Glasgow Film Festival 2015: It Follows

As horror premises go, this one is delicious – a sexually transmitted curse that causes a monster to follow its victims to the death, assuming any form, visible only to the victim, coming for them day or night. The teenage cast gives subtle, sympathetic performances, grounding this wild terror in reality, while the cinematography and assaultive score openly recall the cinemascope suburbia and savage synths of John Carpenter’s Halloween while building on the influence and deepening it.

David Robert Mitchell’s script and direction ponder the inevitability of mortality and work with themes of youth and sexuality, allusions to class and collective national guilt, and codified references to disparate works of literature, cinema and TV, making It Follows ripe for intellectual dissection. But more directly, the film just plain delivers as a bold, terrifying attack of cinema, immersive on the levels of imagery both beautiful and grotesque, and scares from the shallowest to the most pervasive. The term ‘instant classic’ is being bandied around a lot on this one – deservedly.

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The Skinny at Glasgow Film Festival 2015:

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