It Follows
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What’s in a Word?
“Adele Romanski is an independent producer who, Academy Award– and Golden Globe–winning producer whose …” This is what my assistant, April Moore, sent back to me in March of this year when I asked her to please take a pass at revising my bio. (I needed to provide it as part of closing a loan against the tax credit for a television show I was producing.) It had been about a year since I had updated my bio. April made quite a few changes to the document, but striking out the word “independent” was the one I obsessed over. Why […]
by Adele Romanski on Sep 14, 2017 -
An Unpredictable Release: Four Surprising Facts about It Follows’ Road to Success
During the second day of IFP’s Screen Forward conference, Indiewire’s Eric Kohn moderated a discussion between Animal Kingdom producers Joshua Astrachan and David Kaplan, and former Radius-TWC CEO Tom Quinn on the breakout success of David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows. An indie juggernaut, It Follows grossed 15 times its $1.3 million budget at the box office, in large part due to Radius’s last minute decision to stall VOD and expand to a wide release two weeks after its limited theatrical opening on March 13, riding the wave of word of mouth rather than costly P&A. Below are four major takeaways on the film’s unusual […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Sep 21, 2015 -
Creeping Time
There is nothing new about Slow Cinema. From the very beginning of projected motion pictures in the late 19th century, the Lumière brothers utilized the single take, allowing for the temporal flow in the frame to coincide roughly with the audience’s experience of time. The fracturing of time through editing — borrowing from and keeping with the realist conventions of the novel — put cinema on the path of montage: the art of visual storytelling became equated with rapid movement across time (flashbacks and the implied “meanwhile…”) and space (multiple locations). Even cross-cutting — shifting back and forth between two […]
by Nicholas Rombes on Jul 23, 2015 -
“We Didn’t Have to Add Too Much Creepiness”: It Follows DP Mike Gioulakis
Many a book and an infinite number of film studies thesis papers have noted the link in ’80s teen horror films between sex and death – though the actual inspiration for that correlation likely has less to do with Reagan-era conservative mores than the target audience’s bottomless appetite for nudity and gore. The connection between a character’s carnal desires and their demise has never been more explicit than in the new horror film It Follows, in which young Detroit suburbanite Jay (The Guest’s Maika Monroe) finds herself stalked by a murderous supernatural force following a sexual encounter. The force can take […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Mar 31, 2015 -
“It Was a Bit of a Rough Ride”: David Robert Mitchell on It Follows
Writer/director David Robert Mitchell has only released two films, but he has already shown himself to be a fascinating and diverse filmmaker. His first outing, 2010’s Myth of the American Sleepover, was a simple teen drama following a bunch of Detroit teenagers as they, well, had sleepovers. But for his sophomore effort, Mitchell created a horror film, and an excellent one at that. Despite the shift in genre, It Follows is very much a David Robert Mitchell production. It also follows a group of Detroit teens as they live their lives, and by focusing on creating believable characters, goes beyond genre […]
by Alec Kubas-Meyer on Mar 19, 2015 -
Meta Hairy: David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows
Unlike dopamine-inducing mood enhancers, the opening sequence of unique hybrid It Follows aims for atmosphere, not climax — though that, too, will come. It is cinematic foreplay, simultaneously tease and microcosm. Over the span of several minutes, David Robert Mitchell succinctly anticipates not only the plotline of the narrative, but also its themes and infrastructure. He privileges ambience over character development even more in this genre-bending teen/horror movie than he did in 2010’s Myth of the American Sleepover, the film about growing pains and friendship among youth in suburban Detroit that put him on the radar of film scene machers. Myth was primarily […]
by Howard Feinstein on Mar 12, 2015 -
“I’m Pretty Sure She Saw Something”: David Robert Mitchell on It Follows
Lo-fi horror films have enjoyed a modern renaissance ever since The Blair Witch Project, and while the quality of the genre is often overcast by the sheer quantity of its offerings, the profit margins all but ensure Blumhouse and comrades’ staying power. As such, it’s nice to see an aesthetically exacting, relatively high-concept pallet cleanser take its turn in the spotlight. Last year, we had The Babadook, and this year, all signs point towards David Robert Mitchell’s absurdly entertaining, expertly crafted It Follows as the genre’s banner breakout. Mitchell’s sophomore film has myriad virtues — a Carpenter-worthy score from Disasterpeace, and a foreboding use of wide pans, for starters — but it’s […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Mar 11, 2015 -
Sundance 2015: Mistress America and It Follows
Modern media has a perverse fascination with pinpointing the motivations of the millennial. When not publishing extensive reports on “hookup culture,” many publications are transfixed by the generation’s ostensible desire to simultaneously better themselves and the world, while still being unable to get it together and move out of their mom’s basement. With Mistress America, Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig have created a precise portrait of a woman who embodies the ephemeral essence of a do-it-all, self-entitled millennial without dispensing any blanket, generational theses. This character, however, is not the film’s purported protagonist — that would be 18-year-old aspiring writer Tracy, played by a nicely understated […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Jan 25, 2015 -
Parting Shot: Maika Monroe
Filmmaker David Robert Mitchell developed rich, resonant teenage characters in his independent sleeper, The Myth of the American Sleepover. With his sophomore feature, It Follows, he again essays the emotional lives of attractive, sexually adventurous suburban youth, this time within a high-concept genre framework. It Follows is eerie, Carpenter-esque horror, the tale of a slow-moving demon who shuffles steadily, invisibly and scarily toward a single victim. Here that’s mostly Jay, played with real “Final Girl” charisma by Maika Monroe, who has quickly emerged as a strong lead and supporting player in several notable films. She co-starred opposite Zac Efron in […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 21, 2015 -
Trailer Watch: David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows
David Robert Mitchell’s genre juggernaut, It Follows, continues its year on the festival circuit as a just-announced selection of Sundance’s Midnight program. On the heels of said announcement, we now have our first official look at a (French) teaser. The horror film concerns a teenaged girl in a Detroit suburb who is stalked by a sexually transmitted phantom, but as these things are, the less you know going into it, the better.
by Sarah Salovaara on Dec 8, 2014
