Capital Celluloid 2022 — Day 228: Thu Aug 18

It Follows (Mitchell, 2014): Barbican Cinema, 6.40pm


The presentation, part of the 'Post-Horror Summer Nights season', features an intro from David Church, author of ‘Post-Horror; Art, Genre, and Cultural Elevation'.

BFI review (for the London Film Festival):
Horror cinema has a long history of chastening the sexually active teenager, with the old sex equals death adage firmly established in the pantheons of genre cliché. Taking the skewed morals of the slasher heyday and subverting them into an entirely fresh and stimulating meditation on sexual paranoia, David Robert Mitchell’s remarkable shocker has the power to provoke and terrify in equal measures. For 19-year-old Jay, an exploratory sexual encounter subsequently turns into a living nightmare when she begins to experience strange visions and the unfathomable sense that she is being followed. Terrified and helpless, Jay must find a way to pass on the curse that has seemingly befallen her. The suburban milieu evokes John Carpenter’s iconic Halloween, and the cyclical persistence of the horror undeniably recalls Hideo Nakata’s Ring, yet It Follows remains a defiantly original piece of work, impeccably realised and with enough subtext to keep your mind buzzing for days.

Michael Blyth

Here (and above) is the trailer.

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