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A Detroit Landscape with Figures: The Subtractive Horror of <em>It Follows</em>

2018; Wayne State University Press; Volume: 40; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.13110/discourse.40.3.0358

1522-5321

Löwenstein,

Jungian Analytical Psychology

A Detroit Landscape with Figures:The Subtractive Horror of It Follows Adam Lowenstein (bio) "Filmed on location in and around Detroit, Michigan." This announcement appears near the end of the final credits for David Robert Mitchell's It Follows (2014), one of the most excitingly inventive horror films of recent years. On the one hand, the announcement is hardly necessary: the film has made such skillful, strategic, and explicit use of its setting that we have little doubt as to where the film was shot. On the other hand, the announcement is telling in its insistence: it signals just how much the landscape in this film matters, how its background is actually the foreground. It Follows testifies to what we can learn about cinematic horror by focusing on landscape, an element that is usually considered secondary at best, rather than the monsters, killings, and gore that are most often deemed primary. I will contend that It Follows teaches us valuable things about horror's relative investments not so much in a body count that adds up but in a landscape where human presence is subtracted. It Follows concerns a group of teenage friends who stumble across a supernatural phenomenon that is difficult to believe at first. Jay (Maika Monroe), the group's most sexually confident member, is told by her boyfriend Hugh (Jake Weary) that he has passed on a curse to her. When he had sex with her, he transferred what had been passed on to him by another woman when they had [End Page 358] sex: a creature dedicated to killing her will follow her wherever she goes, forever, until she passes along the curse to someone else. The creature can take on any number of human forms and is visible only to the persons being followed. Outrunning the creature is relatively easy, since it moves only by walking at a deliberate pace. But any escape is temporary, since what the creature lacks in speed it compensates for in determination. It will always follow, no matter where you run, and it cannot be stopped. Jay and her friends, who include her sister Kelly (Lili Sepe), the brainy Yara (Olivia Luccardi), the smitten Paul (Keir Gilchrist), and Jay's older friend Greg (Daniel Zovatto), veer from wishing to comfort Jay about what seem to be her paranoid and delusional beliefs to working actively with her to discover the nature of the curse and create a solution to it. Nothing works. Even the ostensible fix, having sex and passing on the curse to someone else, is just another temporary breather. Once the creature kills the newest victim, it pursues the previous one. The film ends with Jay and Paul holding hands and walking the streets of their placid suburban neighborhood. Paul and Jay have had sex in order to share the curse, but what comes next? What will follow? It Follows is an extraordinary variation on the slasher film, one of horror's most tried-and-true subgenres. The slasher film traces its roots to Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974), but its most influential model has been Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978). That film is the crystallization of the slasher formula, what Carol J. Clover, in her brilliant study of gender and the modern horror film, calls "the immensely generative story of a psychokiller who slashes to death a string of mostly female victims, one by one, until he is subdued or killed, usually by the one girl who has survived."1 Many key elements of the slasher film are, as Clover notes, already present in Psycho, and Halloween's knowing nods to Psycho include characters with identical names and the casting of Janet Leigh's daughter, Jamie Lee Curtis, as the killer's featured prey/antagonist. But it is Halloween and its most lucrative imitators, Friday the 13th (Sean S. Cunningham, 1980) and A Nightmare on Elm Street (Wes Craven, 1984), that have spawned the remarkably durable series of sequels, remakes, and even parodies that have continued to make the slasher film very much a part of the cinematic present tense. Although Clover's claims about the presumed audience, spectator identifications, and...