IT FOLLOWS Directed by David Robert Mitchell USA – 2014 – 97 minutes Distribution Press Métropole Films Distribution Mélanie Mingotaud 5360 St-Laurent Boulevard MingoTwo Communications Montreal, QC H2T 1S1 1908 Panet Street, suite 403A t : 514.223.5511 Montreal, QC H2L 3A1 f : 514.223.6111 t: 514.582.5272 e : [email protected] e: [email protected] SYNOPSIS For 19-year-old Jay (Maika Monroe), the fall should be about school, boys and weekends at the lake. Yet after a seemingly innocent sexual encounter she suddenly inds herself plagued by nightmarish visions; she can't shake the sensation that someone, or something, is following her. As the threat closes in, Jay and her friends must somehow escape the horrors that are only a few steps behind. With a riveting central performance from Monroe and a strikingly ominous electronic score by Disasterpeace, It Follows is an artful psychosexual thriller from David Robert Mitchell (whose The Myth of the American Sleepover premiered at Critics' Week in 2010). The ilm also stars Keir Gilchrist, Daniel Zovatto, Jake Weary, Olivia Luccardi, and Lili Sepe. ABOUT THE FILM The Genesis of It Follows David Robert Mitchell had an auspicious debut in 2010 when his irst feature The Myth Of The American Sleepover, which he wrote and directed, premiered at SXSW and then went on to play Cannes Critics’ Week. Set in a seemingly timeless world, neither past nor present, Myth resonated with critics and audiences as a poetic depiction of teenage existence, in all its confusions and yearnings. The independent ilm world was understandably surprised and excited when it was announced that Mitchell’s sophomore project would be a horror ilm. It Follows is indeed terrifying at times, but it’s unmistakably a product of the same mind as Myth. “I guess it wasn’t a big leap for me in my head,” Mitchell said of the transition. “I love horror movies. I want to make a lot of different movies and I like the idea of playing with genre. I thought that it would be interesting to taKe the tone of Myth and imagine characters with a similar feel to them, and put them into a scary situation and see how they would react. I tried to portray them with genuine qualities like those I tried to give the characters in Myth – I didn’t think, oh, because it’s a horror ilm that’s not necessary. I wanted them to be people that I cared about.” The characters in It Follows – all teenagers – feel notably akin to their precursors from Myth. Jay (Maika Monroe) is a college student living in the suburbs of Detroit. She has a close group of friends, including Yara (Olivia Luccardi), Paul (Keir Gilchrist), and her sister Kelly (Lili Sepe), all of whom will become endangered after Jay starts being followed by a nefarious supernatural presence of unknown origin. The germinating idea of the ilm – of Jay being followed, slowly but consistently, by a monster – came from nightmares Mitchell had as a child. “I remember having nightmares where something is following you, and in the nightmare it’s sort of slow and persistent. In the dream I was at the school playground. I looked over across the parking lot and saw this other kid walking towards me. Somehow I knew this was a monster. Then I started running away. I would run down a whole block and wait a moment, and then it would step out and keep walking towards me. It’s about the idea that something is consistently coming after you and it always knows where you are. The nightmare always sat with me. Somewhere as an adult I had the idea to build it into a ilm. I wrote it really quickly – it took about a week.” Mitchell is an admirer of horror cinema, and as the ilm came together he and his key crew immersed themselves in numerous standbys of the genre. “I was watching Rosemary’s Baby, The Shining, some Cronenberg. Halloween, Creature From The Black Lagoon, Blue Velvet, Eyes Without A Face, The Thing, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Those are things I was looking at. There’s also a little Hitchcock inluence in terms of how we used subjective point of view. There were also some photographers whose work we looked at like Gregory Crewdson and Todd Hido.” As It Follows began to come together, Mitchell was tasked with inding the actress to play Jay, an incredibly demanding role that necessitated lots of physical strength and emotional hysterics. He found his leading lady in Maika Monroe, who in recent years has appeared in At Any Price, Labor Day, and The Guest. “Maika read for the part and she was fantastic,” Mitchell related. “There was a vulnerability to her. There was a scene where my reaction to her was, ‘Oh my gosh, this poor girl.’ It went beyond what I put on the page. There was an intensity to her.” For Monroe, trusting Mitchell was easy due to his commitment to executing his vision for the ilm. “I was impressed with how he spoke about the movie and how closely it touched him. When he sent over the information about what he wanted the ilm to look like, I was blown away by how speciic it all was, the details. I thought to myself, this guy is special. This guy is different from the rest. I was drawn to him and to the role.” The Narrative of It Follows It Follows opens with a virtuoso long take, involving numerous rotations of the camera as a young woman lees from an unseen threat. It situates the viewer in Mitchell’s stylistic world, which is comprised of complex camera movements. In fact, director of photography Mike Gioulakis said it was the most complex shot in the ilm to capture. “The opening shot of the ilm was a 360 degree pan with some zooms on about 50 feet of track. We rehearsed and rehearsed and got just a couple good taKes in before there was no light. It was tense!” The complexity of the camerawork provides a dreamlike eeriness to the world as depicted; in other words, the surreal qualities of Mitchell’s nightmares carry through into the ilm’s atmosphere. “We wanted to create an environment where the camera wasn’t telling you where to look all the time,” Mitchell explained. “Where you would be scanning the edges of the frame looking for something. The camera is a little distant. We wanted to suggest to the audience that they should be looking a little in the distance, wondering what’s out there. The idea is that things are out there and we’re not going to shout to you when something dangerous is approaching. There’s deinitely a dreamlike quality to it.” As we come to meet Jay and her friends, that dreamlike quality is boosted by the fact that Mitchell portrays a world that is indistinguishable in its exact time period. “I wanted to create a world that isn’t completely real. This isn’t a period piece and it’s not a modern piece – it’s something different. I like to think of it as in its own time but with things that we are very familiar with.” Jay is in the early stages of a relationship with Hugh (JaKe Weary), an older guy whom she clearly is attracted to, but has yet to form a deep bond. One night, after sleeping together in Hugh’s car, their relationship takes a dramatic turn. As Jay lounges in the backseat of the car, Hugh sneaKs up behind her and knocks her out with chloroform. Later, as she wakes, she realizes she’s tied to a chair in an abandoned building, where Hugh explains that he doesn’t want to hurt her, but what he’s about to tell her is so shocking that he had to tie her up so she would listen to him. Hugh explains that he’s being followed by a monstrous thing of some sort. This thing takes the form of various humans, sometimes known by the person being followed, sometimes strangers. Sometimes they appear naked, other times with clothing. Hugh explains that the thing starts following you after you sleep with someone whom is being followed by it, and the only way to stop being followed by it is to sleep with someone else. If it catches you, it will kill you. Jay, horriied and shocked, remains there with Hugh as the thing starts to appear, in the guise of a naked woman, approaching them slowly. Jay and Hugh escape before it can catch them. The scene is shocking in its transitioning of the narrative from one of everyday teenage life to eerie horror. Mitchell wanted to portray Jay’s shock as naturalistically as possible. “I have always imagined Hugh was someone Jay hasn’t been seeing for very long, but she really likes him and they sleep together very quickly. I think she has genuine feelings for him. I think he genuinely likes her as well, though that may be in conlict with the things that he does. What happens to Jay is overwhelming and ridiculous – it’s insane. We tried to portray how someone might actually feel in this situation, being overwhelmed and not knowing if this is real. But if you’re in this kind of a situation it’s going to become reality to you at some point.” Jay’s doubts and fears about what may or may not have happened continue to plague her in the aftermath of that evening, and she begins sharing her concerns with her friends who try to reassure her that everything will be ine.