take her own life if I pushed back on her abusive actions. She harassed both my first partner after her and my most recent partner, and went after my friends if I dared try to take some space.

Learning to put that level of trust in someone again was difficult. Seemingly well-meaning people became suspicious. Intimacy was a threat. Closeness was weakness. My agreeableness had been used against me. I was easily manipulable, and she pulled every string that she could to keep me stuck with her.

So, when someone offers help, seems to be exactly what you asked for? Well, do they actually want to help, or am I just going to fall back into this cycle again?

Abuse and trauma, I think, inspire a certain hyper-vigilance that It Follows is masterful at articulating. Is that person behind you there to kill you, or just going about their own business? Does your friend want to sleep with you because he wants to help take the monster off you back for a while, or is he just attracted to you, or is it both?

It’s no coincidence, too, that no one seems to take the monster seriously until they’ve also been exposed to that trauma, or had it “passed on.” You can see the effects of the monster, but you can’t see the actual monster itself. The abuse I faced was mostly emotional. Even the physical abuse – in my case, being slapped by my abuser – was not particularly visible. In the case of my partner, the abuser they’ve most recently gotten out of their life emotionally abused them – and people who supposedly believe them about the abuse still go about daily life with the abuser, seem friendly with them. It’s so much easier to just believe that the abuse isn’t happening and go about your daily lives. It’s so much easier to believe that your friend isn’t an abuser. Or your partner. Or those parents across the street. It’s so much easier to just go along with what they want. That’s certainly a big part of why I put up with my abuser’s shit for so long.

Anyway. I guess the fundamental question of this movie is, what are you running from? It’s abusers. It’s mortality. It’s assault. It’s sickness. It’s age.

It’s the very fact that I can’t run from death that freaks me out so much about it. Am I going to die any time soon? No, not with any likelihood. I’m relatively healthy. I’m young. I don’t do super risky things all the time. Yet I constantly feel like I have something breathing down my neck, reminding me, you will die. Not yet, maybe not for a while, but eventually “it” is going to catch up to you and there’s nothing you can do about that. You can get it out of your mind for a while – through sex, through love, by running from it, by filling your days with other things – but you will never be rid of it entirely.

3. The Worst Thing is that it is Certain

The ending of It Follows gets a lot of criticism from people. The kids try to kill the monster through a really, well, stupid plan. They stack a bunch of electronics around the outside of a pool, try to lure the monster in, and plan on shocking it. What happens in actuality is that the charge is not enough to harm anyone – the monster knocks one of the electronics in while Jay is in the pool to no effect – and then starts chucking these objects at Jay. Is it a dumb idea? Yes. It’s a bunch of kids trying to kill some inhuman monster using a pool and some toasters. But they’re a bunch of kids trying to fight off the concept of death! When my anxiety was at its worst, you know what I did? Gaming, watched some movies, stargazed, etc. Did any of that do anything at all to actually address the cause of my anxiety? No. Did it make me feel better to think I could do anything at all? A little. But this is a thing that can be shot in the head and still survive. You’ve got to try something.

I mean, the entire premise of this movie is the interplay between life and death. It’s mentioned that “It” would kill its way down the chain if people stopped spreading it. Death would eventually claim each person and it would be done. That is to say, you can’t have death in the absence of life itself. It is through procreation, and continuing life, that the monster spreads at all. At the same time, however, it is through intimacy – physical, emotional, etc. – that we can help each other, that we can help push back the specter of death a little more. Death is an inevitability, but that doesn’t mean that life needs to be navigated alone. Similarly, abuse tracks behind us, follows us from the initial abuse itself until the day we die, but we need not carry those burdens on our own. I wonder if there are others out there who have also been abused by my abuser, and who may in the future. I wonder if I could have done something differently, and what I can do now. I wonder how I can use my own experience as an abuse victim to help others get out of their own similar situations, and how I can be supportive to people who have suffered abuse themselves.

If this essay seems a little back and forth, I think it shows how back and forth this movie itself is. It’s not easy to nail down one particular “meaning” of “who” the monster is. It’s not easy to point to one interpretation (and while that’s true of every movie, this one in particular pokes at a lot of questions concurrently). But what I can say is that this movie is the clearest depiction of both my existential dread as well as the weight of the past abuse done to me on my present self.

I think, too, that it’s fitting the movie leaves you with a lot of questions. We learn that the form of the monster at the pool was Jay’s father, but it’s unclear what happened to him. Did he die? Was he an abuser? Is that why Jay’s mother is absent and seemingly an alcoholic? Is the monster dead at the end or is that blurry figure walking behind Paul and Jay the monster, all caught up to them now?

Yara, at the end of the movie, reads us another passage from Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot: “When there is torture there is pain and wounds, physical agony, and all this distracts the mind from mental suffering, so that one is tormented only by the wounds until the moment of death. But the most terrible agony many not be in the wounds themselves but in knowing for certain that within an hour, then within ten minutes, then within half a minute, now at this very instant – your soul will leave your body and you will no longer be a person, and that is certain; the worst thing is that it is certain.”

Fundamentally, this is what runs through my head when my anxiety is flaring up. This notion of “knowing for certain” that within a year, ten years, fifty years, I will no longer be a person, will no longer be able to enjoy all that being a person entails. It is not so much the concept of death that frightens me itself, it is the certainty of it. In this line, then, I believe lies the core message of It Follows. It is a question: what do you do in the face of certainty, in the face of something that has happened and cannot be undone? Be that trauma, be that mortality, be that abuse, be that an illness or an injury.

There really isn’t a good answer. I’ve often remarked on the fact that with many phobias, one can avoid the feared thing. If I’m afraid of spiders, I can avoid spiders. If I’m afraid of heights, I can avoid heights. If I’m afraid of death, what exactly do I avoid? How exactly do I run? I can distract myself for a little while, but that only lasts so long. There is that small, pulsing, rhythmic anxiety in the back of my head that starts out soft and eventually will burst out and start growing, as the soundtrack so deftly portrays. It’s unavoidable. It’s unpleasant. It’s overwhelming.

But despite how much it seems like I’m preaching a lack of hope, I have found something of a solution. I’ve pursued therapy. I’ve pushed myself to find my way to be present in the world – whether that’s through a film essay blog, or a passion for photography. I’ve pursued those moments that make it feel like I don’t have to worry so much any more. Moments like sitting together and having a dinner with my family. Moments like drinking and yelling about movies in a cheap pub on a first date. Moments like looking out onto the Boston skyline from Quincy while biting down on some grilled food, or sharing a dinner with a pair of friends.

Am I going to be able to fight off death? Well, I’m holding out hope for a real-life San Junipero, but probably not. Am I going to be able to hold every abuser accountable? No, I won’t, especially not if these past two months have taught me anything. But that doesn’t mean I can’t help – both myself and others. There’s something that each of us can do to help, and it’s imperative that we find out what that is.

I used to think that the ticking clock permanently activated in my head meant that it was okay to take shit from people for a little while because, well, it’s going to pass eventually anyway. It’s not going to matter in the end. That, oh, I can take this abuse for now, because I want to help this person be a better person and they’re working on X Y or Z thing that they blame for their abusive behavior. I’ve worked on that. It’s a horrendous mindset, and, take it from me, it lets people take advantage of you. But just because death is inevitable doesn’t mean that it is everything. It means there’s all the more reason to treat people with kindness, love, and to not waste your time on people who treat you – or others around you – poorly. Death instills in each of us a responsibility. It means you do not run and do the easy thing when faced with something horrendous, but you invest your trust in people. You let yourself trust and you give others your faith.

Trust is the first casualty of abuse. It’s taken me a while to build that back up, but I have.

Similarly, vibrance is the first casualty of an all-encompassing fear of mortality. I felt like I was walking around in a fog when I was dealing with that – much like Jay, when I was doing stuff as mundane as laying on the beach in the summer, or sitting in class, or so on, something would spark my anxiety and the pursuit would begin.

There was a sense of, well, you’re going to die eventually anyway, how much can you really be enjoying this thing? Or, in a similar vein, you’re going to be abused again, how much should you really trust this person? Am I allowed to feel angry? Am I allowed to feel uncertain? Am I allowed to feel confused?

It wasn’t an easy thing to rebuild. I did, but it took months and months of intense emotional work on my part. I still feel livid when I see others who continue rubbing shoulders with abusers. I still have days where I remember what was done to me and it makes my blood boil.

But I’m moving past it. I’m no longer looking over my shoulder. I’m able to look forward, live forward. Much like Jay and Paul are walking along the road at the end of the movie, eyes straight forward, I don’t need to be stuck looking over my shoulder any more.

It may be following, but that doesn’t mean it controls us.