Name: It Follows
Director: David Robert Mitchell
Genre: Horror, Mystery
Released: 2015
Duration: 101 min
Rating: 6.8

It Follows (2015) · Cinespective

Meaning, unpacked

Central idea

The film can be read as a horror fable about mortality, adulthood and the consequences of intimacy: the thing that follows is always slowly approaching, and you can delay it but never fully escape. It treats fear as something ordinary that arrives on foot.

What it means, and why it matteredA thing follows you. It walks, it never hurries, and it never tires. That is the whole engine of It Follows. Jay is handed a curse through sex: an entity, which can look like anyone, will walk toward her until it catches her, and she can only pass it on to someone else. The film works as a fable about mortality, adulthood and the consequences of intimacy. You can delay the figure, but you can never fully escape it. Fear here is ordinary. It arrives on foot.

What it means

A thing follows you. It walks, it never hurries, and it never tires. That is the whole engine of It Follows. Jay is handed a curse through sex: an entity, which can look like anyone, will walk toward her until it catches her, and she can only pass it on to someone else. The film works as a fable about mortality, adulthood and the consequences of intimacy. You can delay the figure, but you can never fully escape it. Fear here is ordinary. It arrives on foot.

Many people read the curse as a metaphor for sexually transmitted infection, and the film invites that. But David Robert Mitchell has said he intended no single message, and the film does not punish pleasure in a tidy way. It is just as much about the dawning knowledge that you will die, and that growing up means living with that. Safety depends on involving someone else, which raises questions of trust and what people owe each other. And because the entity can look like anyone, every stranger becomes a possible threat. Notice, too, how alone these teenagers are, with parents almost absent.

Why it mattered

The film's method is its big idea. In the classroom shot, the threat advances from the back of the frame, and you learn to read depth and distance as suspense. Cinematographer Mike Gioulakis uses wide frames, long takes and slow 360-degree pans, until you are scanning every background yourself. You become part of the characters' watchfulness. The lakeside beach proves the fear needs no darkness: a calm, sunny, open place becomes somewhere with nowhere to hide.

After watching