From the director David Robert Mitchell, who debut in 2010 with his first feature The Myth Of The American Sleepover, which he wrote and directed, now comes a different horror film like you never seen before: “It Follows”.
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The movie is a terrifying 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 film that’s not necessary. I wanted them to be people that I cared about.”
It’s a teenage horror flick with all characters being teenagers. 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 film – 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 film. I wrote it really quickly – it took about a week.” Mitchell is an admirer of horror cinema, and as the film 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 influence in terms of how we used subjective point of view.
“IT FOLLOWS” is released and distributed by CAPTIVE CINEMA and will be showing in cinemas from May 13, 2015.
photo credits: Press Release
trailer credits: official trailer youtube channel
