It Follows

Just about any slasher flick. ;-)

It Follows. What a great movie!

I don’t think Quentin Tarantino is that qualified to tell others how to make movies better, IMHO. :-(

EDIT: Regarding the monster’s behaviour, I think it’s allowed to mix it up a bit, although, it usually just walks in a straight line. So my interpretation is that what’s-his-face’s explanation at the beginning of the movie wasn’t entirely accurate.

I don’t have a ton to add to this conversation, other than to note that this was the best of the horror movies that we watched in our Halloween prep this year.

Not to distract too much from the point of the film (on the contrary, I think it’s a testament to how clever their mythology is), but it’s really tempting to try to SCP (http://www.scp-wiki.net) the It Follows monster (STD: Sexually Transmitted Dismemberment).

(In short: keep a detailed log of the last dozen or so hosts, distribute them around the world, contain it in a prison cell, with at least 1 infected guard at all times.)

We watched this one on Halloween. Loved it. Great, original horror. Loved the music. I was like… this sounds like the Fez music… And it was that guy!

Such a great concept well done.

I adore that idea, but I’m not sure of the point of the infected guard. Also, you could arrange for it to be stored in a specific place and then have a series of people have sex with each other in a circular order, so that the “last” person changes e.g. every day.

Sorry, a “carrier” guard, so somebody on duty can see it, but the guard is not in immediate danger.

Think of the kill order as a queue. Everybody in the queue can see It, but It only attempts to kill the person at the front of the queue. If you’re already in the queue, and you have sex with the person in the front of the queue, you don’t change places. You’re still in your same position, and they are still at the front. The queue is unchanged.

If the person at the front of the queue has sex with a person who is not yet in the queue, only then is a new person added to the front.

The person at the front of the queue is the current host, everybody else is a carrier.

There would of course, be some hazard pay involved with signing up as a carrier, but you should never be in immediate danger without adequate warning, so the bonus is likely to be rather small.

I didn’t even think about the carrier/versus “target” thing. Good point. And yes I was thinking of the guard as the “last up/target” for some reason. Silly me.

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that class D personnel (1) don’t need pay and (2) would welcome the basic work. The “seeders” might need compensation, though.

I haven’t read SCP in ages, will have to start again this weekend.

I didn’t know about SCP until it was linked here. I don’t even know what to think, but some of these are very creative.

I’d never heard about it until just now, and I think my productivity for the rest of the day will experience a sharp decline.

I presented It Follows at last year’s Halloween movie fest with the sister-in-law and they said it was just an average not scary teen movie.

Philistines.

@Vesper and @anonymgeist you guys are in for a treat (and, IMO, in for a lot more lost time than a single afternoon :P). There’s no right or wrong way to read SCP.

This was great. Like a zombie movie, but a curse that gives you one personal endless zombie, forever. Also a nice twist on the teen sex taboo stigma / punishment as well, which is a classic horror movie trope. I agree the sets, the costumes, the music were all top notch and off kilter in a timeless way. A very clever horror package end to end.

That said … I have technical questions! If you had this curse, wouldn’t you be better off flying somewhere halfway around the world for a while? That’d buy you many months, wouldn’t it?

Well right, it is a zombie movie, so it is about the inevitability of death. The sex stuff is a novel ingredient, though, as is the personal (intimate, even?) nature of the curse.

Also there is evidence that the last manifestation was her Dad, who maybe killed himself? That ties together the family angles with the other kid who was killed by the manifestation of his mother.

In the final pool scene, Jay spots IT coming towards her. She keeps saying “There he is!” When her sister Kelly asks what it looks like, her response is: “I don’t wanna tell you.” Upon revealing IT, we see a normal-looking man in his late 30s-early 40s. It’s her dad — that’s why she doesn’t want to tell her little sister.

Why does this prove he killed himself? Well, the pan beyond Jay’s mother shows an older family photo. Jay and Kelly are much younger, but the man to their mother’s left is the EXACT man IT was portraying. Not a day older.

Bonus: if you pay attention to the polaroids tacked to Jay’s bedroom mirror, there’s a photo of her and her father. Same man, basically same age, but she’s a child.

He’s been dead for years, which is why the girls seem more complacent and put-together — they’ve learned to cope — but their grieving mother is still despondent, self-medicating with alcohol.

On the ending. I liked it. We see the one kid, her new “boyfriend”, driving around looking at prostitutes, the idea is he gave the curse to her, and he gives it to a prostitute, who then quickly gives it to someone else… but every person in the chain has to have sex quickly, before the curse catches up to them. Also, unless you prepare the random person you sleep with (as the guy did with her, which was quite a boon in retrospect), that person will be a goner pretty quick, don’t you think? Then the entity will continue working their way down the list, which didn’t get a whole heck of a lot longer, did it?

There is a 0.0% chance the curse is gone. You can’t kill a curse, or a demon, or whatever. And whatever you do, you can’t buy much, if any, time. They were already being followed during the ending.

He got it from her, I think you meant.

I think the idea is that the sex worker passes it on to someone else. If (when) that person is caught, she’ll have passed it on again before It returns to her, and that will continue for potentially a long time (especially if it gets passed to another sex worker, and so on). It’s not fullproof, but that’s not really the point.

We don’t know that they were being followed during the ending but that doesn’t matter. The fact that you can’t permanently deal with this isn’t relevant either. It’s a neat movie because we can dig into the logistics a little bit and think up scenarios and whatnot. But those things aren’t really important, and the movie isn’t about how to best deal with an unerring and inevitable curse/whatever. To re-quote my favorite Pavement song “you can never quarantine the past”. Accepting that is freeing. The ending was about not being chained to the inevitable, about the acceptance of people as they are (and not as you want them to be), and about how “the time ahead being all the time you got” ( to quote a different bard) isn’t necessarily the worst thing in the world. Live your life and take everything from it. Don’t let tomorrow get in the way of today. Etc.

Dammit, now I have to see this again!

Your quote commands need to be on their own lines FYI

I couldn’t figure out what the problem was, but figured someone else would be along to tell me. Fantastic!