Of course, plenty of horror movies are about teen sex and the punishments that come to its practitioners from primitively moral killers. While Scream (you can probably tell I hate those movies, and this is, I promise the last time I’ll use them as a strawman, or even mention them at all…) wrote out the “final girl” trope in big crayons, because it just seemed, like, totally stoopid that horror films should enshrine psychosexual terrors in popular culture, It Follows takes the trope seriously: if slasher movies have traditionally punished the promiscuous and heroised the virginal, this is one film that wants not to mock but to find out why. It takes the stigma and anxiety of teen sexuality and blows it up to a full-on horror trope in its own right. So, while the Scream films had their cake and stabbed it in the neck by both mocking the silliness of teenagers in horror films and marshalling a cast of very silly teenagers, It Follows has a real feeling for its protagonists’ anxieties. It has a plot like a ghost story told at an unusually mean-spirited sleepover, the sombre tone of a classmate’s funeral, and it lingers in the mind like a malicious rumour. And since movies so rarely frighten me, I’m always happy to admit when it happens: It Follows is really scary. The film builds a distinctive atmosphere, bathes it in a throbbing, nagging electronic score, and never punctures the mood with the leavening hijinks that are routinely wedged into anything aimed at a teenaged audience. Instead, it sets out an intriguing premise (a slow-moving demon-thing, in multiple human forms, ceaselessly pursues any individual carrying its sexually transmitted curse, which can only be passed on to another person through sexual intercourse), and sticks to it. David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows similarly tackles genre tropes, but without snarky citations. While Riley’s learning to make his own gingerbread lattes at the local coffee shop, she’s trying to sleep through the apocalypse, and as time stretches on, she gets increasingly agitated and unnerved, until their differing approaches reach a series of crisis points.Remember the Scream movies? What was billed at the time as a series of knowing, witty take-downs of the slasher film genre, full of self-referential jokes and a spiralling plotline of ludicrously solemn fatalism, now looks like an arrogant attempt to speak on behalf of a genre and a generation, a nauseating spectacle that managed to pander to and sneer at its target audience in equal measure. From the start, though, Jenai is more withdrawn about being alone in the world. He can even act out in minor, goofy ways, like taking a shopping cart for an in-store joy ride, or grabbing an unoccupied SUV and tearing through the streets. They’re both unnerved at first, but soon Riley is celebrating the freedom underlying most zombie movies: he can go anywhere he likes, and take anything he wants. Then, just a few minutes into the film, a mysterious green light pulses in the night sky, and Jenai and Riley wake up to discover that everyone else is gone, and they’re alone in Reykjavik. Bokeh starts with a young couple, Jenai ( The Guest’s Maika Monroe) and Riley (Matt O’Leary), on vacation in Iceland, where they make out under waterfalls, soak in hot springs, and drink in the scenery on walking tours.
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