Mors Vincit Omni: On “It Follows”

It Follows, director David Robert Mitchell’s second film, opens with a yawning vista of suburban life — the likes of which exist on film solely to be disturbed by dark forces. The sun has all but disappeared from the sky, and the trees, which have shed their long afternoon shadows, buttress both sides of a long road; scattered leaves tell us that it’s autumn. But little time is wasted selling us a sense of security that we’ll never buy. A door opens and out runs a young woman, scantily clad and in stiletto heels. She is visibly terrified; of what, we can only guess. The door seems to slam shut of its own volition.

“Hey,” says a neighbor, “are you okay?”

“Yes.”

“Annie,” her father calls, “what are you doing?”

“I’m fine, dad.”

Evidently, she is not. It quickly becomes clear that she sees something we can’t. She runs back into her house, giving something a wide berth, and emerges a few seconds later. She gets into the family car and is gone.

Now we’re on the beach, and it is night. Annie sits on the sand and sobs “sorry” and “I love you” into her phone. Time seems to be of the essence. Suddenly her expression changes, and while we can’t see anything, we sense that we’re no longer alone. Annie sits still. She will not run any longer. The scene cuts, and it’s morning now. Annie is dead: her leg is bent back and snapped at the knee so that her still-heeled foot points jauntily toward her face. We don’t see Annie again, nor do we hear any more about her. Are we to believe that her death takes place before or after the main events of the film? It’s impossible to say. The point, however, is that it doesn’t matter: the forces that Annie reckons with, which also haunt the film’s protagonist, Jay, are timeless and universal.

Another house, another girl. Jay lies in a pool and stares at the sky. Clouds roll impassively overhead. It is summer. An insect lands on her forearm, and she drowns it mercilessly without a moment’s thought. Like her friends, Jay is eminently likeable: witty, sardonic, and caring. That night, she goes on a date with Hugh. The two chat awkwardly in line at the movies, but something happens before the film starts, and he begs her to leave with him. Jay is confused but compliant. A few days later she sees him again, this time on the beach, and they have sex in his car. The sex is hardly revelatory, but everything seems to be going well enough. Then he stuffs a chloroform-soaked rag in her face and ties her to a wheelchair in an abandoned parking lot. “I’m not going to hurt you,” Hugh not-very-reassuringly assures her. But he seems in earnest, and what’s more, he seems frightened himself.

Hugh tells Jay that he has given her something — just as someone gave “it” to him. As a result, she will be stalked by the titular it, a polymorphous entity that only she can see. It will follow her slowly but ceaselessly, and, if it catches up with her, it will kill her. Then it will resume its hunt for Hugh, her transmitter. Jay’s only hope for survival is to pass it on — to sleep with others and unload the burden of it onto them. Of course, that will only bring temporary respite: if it kills them, it will be after her again. A cure is impossible. The most she can hope for is a lengthy remission. While Jay is naturally incredulous, her first visit from it, taking the shape of a frightening, expressionless child, is enough to leave her rattled.

As the summer days roll on, a few more encounters with slow-moving, dispassionate stalkers put Jay in a permanent state of terror. Naturally, her friends don’t immediately believe her, as only Jay (and we) are privy to the horror. Unlike Jay’s friends, we aren’t granted the luxury of incredulity or detachment. Indeed, through the extensive use of deep focus shots — which turn foreground, middle ground, and background into possible playgrounds for “it” — we find ourselves prey to the very paranoia that befalls Jay. Of course, the horror occasionally whips up into crescendos, but some of the film’s most horrible moments are the ones that don’t quite occur: where our feverish imaginations make us believe that ordinary people in the background signify death itself. It is suffocating and exhausting. Indeed, when it turns up, it’s almost a relief.

There’s something inconsistent and irrational in the way it follows: sometimes it seems to turn up within a few minutes; other times, days pass without a peep. Often it takes a single form; other times it changes guise several times within a scene. And while it is often a complete stranger, sometimes, Hugh says, “it looks like people you love just to hurt you.” Are these plot holes? In a lesser film, perhaps they would be. Here, though, they serve to amplify the horror: after all, what persists through the inconsistencies is the simple fact that it follows.

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Some commentators on the Christian right have suggested that “it” is a metaphor for AIDS. If that’s correct, then presumably the film is some kind of anti-sex, or anti-teenage sex, or anti-casual sex, polemic. “While possibly not the filmmaker’s intent,” one argues, “this movie serves as a warning against casual sex.” Another offers this unedifying little adumbration: “It Follows is a masterful, beautiful, terrifying tale of sexual repression and the values of gun ownership in suburban Detroit.” Let’s be unduly generous: if this reviewer is joking, his joke is not funny. This sex-negative reception of the film leads one well-meaning commentator to the conclusion that it represents the “stigma that follows those who are casual with sex and are tainted by their promiscuous lifestyle.” But of course it doesn’t. After all, the solution that the film offers isn’t chastity or even prudence. If it follows you, and you don’t want to die, the answer is to fuck more, not less. The film couldn’t be clearer: don’t wait — fuck.

To the extent that It Follows is about sex, it is perhaps a subtler distillation of a theme that David Foster Wallace addressed in “Back in New Fire,” his recently resurfaced 1996 essay. Wallace modestly proposed that, in a world where sex had become commonplace, AIDS may serve to re-establish a lost sense of danger and risk to our amorous affairs. Commentators rushed to call the essay “utterly minor,” and, “uncharacteristically gormless.” It seemed to belie a strand of conservativism and chauvinism, which some suspected lay dormant throughout all of Wallace’s work. But if Wallace’s mistake was to imply a conservative sexual ethic, Mitchell’s triumph lies in his hilarious subversion of one. If sex has become conspicuously common — if the darkness of the bedroom has been flooded with light by advertisers and consumers alike — It Follows dramatizes the nonetheless nocturnal aspect of sex that withdraws from the familiarity of the public gaze.

In one scene, Jay looks out onto a lake and sees three young men on a boat. If this was a cartoon, we’d see a lightbulb switch on above her head, or cogs turn about inside it: she must transmit it. She takes off her clothes and enters the water. The scene cuts, and she’s in her car, dripping wet and looking a little regretful. A few minutes later, it is following her again, leaving us to imagine just how quickly it dispatched of the three men. Her technique is all wrong: she presumably didn’t warn them about it, and simply made a hasty escape. But the film passes no judgment on her promiscuous acts. After all, sex is her lifeline.

Ultimately, however, that lifeline fails. Mors vincit omnia, death always wins. Near the end of Plato’s Symposium, the priestess Diotima tells Socrates that love aims at immortality. One of the ways it does this, perhaps most obviously and basely, is through procreation. Through the creation of a child, lovers accomplish immortality. It Follows is a brilliant perversion of this idea: if death is omnipresent and certain, then sex no longer aims at immortality but survival. It is an act of mortal postponement, not redemption. Sex isn’t fecund, it doesn’t give birth to anything; it simply defers the inevitable, which is perhaps the most that one can hope for.

It Follows doesn’t contain a lot of gore (though it isn’t without its share), nor does it rely on the sudden “jumpy” moments that have become a staple of the horror genre. Its terror lies in the creation of a foggy atmospheric density, where boredom is no longer distinguishable from dread — where ontological terror exists amid the now insufficiently reassuring banality of everyday life. It Follows takes the idea of death’s inevitability — so straightforward and universal — and follows it through rigorously and unrelentingly. At one point Jay stares out across an infinite blue expanse. But this is Detroit: that blue isn’t the endless sea. It is a lake, on the other side of which, and not so far away, lies more land over which death looms just as large. Death may follow slowly, but it does so without end, and there’s nowhere one can hide. The narrative unfolds like a knot, or a noose, being pulled tighter and tighter; ultimately, the distinction between running from death and waiting for it vanishes.

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Will Rees is a writer based in South London. He is especially interested in philosophy, literature, and — above all — the texts that scatter the border between them.