Ten Years Later, This $1.3 Million Indie Horror Movie Is Still One of the Most Unsettling Ever Made

This year marks a decade since It Follows –– the breakthrough horror film from writer/director David Robert Mitchell –– celebrated its world premiere. The film wouldn't make it to wider release until the spring of 2015, but the hype leading up to this high-concept dose of terror was so tangible and exciting at the time that it's worth remembering the film as early as we can. 

Thankfully, it's very easy to look back on this modern classic at the moment. It Follows is streaming on Peacock for Halloween, so you're just a couple of clicks away from watching Mitchell's film, Maika Monroe's breakout horror performance, and one of the essential horror films of the 21st century so far, a movie so good that 10 years later, it's quite possibly even better now than when it first played to audiences. 

Why You Should Watch It Follows

This is one of those films that's cast a very long shadow over the horror scene, along with similar hits like The Babadook, The Witch, and Only Lovers Left Alive, all released around the same time in the mid-2010s. It's so well-known that, even if you've never seen it, you know the basic story. Jay (Monroe), a college student who's seeing a new guy, wakes up from a sexual encounter gone wrong to be told that she's suddenly been afflicted with a strange curse. From now on, until she sleeps with someone else and passes it on, an entity that's invisible to everyone else will follow her at a slow, deliberate pace, never stopping until it reaches and kills her. The only way out, she's told, is to pass it on. 

Initially unable to really believe what's happening to her, Jay tries to go about her daily life, only to find that the entity is indeed following her, taking various human forms as it stalks her at home, at school, and basically anywhere else she goes. If she's going to survive, she has to lean on a small group of friends and try her best to defeat the entity. 

While it arrived in the midst of, and was subsequently lumped in with, the "elevated horror" conversations of the 2010s, It Follows is rooted in certain primal, basic, very ubiquitous human fears. We've all felt that little tickle on the back of our neck that suggests maybe we should turn around, maybe we're being watched or, worse, followed by someone. We've also all seen that one person in the crowd behaving a little strangely, looking a little out of place, maybe staring at us, maybe not. These are things that, generally, we're wrong about. Most people out in the wider world aren't out to get us, and we can rest easy knowing that it's all in our heads. With It Follows, that little tickle of fear is placed front and center, with the added terrifying element of a being that only the protagonist can see. 

Mitchell's script, witty and cleverly paced and full of great scares, is rooted firmly in these simple fears, but it also succeeds in expanding on them, exploring ways in which the entity might behave when confronted with a trap set for it, or a group of people all trying to kill it at once. The way the entity interacts with a physical world in which it's largely invisible is both frightening and remarkably well-considered, as is Mitchell's depiction of how different people respond to this terrifying phenomena. Bottom line: This movie is just plain scary in a way that hits you on an instinctive level. It's one of those films that'll have you glancing behind you every few minutes for days afterwards, just in case.

Why It Follows Endures

In the immediate aftermath of It Follows' release, critics and viewers started picking the film's dense, detailed narrative apart, looking for a direct metaphor in its tale of a sexually transmitted monster. Interpretations ranged from the obvious to the obscure, but Mitchell himself eventually weighed in with a point of view that's a bit more abstract.

"I'm not personally that interested in where 'it' comes from," he told Digital Spy. "To me, it's dream logic in the sense that they're in a nightmare, and when you're in a nightmare there's no solving the nightmare. Even if you try to solve it."

The dreamlike interpretation of the story as Mitchell explains it is reflected in the strange timelessness of the way the tale unfolds. It Follows seems to take place in a kind of time warp, a world where all the TVs are old school tube models, but people also have e-readers; where laptops and smart phones seem nowhere in sight, but you can sometimes find relatively modern cars and houses. It's simultaneously in the past and present, and that's reflected not just in the visuals, but in the lives of the characters. 

Everyone in It Follows is a young adult, college age or a bit younger. They're all people with their whole lives ahead of them, in other words, but they can't stop reminiscing about simpler times and fun they've had. Jay's friends are always talking about first kisses, first beers, sleepovers gone by. Jay, in one telling moment, explains to her date that she used to dream about such moments, and now doesn't understand where she's expected to go next with her life because the dream has become a reality. It's a film that carefully, incisively reflects the kind of no man's land that is early adulthood, when everything is potential energy and the world grows more complicated all at once, leaving you both longing for a simpler past and eager to move forward. 

The ambiguity that's present in the origins of the entity means that It Follows is open to a wide variety of interpretations, and a lot of them work perfectly well with the movie's text. That's one of the key reasons it endures, but it's also a film that's stood the test of the last decade because, at its core, it depicts the simple fears of growing up. At a certain point, whether it's during your first sexual encounter or just a random grown-up moment, all the kid stuff starts to slough off your life, and it can be a truly horrifying experience. It can feel, at times, like death is the only thing that's certain now, and that it's marching behind you at a steady, tenacious pace, never to be shaken off. The only solution is to keep moving forward, keep clinging to those you care about, and find joy where you can. 

It Follows is now streaming on Peacock, alongside a ton of other great spooky offerings!