Do you ever wonder why we are scared of scary movies? There's a lot more to making such a production than fake blood or editing. Oftentimes, cultural and political trends of our contemporary are reflected in the media. The genre of horror in cinema is a great example of the lense in which this reflection takes place. In Brigid Cherry's chapter, Horror and Cultural Moment, Cherry explains the implications of horror in society by bridging the genre to ideology of the contemporary, regardless of the geographical or historical setting of the work itself (Cherry, 2009, p. 167).
It Follows, directed by David Robert Mitchell premiered in 2014, and surely scares and reflects ideological anxiety within its subtexts. The film features a couple who are young and sexually active in the suburbs of Detroit, who are faced with a demon of a very peculiar kind; one that kills you after contracting it through sexual intercourse. In the film, the audience watches a teenage girl physically run from a demon that walks towards her slowly, and nearly catches up to her until she passes the demon onto someone else, who will also have the same fate (Mitchell, R. 2014).
Run from the curse until you give it to someone else. If you fail, you die, and whoever gave you the curse will have to run from the curse again until they give it to someone else. The curse is cyclical and psychologically terrifying, because it is a reflection on a contemporary anxiety of contracting sexually transmitted diseases or infections.
Traditional notions of sexual experience being saved for marriage is an old fashioned and outdated concept for the teens and early adults of the past few decades. In a sense, It Follows is a reflection on both the fear and anxiety of that ideological structure's disintegration and also of the growing issue of contracting something sexually. These fears are captured in the film, reflecting on a modern issue of socio-political trends of its time and the time in which it was produced, 2014. In this instance, the film is produced and set in the contemporary, but had the setting of the movie been from another time period, the reflection would still resemble that of the contemporary.
It Follows most definitely reflects and critiques a taboo society, and subsequently demonizes a fairly common issue of society. Sexually transmitted diseases and infections grow in frequency in societal structures that allow sexual freedom, and using this growing issue as fuel for a horror movie is exactly what the genre does. I personally find the film to be both evident of a great critique, yes simultaneously problematic in it’s message and contextualization. It is problematic in the sense that demonizing such an issue contributes to the stigma surrounding it. However, being a horror film, the job of the genre is to form these types of relationships with social anxiety, and capitalize off of anxiety ridden tropes, whatever they may be.
It Follows is possibly one of my favorite horror films, Bryce. Together with its cinematographic merits (its nostalgic artistic design and soundtrack being to me the most relevant) the film works brilliantly as as a metaphor for the existing social panic/anxiety around early sexual relationships. In that sense, I see this film as a modern reformulation of Nightmare on Elm Street. A much more sophisticated one of course. Great interpretation and activation of the reading Bryce!
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