“It Follows” and the Strength of Uncompromising Visual Style

Everything the audience needs to know about It Follows is established in the opening sequence of this masterful horror film from writer/director David Robert Mitchell. A haunting score establishes an uneasy tone to the film while the camera rotates 270 degrees to reveal a perfectly normal suburban street. A young women emerges from a house and starts running, looking behind her. No one seems to understand why she is running, but she informs her father that everything is okay. After a quick cut to later that evening, though, we find this same girl seated in a field, sobbing through a phone call to her father in which she expresses her resignation. Another quick cut, and she lay dead with misshapen, broken limbs.

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