Plot Summary

After sleeping with a handsome boy on their first date, Jay (Maika Monroe) learns that he has passed on to her a terrible curse: Wherever she goes, shape-shifting phantoms visible only to her and able to assume any outward appearance, will follow, with the singular goal of killing her. The only way for Jay to save herself is to pass the curse on to someone else by having sex with them.

Memorable Lines

Hugh: It could look like someone you know or it could be a stranger in a crowd. Whatever helps it get close to you.

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Hugh: Okay, even thought it is following you I can still see it. It is not done with me either. Okay, like I told you, all you can do is pass it on to someone else.
Kelly Height: What the fuck are you talking about?
Hugh: She can do the same thing I did. It should be easier for her, she is a girl. Any guy would be with you. Just sleep with someone else and tell him to do the same thing. Maybe it will never come back.

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Yara: When I was a little girl my parents would not allow me to go south of 8th mile. And I did not even know what that meant until I got a little older. And I started realizing that. That was where the city started and the suburbs ended. And I used to think about how shitty and weird was that. I mean I had to ask permission to go to the state fair with my best friend and her parents only because it was a few blocks past the border.

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Thoughts from the HauntedHouses.com team

Chuckie. Freddie Krueger. Pennywise the Clown. Samara. Dracula. Norman Bates. Nosferatu. Jack Torrance. Carrie. The Blair Witch. Hannibal Lecter. The Babadook. The Devil.

The horror genre’s most memorable monsters and villains have names. And, frequently, fully fleshed out identities and backstories. Viewers sometimes even see pictures of them when they were little, before they turned bad. Their faces—whether cloaked with a thick curtain of wet, black hair or dappled with leathery burn scars—inspire uneasy sleep. We empathize with them. We know what makes them angry, why they kill, and sometimes, how to stop them.

But not in It Follows. The deliriously frightening new low-budget horror film by David Robert Mitchell bucks the genre’s habit of over-explaining monsters by going in the exact opposite direction—revealing nothing. The premise is deceptively simple: Girl meets boy. Boy and girl have sex. Boy tells girl (surprise!) he just gave her a curse: A mysterious creature in the form of a person will follow her until it kills her, unless she has sex with another person and passes the curse along to them. But if that person dies, the creature will come after her again.

There’s plenty to parse without wandering into the thick weeds of the film’s (inadvertently) daunting sexual politics. The unwitting curse-bearer, 19-year-old Jay (Maika Monroe), spends the entire film running from “it” with the help of her sister and friends in the Detroit suburbs. “It” is a mindless, shapeshifting creature whose only mission is to silently stalk its victim to the death. The only other details: It walks slowly but never stops, it cannot be deceived, and it can look like a stranger or someone you know. Oh, and don’t let it touch you.

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