We’ve been in the throes of the “elevated horror” wave for so long that it feels almost trite every time a new release has the revolutionary idea of using the genre as a didactic allegory, but there was a point in time when it was a fresh departure from a decade of generic studio releases. From the early 2000s up to the mid-2010s, mainstream horror was a wasteland of found footage Paranormal Activity clones and a race to see who could escalate gore after movies like Saw opened the floodgates, but around 2014, there was a pivot, and there are two movies in particular that were at the forefront of that change – The Babadook and It Follows.
While The Babadook is probably patient zero for the current trend of “horror as a metaphor for grief and depression,” It Follows was a comparatively esoteric affair. Its central plot (which sees a young woman relentlessly pursued by a tireless supernatural entity passed on through intimacy) was brilliant due to the fact that it could be interpreted in any number of ways beyond the obvious STD evocations, and the subtly anachronistic setting and Disasterpeace’s synth-heavy fairy-tale-turned-nightmare score helped it become pretty much an overnight cult classic. The announcement of a sequel back in 2023 was a completely unexpected shock, and after two years of relative silence on the project, we’ve now received our first major update about the status of the It Follows sequel — They Follow.
