Love and Death: David Robert Mitchell on horror movie It Follows

It’s a dark and stormy night, and I’m heading into the cinematic equivalent of a haunted house – Islington's Vue – to speak to indie filmmaker David Robert Mitchell, the mind behind It Follows, the most beautiful and ingenious American horror movie in recent memory. As I pass the pick‘n’mix and popcorn stands, leaving puddles of rainwater in my wake, I catch sight of the filmmaker as he's leaving the auditorium after introducing his film to the London Film Festival audience – its chilling synth score fills the corridor, then fades as the cinema door slowly closes. “It’s a little quiet”, he says to the LFF liaison. “Can they turn it up a notch?”

It seems like a reasonable request until minutes later he’s describing the concept for the score by composer Rich Vreeland (aka Disasterpeace). “We wanted to create a balance between a very beautiful and haunting, melodic piece of music,” he tells me, “and then at times it’s like a controlled noise – it’s assaulting the audience.” If you’re one of the few people to have caught Mitchell’s debut film, The Myth of the American Sleepover, a delicate and swoony coming-of-age film, you might be surprised to find him delivering a brutal slasher flick as his follow-up. But take away the film’s central monster and we could be watching the same movie. “When I was writing It Follows I kept thinking about the idea of taking characters similar to the characters that I had written in Myth, and then imagining if they were placed in a nightmare and how they might react.”

The nightmare in question is Mitchell’s own recurring one. Perched on a bench in the multiplex lobby, he recounts it: “In the dream I sort of knew it was a monster coming to kill me but it looked like different people.” In the film, too, the eponymous “It” takes many forms, sometimes seemingly-benevolent (a girl in pigtails, a lost-looking old woman) and some disturbing (a rape victim, the main protagonist's father sans clothes). In old-school horror movie style, the creature was shuffling but relentless. “In the nightmare I could get away from it very easily but that wasn’t comforting because of the fact it was always coming towards me.”

The dreams stopped in adolescence, but the concept stayed with him. “I wanted to turn it into a horror film,” he says, “and I thought it would be really cool if this thing that was following could be something that could be passed between people.” Like a game of tag, the monster is transferred from character to character. It’s a familiar horror sub-genre that contains at least two classics: Jacques Tourneur’s Night of the Demon, where a cult leader curses his enemies using satanic symbols on parchment, and seminal J-horror Ringu, where watching a creepy video tape results in death seven days later.

Mitchell’s method of transference is ingenious and gives the film’s title a delicious double meaning. “It sort of dawned on me: if it’s sex, then that connects people both physically and emotionally, and we’re kind of followed by people that we sleep with and in a way we’re also connected to the people they’ve been with.” Anyone with an ex and Facebook will know exactly what Mitchell means. The story concerns Jay, a melancholy teen played by the charismatic Maika Monroe (The Guest), whose new boyfriend has had sex with her to rid him of the affliction. Jay's only hope it to pass it on to her next sexual partner before "It" reaches her. Think of it, then, as a sexually transmitted haunting.

What makes the film’s thin story hum is its sophisticated visuals. It’s based on a nightmare and Mitchell’s dreamy aesthetic makes it feel like we’re in one. It’s full of unsettling long takes and voyeuristic tracking shots. Its slow zooms and 360 degree pans will make your hairs stand on end; film grammar has never been so terrifying. “There are subjective moments in the film, but a lot of these are fairly wide objective frames in which we present you with the environment and you are a character sitting within that physical world.” These long takes, combined with a shapeshifting monster, result in the audience constantly playing a terrifying game of Where’s Wally? “The idea is that you’ll kind of look around the edges and look off into the distance – you’re looking out to see if something’s coming.”

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“There’s no searching for truth or logic behind a nightmare” – David Robert Mitchell

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Mitchell has another trick up his sleeve for keeping us off-balance: while the group of kids at the heart of the movie talk and act like modern teenagers, the world around them gives conflicting clues to the time in which it’s all taking place. “I wanted the film to live and breathe outside of time,” he explains. “So there are a lot of production design elements from the 70s and 80s, and there are some from the 50s and 60s and some things that don’t even exist” – for example, one character is often found reading from a futuristic e-reader designed to look like a 40s shell compact that looks like it could have been pinched from the set of Spike Jonze’s Her. “It’s just about blurring the lines of what’s real.”

Reading the premise, one might assume that It Follows is part of horror's tradition of punishing beautiful teens for their sexual misdemeanours – a seedy practice stretching as far back, at least, as John Carpenter’s Halloween, which It Follows often recalls in its suburban setting and synth score. But Mitchell’s film’s themes are far more slippery than that. “I’m not trying to demonise sex, definitely not. These characters open themselves up to danger through sex, but it’s also the thing that can at least temporarily free them.” Mitchell suggests one possible, more sex-positive theory: “[The film]’s dealing with mortality on a very simple level in the fact that we’re all here for a limited amount of time. I think that love and sex are ways in which people can push death away. To me that’s one interesting read.”

Or maybe this is just a 100 minute night-terror that horror-nuts, critics and armchair Freudians have no hope of solving? “There’s no searching for truth or logic behind a nightmare,” laughs Mitchell. “It's simply just a nightmare.”

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