Pursuit predation as the basis for a horror film! There’s this tumblr post about how the other sentient species in the Universe would see humanity because of what we are. It feels to me like the writers of It Follows read that post and appreciated it as much as I did. All of this is to say that I wanted to like this movie so much. It’s about a teen girl who leans on her sister and her friends in her time of crisis. It’s about a pursuit predator! It’s scary enough that it gave me nightmares last night. And yet… I didn’t like it. All those amazing elements were combined together in a weirdly voyeuristic way. There’s no way to discuss the why’s of this without spoiling everything so stop reading if you mind spoilers. The horror works very well, at least for me, but it’s everything surrounding the horror that made this movie a one-time watch for me. It’s good if you don’t mind sexual-assault-as-a-plot-point tropes and frequent objectification of late-teens early twenties girls.

So:
Everything is built around a rape metaphor, that’s never actually treated as such. A lot of the personal, quiet moments are built around all the guys that ever appear on the screen wanting to have sex with the main character. And if that wasn’t enough, late in the movie we find out that the monster kills by essentially raping its victims to death, which given the first death, is especially lovely, let me tell you. It’s all kind of disappointing cause I really wanted to like this movie. The horror element worked well enough for me that I had an actual nightmare about it last night. And frankly, that doesn’t happen often. I wanted this to be a movie I’d come back to again and again. But nope. Such disappoint.