A World of Ten Minutes Ago or Ten Minutes from Now?
Aesthetics and Anachronism in It Follows
On David Robert Mitchell’s 2014 film It Follows, and the sense of being caught between a familiar childhood and an adolescence that’s slowly becoming known.
I recently felt vindicated when one of the best parts of It Follows got the recognition it deserved. Yara, the protagonist’s close friend, reads Dostoevsky’s The Idiot on a blush-colored clamshell e-reader (or, as I like to say, shellphone) throughout the film—while they watch TV, while she sips a juice box in a hospital gurney. On Twitter, it’s one of those things people talk about wanting in real life. It’s a charm of the film we wish were real.
Yet, it’s one of the best examples of the film’s anachronisms. David Robert Mitchell’s 2014 It Follows is a sort of sexual health horror. If you sleep with someone afflicted, you get it; or rather, It starts trudging in your wake, following you. If It gets you, you die, body mangled and snapped. We see this horrible fate befall one girl at the beginning of the film. A girl in heels—Kayla—runs away from nothing, calls her dad crying on the beach, and in a horrific cut, we see her legs snapped on the shore the next morning.
The film is dreamily aestheticized: vintage cars, abandoned homes, an ethereal synth and bass soundtrack by Disasterpeace. A saturated color palette that renders the Detroit suburbs—its water towers and abandoned houses and old school movie theater—in a bubblegum nostalgia. The aesthetics are anachronisms, or sometimes the anachronisms are aesthetic. Jay, the film’s protagonist, watches black-and-white movies with her friends on a deep TV. The movie theater organ and its impassioned musician have maybe never left the 1920s. We can take the anachronisms as stylization, or we can pull them back a bit further. The film embodies a twilight zone—are we in a world of ten minutes ago or ten minutes from now? Are we in a world where clamshell e-readers are a playful holdover from childhood—a Tamagotchi—or the next trend?
In part, the film’s aesthetic unmoors us from time. We have to ask, where are they? Or rather, when are they? The film dwells in the uncanny, and this timelessness underlines the unease we feel in defining the terms of these adolescents’ lives. How exactly is this group of friends connected? Are they two sets of siblings? Who’s older, who’s younger? How old are they anyway? They go on walks around the neighborhood to sneak cigarettes and then play Old Maid on the patio at night, drinking Tab. There’s this sense of being caught between a childhood they’re familiar with and an adolescence that’s slowly becoming known to them.
Jay articulates some of this to her date, Hugh. After they have sex in his car, Jay drapes out the open door and plays with weeds in the grass, sharing post-coital musings with Hugh, who’s gone to the trunk.
“It’s funny,” she says, “I used to daydream about being old enough to go on dates and drive around with friends in their cars. I had this image of myself holding hands with a really cute guy, listening to the radio…driving up some pretty road up north maybe…It was never about going anywhere really. Just having some sort of freedom, I guess. Now that we’re old enough, where the hell do we go?”
Hugh chloroforms her, ties her to a wheelchair, and then introduces her to It.
The monster lurks, slowly following. We can never be sure if Jay’s being followed. It’s already creepy thinking you’re being followed. It’s even creepier if there’s a monster dead set on killing only you. The monster shifts shapes, so you can never be sure if someone you see is demon spawn or an amicable perambulator. The resultant paranoia finds a natural home in this reality where the circumstances are rotated ever so slightly from our own. Hookups gone wrong and the horrors of being a teenager collide in the nightmare sequence of the film. Intimacy becomes a matter of passing something on. We only see It once Jay sleeps with Hugh. Before, we could remain blissfully unaware of what plagues Hugh or Kayla. Once she’s in the hookup chain, every extra on-screen, every person walking just might be the monster out to get Jay. We can’t escape her anxiety, either.
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In a college class on horror film, It Follows was the final film we studied. When I first watched the movie, I couldn’t help remembering horrifying middle school text chains–pass it on or this girl from the sewer will get you. I spoke up in class, sharing my theory that the film’s aesthetics replicate mid-aughts text chains and immediately felt like I was speaking ancient Greek. Yet, I felt something deeply disturbing in the music that reminded me of the tinny melodies of flip phones, the feeling of being trapped in a time, and the need to pass something on.
What I couldn’t articulate, though, was that the film employs the uncanny in a way I hadn’t seen before. The uncanny is so essential to horror, rendering innominate discomfort by things being slightly off. Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is a prime example. The Overlook Hotel is this oppressive, unknowable place with hallways that repeat themselves, the famous Grady twins who seem just about identical but not quite. In The Shining, the uncanny untethers us from space–where are we? Unsure, we experience Jack’s unspooling alongside him.
In It Follows, the uncanny is more concerned with time. Thinking about the film’s central questions on sexuality, bodies, adolescence—of course it should ruminate on time. The film dramatizes anxiety about getting something over with. Jay needs to pass the curse on so It will follow somebody else or else she’ll be stuck with it trailing her forever. Jay liked Hugh, but he just wanted to be free of it. By the film’s end, she reaches perhaps an imaginative resolution, but maybe she’s still caught between.
Hugh, though, is less original. He just finds Jay and hopes she keeps It from him. On their date, before they sleep together, they play a people-watching game in which they find a stranger they’d want to switch places with and the other has to guess who they chose. Jay guesses that Hugh picked a man flirting with a woman, then she guesses he chose a father. Instead, Hugh picks the son, a young boy who has his whole life ahead of him. He’s not yet part of a chain. Maybe he’ll find another way through.
