It Follows

Jay Height is a nineteen-year-old in the quiet suburbs outside Detroit, drifting through a late-summer haze of above-ground pools, card games with her sister and friends, and a promising new boyfriend named Hugh. After a date that ends in the back seat of his car, Jay wakes to discover that the evening has cost her far more than she imagined: something has been handed to her, and it will not be handed back.

From that point on, Jay is followed. The thing that pursues her can look like anyone — a stranger in a crowd, a friend, a family member — and only she can see it. It never runs. It walks, patiently, in a straight line, and it never, ever stops. The only way to pass it on is to sleep with someone else, an escape that is also a condemnation, and one that offers no permanent safety: if the new carrier dies, the entity turns back down the line toward her.

What follows is less a monster movie than a slow dissolve of adolescence itself. Jay's sister Kelly, her friends Yara and Paul, and the boy next door Greg orbit her with a mixture of loyalty, skepticism and desire, improvising defenses against a threat none of them can see. David Robert Mitchell films this dread in wide, unhurried compositions and a pulsing synthesizer score, turning empty streets, beaches and abandoned Detroit blocks into a landscape where the worst thing in the world is always somewhere on foot, heading your way.

At its center, It Follows is a film about the inescapability of death and the way human intimacy is used to hold it briefly at bay. Mitchell has framed the film as a confrontation with mortality, describing sex and love as ways to temporarily push death away — there is no real escape from it, but there are moments.

The curse works because it literalizes something everyone already knows: the instant you become a sexual adult, you also become a mortal one, aware of a clock that started running the day you were born. The entity does not sprint, ambush or negotiate. Its horror is its patience — it is the unglamorous arithmetic of time, walking toward you at a steady pace while you go to school, swim, flirt and sleep.

The film is also a lament for a specific American adolescence. Its suburban Detroit, suspended somewhere between the 1970s and the present, is a place where the promise of freedom — a car, a date, a night with no curfew — is discovered to be a corridor with a door at the end. The message is neither moralistic nor nihilistic: you cannot outrun it, but you can choose whom you walk beside while it comes.

The STI reading. The most immediate interpretation treats the entity as a sexually transmitted infection: it passes through intercourse, can be given away but not cured, and follows the chain backward if the next carrier dies. Detractors consider this reading reductive and faintly puritanical; defenders note the film never punishes desire, since transmission is the only available remedy.

It Follows arrived at a hinge moment for the genre. Premiering at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2014 and released widely in 2015 through Radius-TWC, it helped define what would soon be labelled the "elevated horror" wave — low-budget, auteur-driven, thematically legible films that critics could praise without apology. Its numbers made the case commercially as well: a picture costing roughly $1.3 million returned around $23.3 million.

Critically it was a landmark. The film holds a 95% Tomatometer score on Rotten Tomatoes from 271 reviews, with a consensus calling it "Smart, original, and above all terrifying... a rare modern horror film that works on multiple levels — and leaves a lingering sting."

Its most durable legacy may be sonic. Disasterpeace's synthesizer score — his first for a feature, written in three weeks before Cannes — became a touchstone, accelerating the revival of Carpenter-style analog synth soundtracks across horror and beyond, and standing as one of the most acclaimed genre scores of the decade. Mike Gioulakis's compositions, with their slow pans and threats lurking in deep focus, were widely imitated; the "figure walking in the background" shot became instantly legible film grammar.

Culturally, the film has been read through the lens of sexual anxiety, STI metaphor, consent and the end of adolescence, and it has been repeatedly revisited in essays and video analyses for its Dostoevsky citations and its portrait of a decaying Detroit. Initially a cult object, it broadened into mainstream familiarity through streaming, and a sequel — They Follow, with Mitchell directing and both Disasterpeace and Gioulakis returning — has kept it in active conversation more than a decade on.

Critics were close to unanimous: the film carries a 95% Tomatometer score from 271 reviews, with praise concentrated on its originality, its sustained dread, and the rare ability to work simultaneously as visceral scare machine and as metaphor. Reviewers repeatedly singled out Disasterpeace's synth score and Mike Gioulakis's widescreen compositions, whose deep-focus backgrounds turn the audience into anxious lookouts, as well as Maika Monroe's grounded, unaffected lead performance.

General audiences were more divided — the film's Rotten Tomatoes audience score sits at 66% from tens of thousands of ratings, a notable gap from the critical figure. The common complaints are familiar for this kind of horror: the pace is slow by multiplex standards, the characters make baffling decisions (most infamously the swimming-pool plan, which even the director has called ridiculous), the curse's rules are loosely and inconsistently applied, and the ending refuses to resolve. Some viewers arrived expecting jump-scare horror and found a mood piece instead.

The most contested elements are the third-act confrontation, the deliberately blurred time period, and the closing shot. Yet the same ambiguity that frustrated some viewers is precisely what gave the film its afterlife: it accumulated a cult following before broadening into mainstream popularity via streaming, and it remains one of the most discussed and dissected horror films of its decade. The overall verdict: an atmospheric, intelligent modern classic whose power comes from restraint, and whose flaws are inseparable from its ambitions.