It Follows

It Follows

Directed by David John Mitchell

100 minutes

It Follows (David Robert Mitchell) is a new horror film that’s found much attention in its explicit and terrifying context. Directed and written by David John Mitchell, the premise comes from a recurring nightmare he had, whereby someone is following him. In much the same way the main character Jay (Maika Munroe), and somewhat ‘final girl’ becomes trapped inside her own nightmare. This is when Jay sleeps with boyfriend Hugh (Jake Weary) who passes on a sort of STD. Jay becomes plagued by strange visions and like Mitchell’s dream someone follows her.  The carrier can only see the follower(s) and break the curse by sleeping with the next person, exactly what Hugh had done. This proves difficult and challenging since the followers evoke personal trauma to the beholder. The social commentary is what makes this a disturbing experience. The bodily associations such as STD’s that could occur from a ‘one night stand’ or the darker monstrosities like rape and molestation are all very real. This is fused with tragedy, which makes you have empathy and connect to these cases. Jay’s followers are either sinister or victims themselves. Physiological scenarios like mental illness or the battered wife syndrome are cases we understand and handled with thought and respect. Besides, it has been awhile since these themes have been tackled in the horror genre in such a delicate way.

As it turns out though, I found myself enjoying the ambience, more.  It Follows is a minimal, yet pretty grim film but violence and past trauma are only implied. Mitchell, much to my delight distances himself from the “splat pack” (a term associated to directors such as James Wan), but recreates his own version of John Carpenters, Halloween (1978). In the lead-up and night of Halloween, a follower prowls a neighborhood. The follower (Mike Myers) is not a disease, but someone sick. A monster Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) sees and not till the very end others see him, too. In much the same way, Laurie is a final girl, needing to overcome the (masculine) nightmare.

The use of wide shots, voyeurism, and hand held camera not to forget the stripped back and effective score makes this a very haunting and realistic experience. What It Follows manages to do differently, is take out the slasher madman element and present taboos. Even though, Myers does present a form of societal monster, the film is very traditional to the slasher genre and doesn’t budge in that regard. In much the same way, Jay as a final girl is quite different to Jamie through appearance and being sexually active. This is a great juxtaposition, since traditionally, final girl’s don’t have sex. Jay is a beautiful concoction of a victim and an aggressor, with much vulnerability and trauma but at the same time strength and power to overcome her nightmare.

It Follows is a subliminal film that does feels like being, perhaps inside Mitchell’s recurring nightmare. It is very floaty and ambiguous and has the sort of sexual energy of Twin Peaks (Mark Frost, David Lynch 1990). This is not flawless but pretty close to the mark. It does feel like, It follows over stays its welcome, again the more I think about it, the more it works as an anti- narrative that doesn’t give you the answers. Perhaps, because of its dream like narrative there are some awkward moments that don’t seem to work or make sense. However, if you stay with the film then this incoherence and eclipses, kinda work. Meaning, this is a film that can be reevaluated in a different context, or soak up its fragmented truths.

Jacob's Ladder

Jacobs Ladder

Directed by Adrian Lyne

113 minutes

If you’ve heard of the phrase Jacob’s ladder, then this gives you some kind of meaning to the film of the same name. Jacob’s Ladder (1990, Adrian Lyne) is a physiological horror with Tim Robbins playing the character, Jacob Singer. The film starts in the Vietnam War where Jacob is an American Solider. Visually and acoustically the film hasn’t dated, it is pretty damn menacing. Comrades are shot, if not wounded, while Jacob himself, is stabbed in the stomach with a bayonet. At this stage it seems logical to make the assumption Jacob is dead or at least, rescued. Flash forward to a little later, and it is 1975. Jacob is still alive and sitting on a subway wearing a New York postal uniform. As he tries to leave the subway in a normal, orderly fashion the station becomes a series of endless tunnels. Jacob cannot find his way out and is nearly killed (again) by a train. Every event now, in Jacob’s life is fighting and coming to terms with his presence state.

One-way of looking at Jacob’s Ladder is through time and the characters who define that. Jacob at present lives with his girlfriend Jezzie (Elisabeth Pena). Jacob is a post traumatic solider with a guilty conscience and Jezzie is unsympathetic towards Jacob’s panic attacks, which is a little odd. But then, in different stages of time, as in the past, Jacob was married with children and talks about Jezzie as a made up character from his dreams. This is confusing when these truths occur in the narrative space. But after a while you learn that Jacob has a cloudy mindset and cannot distinguish between past and present. In one tensely present moment, Jacob witnesses his friend blown- up, but his friend has already been killed in Vietnam.

Jacob’s Ladder is a bombarded with flashbacks and psychological black outs, once you get used to, it gets tedious. It also requires you to go with the narrative and trust Adrian Lyne like you would with David Lynch. But unlike the dream like nature of Lynch it is quite heavy handed and leaves you with too much closure, not to mention any opportunity to be symbolically charged or get its point across. Lyne takes on mental illness through posttraumatic stress, which is nuanced and convinced through Robbins. Sometimes you feel sorry for Jacob and then other times, he’s selfish, absolving his grievances.

This is a film that uses a twist to resolve and add closure. Whether this is clear, or not, it got to the point that it lost impact and boredom comes. When you step back a little and revaluate Jacob’s Ladder in today standards, not that films these days are employing the same mindfuck style (yes, it is a genre!), it has dated. Personally, we’re too savvy for Jacob’s Ladder. In the sense, too prepared. I mean watching Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999) or The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan, 1999) now, I recon I would get the ‘twist’ better than when I first saw these films at the time of release. Perhaps because of this I battled to fully enjoy Jacob’s Ladder and know to never trust a character with a cloudy personality or a narrative that isn’t in chronological order. Dead give away!