Counter-Currents
3,517 words
SPOILERS AHEAD
When I was a little girl, my parents wouldn’t allow me to go south of eight-mile . . . and I didn’t even know what that meant until I got a little older. And I started realizing that’s where the city started, and the suburbs ended. — Yara, It Follows
David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows is one of the best horror films of the twenty-first century. Whenever I watch it, I find myself mesmerized by the wide-angle shots of greater Detroit, the nostalgia color palette melding the bright and dull, ubiquitous shades of blue and green, the characters’ isolation, the Indian summer, the puzzling anachronisms, the relentless and soulless demons, and of course Disasterpiece’s banger of an electronic soundtrack exuding intensity and longing melancholy. I seamlessly drift into another world when I watch It Follows, one that is both eerily confounding yet comfortingly familiar. Retro futurism comes to mind, seeing a young man in the 2010s behind the wheel of a 1975 Plymouth Gran Fury.
I watch this movie with a visceral instinct that something is off and deeply wrong while also being hypnotically, hauntingly beautiful. Detroit itself, a monument to the promise and devastation of twentieth-century white America, looms large over these young white adults grappling with questions of sex and morality while on the run from what only they can — or at least try — to see. It Follows is unconventional horror in terms of how Mitchell can both fix your eyes on immediate psychological terror while prompting your uneasy reflection on a world you want to escape, but whose mystery is ever alluring. The aesthetics, the storyline, and the characters urge me to pursue the dark yet romantic dreamscape of It Follows in the hopes of connecting the characters’ torment to greater truths of social atomization, familial abandonment, globalization, and racial conflict.
It is dusk. We are treated to a peaceful suburban street and green lawns covered in fall leaves from an emptying, albeit golden canopy in a better-whiter part of Michigan. The camera pans over to a quaint, two-story brick colonial home. The front door opens and a disheveled white teenage girl in nightwear bursts out — with difficulty, considering her high heels. We do not know why, as her eyes remain fixated on the door. Breathing heavily, she sees what others do not as a confused onlooker asks if she is all right. She lies, saying yes, and repeats the lie to her concerned father, who comes out the door off screen. The soundtrack abruptly shifts from a slow, building beat to a fierce, fast-paced synthesizer gallop.
She runs back to her door, past her flummoxed father as the camera remains fixed on her in a continuous shot before it stops in front of the house. Seconds later, she desperately runs back out with the car keys, and new, piercing, high-pitched short shrieks take over the soundtrack. The camera follows her again as she gets in the car and drives away. Thus, the opening scene, with its unbroken following shot, ends.
She then drives to a beach at night, where she tearfully tells her worried dad over the phone what sounds like a final goodbye. Immediately after we see her mangled dead body on the beach at dawn. With a vast blue and silver lake in the background, her disfigured right leg bizarrely bends towards her head with a bone sticking out at her opened, bloody knee. This total sequence, which is less than four minutes long, is meant to be terrifying, and it surely is. But why is it so, apart from the girl’s sudden, contorted corpse?
As you will discover, Mitchell tells us a lot about the film in this sequence, but your somewhat annoyed sense of, “Wait, what?” overwhelms your disgust and horror. Such provocation is the genius of It Follows. The horror jumps from what we cannot see while the cinematography and soundtrack immerse us in a picturesque world. We discern a stalking menace in the background and want to know what it is, encouraging our own imaginations to get creative — perhaps ambitiously enough to learn more about the world surrounding the menace, and not just the unseen force.
The first victim.
Since its release in 2014, It Follows has been analyzed to death, and rightfully so considering the caliber of its storytelling. A group of five white, college-age adults in suburban Detroit must confront a demon after the protagonist, Jaime “Jay” Height, played brilliantly by Maika Monroe, has sex with an unscrupulous Hugh (Jake Weary). The demon only walks, but it walks forever — to the ends of the Earth, should it choose — in following its target that is acquired through sex, something Hugh of course neglected to mention until after his fling with Jay. Once the unfortunate victim falls prey, the demon, in its limitless personal forms, sets its sights on whoever passed the curse onto the victim through sex, continuing the sexual chain of carnage ad infinitum. These victims are the only ones who can see the walking abomination.
In her desperate ploy to escape the madness, Jay faces the daunting choice of whether to pass it on or somehow confront and destroy it. And passing it on invites the most awkward question: to whom? Jay is in a typical love triangle as she feels pulled toward her slacker, cool bro neighbor Greg (Daniel Zovatto), while timid, uptight Paul (Keir Gilchrist) still has feelings for her from their brief childhood romance. Either way, Paul, Greg, Jay’s sister Kelly, and their friend Yara are willing to help her find creative means in killing the monster. What on earth could such a story have to do with sexual transmitted diseases, fear of getting old, the Great Recession of 2008, or even white genocide? Surprisingly, a lot. Such themes in the film have been covered, but not from the necessary pro-white lens a Counter Currents review dictates.
Left to right: Greg, Jay, and Kelly. Note the child-like arrangement of straws in soda cans.
Remarkably, It Follows has received attention for being a Right-wing film since it portrays demonic consequences for youthful premarital sex. David Mitchell, being a Hollywood director, has of course rejected that interpretation when talking to journalists, though he gave ground when he said, “It doesn’t really matter what I think” — stressing that, at the end of the day, the audience, not he, must decipher this Motor City caper.
I am inclined toward the interpretation popular in traditionalist circles that Mitchell’s masterpiece condemns the sexual revolution. It is hard not to be so inclined when monsters, often in the form of adult authority figures who are otherwise absent, come to kill you after being in the back seat of a 1970s car one autumn night with some guy who has lied about everything, including his name. Moreover, when Jaime passes the demon on to Greg, he is cavalier about the whole affair, proud of his conquest while never truly believing in the curse, even to the point of looking down on her for doing so despite being by her side while it tried to kill a frantically traumatized Jay. Arrogance, and this neglect of shared adversity in friendship, proves his undoing. The demon, appearing as his mother, kills an unsuspecting Greg in the dead of night before setting its sights back on a far more fearful Jay, who grasps her predicament’s consequences and severity.
The pursuing demon takes the form of a previous victim, tracking down Jay and her friends to Greg’s family’s lake house.
Beyond the immediate allegory of youthful sex, there is more to It Follows with its tour de force nightmare storytelling in which the legacy of post-1967 Detroit follows Jaime much as the stalking demons do. YouTuber Daniel Netzel contends that It Follows is about the fundamental fear of getting old, evident in Jaime living in her ever-absent parents’ house while going to college, and always reminiscing with her friends about lost childhood days and dreams while they indulge in innocent treats of ice cream and soda. Netzel sees her as caught between two phases, like the very Indian summer Jay and the gang are experiencing. Cold gusts of autumn foreshadow winter between lingering, yet prominent warm days where shades of orange and green fill the trees.
For Netzel, the idea of two worlds can be taken further in understanding the suburbs of Jaime’s childhood as a sanctuary defined by cul-de-sacs, swing sets, her pool, and curiously old, clunky televisions in homey living rooms showing old films. The pursuing demon forces Jay and her friends to abandon these comforting confines, however, and venture into the dark, grimy, crumbling ruins of Detroit, where pornography is conspicuously lying around. It is a world of adult danger from which Yara confesses her family attempted to shield her as a kid.
In contrast to Netzel, Joni Hayward in Frames Cinema Journal sees the clash of suburban affluence and urban blight in It Follows as a portrait of post-Great Recession economic decline in the 2010s. A group of white — yes, she singles them out for being white — middle-class millennials living with their boomer parents are forced to venture into spaces they normally would not, having been robbed of their freedom (economic security) by tormenting forces they cannot understand (neoliberal capitalism). Curiously, Hayward acknowledges parallels between Jay and her friends’ forced movements away from a stalking demon and the city’s white flight from the infamous 1967 Detroit riots onward. Of course, to her this concept merely proves just how much racism is entrenched in America’s short-sighted capitalist system of exploitation. Regardless of the interpretation, seeing both sides of 8 Mile Road in It Follows creates a horror of its own.
This is downtown Detroit today; its population has declined 60% since its peak in 1950. Many of these skyscrapers are empty.
Greg, Jaime, Yara, Paul, and Kelly explore the condemned Detroit home Hugh used as a fake address to track him down and explore the origins of It.
Some of the most striking shots appear as Jaime and her friends seek to track down Hugh, actually a fake name, to further understand the demon’s nature. They go to his fake address in the ghost town of the Detroit slums for further clues. Set to Disasterpiece’s “Detroit,” they are cruising at the break of dawn under grey skies in a 1980s blue sedan down the condemned boulevards of the former Paris of the Midwest. They are silent as they glide past boarded-up, graffiti-strewn warehouses and ruined homes where a few huddled denizens of the ghetto make them even more eager to keep driving, while they themselves maintain blank stares throughout. This wordless scene of about 30 seconds sets the menacing yet despondent tone of the entire flick.
You can buy Trevor Lynch’s Part Four of the Trilogy here.
Starting from this scene, Mitchell sets up Detroit much as Stanley Kubrick set up the Overlook Hotel in The Shining. These settings, with their history of uniquely American trauma, become irrevocably tied to the characters’ fates. The Overlook, with its Native American décor, was built on an old Indian burial ground where spirits from the past drive snowbound winter caretakers to murder their families across generations. Likewise, urban Detroit’s decay reflects the nature of Jaime’s struggles with the pursuing demon in whichever form it takes, whether “it” is Hugh’s mother, Jay’s father, an old and decrepit lady, or her own friend, Yara. Such spirits emanate from America’s own burial ground, a post-apocalyptic urban hellscape which once epitomized post-war liberal ideals of economic prosperity and civil rights before crashing into economic globalization and stark racial realities. The end of this primrose path haunts Jaime and her friends in a dominating exposition as they seek to learn more about just how the curse of “it” befell her.
Detroit as an abandoned city brilliantly plays this foundational role, because its graveyard nature heightens isolation for Jaime and her friends in the face of a relentlessly marching “it.” Steve Sailer points out that the story for American black-majority cities like Detroit does not end with white flight, but total depopulation. As institutions of governance and stability dissolve under the weight of crime, corruption, and drug abuse, anyone with at least modest means – and not only whites — will inevitably get out, leaving behind only the most hopeless who have the least stake in a functioning society. 82% black Jackson, Mississippi saw its population decline by 17% from 2000 to 2020, while Detroit; Gary, Indiana; and East Saint Louis, Illinois all saw a population decline of at least 16% in the same period.
Mitchell gives the viewer a subtle feeling that Jay and her friends are living in a world of atomized solitude and neglect where men and women of ideal responsibility are long gone. After Jay is first introduced in the film in her backyard above-ground pool to a soundtrack of beautiful serenity, she walks into the house to see her friends on the couch watching a 1950s movie, where the characters have old-time mid-Atlantic accents. She then talks with her friends about her plans to see her new boyfriend, Hugh.
During the back and forth, they entirely ignore the nameless woman in the background who is silently talking on the phone at the kitchen table, presumably Kelly and Jay’s mother. From then on, we do not see the nameless woman again. Later, Hugh’s mother appears as the only other living parent in the entire film, just for one moment. By seeing adults rarely interact with these young people, I got the sense that Jay and her friends are missing something existentially fundamental. The lack of substantive interaction with elders and their guidance created a gaping spiritual void tied to their fear of a disheveled, injured, or undressed stalker demon right around the corner. Their fear, while isolated, is perfectly fitting for what is arguably America’s largest empty city. For anyone unfortunate enough to live in Detroit, I can imagine that the fear of black crime found in any major American city is compounded by a unique, eerie creepiness when one walks for several blocks without seeing as much as a shadow of another person. Mitchell entraps us in this depopulated Detroit by seamlessly portraying Jaime, Kelly, Greg, Paul, and Yara as unnaturally on their own.
Where Jaime and her friends intend to kill the demon once and for all.
Parents do ultimately return to these lost children as “it,” culminating in the final battle in the dead of night at a Detroit community swimming pool pristinely illuminated from under the blue-green water like a temple’s inner sanctum. Despite planning the encounter, a terrified Jay did not expect to see her own father (recognizable from home photos) in demon form. She refuses to tell her friends what she sees as they stand ready to help drown and electrocute the monster in the water. Despite her father’s furious aggression, managing to throw the various electric appliances our heroes had laid out as traps into the pool, he is ultimately brought down by a gunshot to the head once he is in the water and grabbing Jay’s leg. He leaves behind not his body, but a growing pool of black-red blood to a hissing, clinking crescendo on the synthesizer.
Societal flight in real-life Detroit begets familial abandonment in It Follows. An abdication of responsibility by the adults in Jaime’s life such as her father coincides with her being stalked by a murdering, sexually-transmitted monster in the decadent ruins of a once-legendary city. By showing the demon as Jay’s father when it is in its final form, does the film subconsciously suggest that adults who abandon their responsibilities, be they their own children or the city their ancestors built, are morally culpable villains? Perhaps. Whether it is white flight from diversity, paternal flight from a broken family, or Jay’s flight from “it” after sex with Hugh, consequences have a way of catching up in the end.
And at the film’s climax, such consequences have a particularly grotesque way of catching up. The pursuing monster’s appearance as Jay’s father carries implications of past sexual abuse, given how “it” entered Jay’s life in the first place. Jay’s father wanted to leave, but ultimately came back in the most horrific way imaginable. Similarly, it is impossible to put into words the scale of Detroit’s debasement and degeneracy after whites fled en masse after 1967. The desperate ploy to avoid reality and the responsibilities shouldered by previous generations leads Jay and her friends to experience the city’s detritus up close. These different generations’ experiences make one thing clear: We cannot abandon our own families, just as we cannot abandon the larger families of our people and our ancestors, such as that noble captain of industry, Henry Ford, who built Detroit for us with the expectation that future generations would preserve it.
With the demon disappearing in blood, Jay, Kelly, Yara, and Paul have saved the day, right? It can never be that simple. After this climax, Paul and Jay are on the couch together, under the covers. The initial love triangle is resolved as the camera moves above the ensuing intimacy to the living room window, with a cozy shot of a Michigan autumn downpour at night. When it is over, we are treated to a final, iconic moving shot of grey-clad, skeletal Detroit factories as Paul drives slowly past some shady prostitutes, setting up the mystery of whether the demon, if it even still exists, has been passed down once again. Recovering in a hospital bed after being grazed by friendly fire at the pool showdown, Yara reads a Dostoyevsky quote regarding the agonizing inevitability of death to Paul and Jay. The film then ends much where it began: on a peaceful street with manicured, vibrant-green lawns in the Detroit suburbs at sunset. A light sound of birds chirping accompanies Paul and Jay as they silently stroll down the sidewalk, seemingly at peace while somewhat awkwardly holding hands — but wait a second, what’s that behind them?
Whether it is just your awkward, gangly neighborhood incel jealous of these lovebirds, or yet another manifestation of predatory, stalking, and persistent death, we never find out. Paul and Jay continue walking, blissfully unaware of the lanky lurker. The film ends and the credits roll. The final background sounds of happy, playful children evoke the beginning of life, while the steady rhythm of leaf-raking taking place on a nearby lawn resembles the tick-tock of life’s countdown clock. Put simply, the final scene’s meaning could go either way. This cutting anxiety concludes It Follows, a Detroit magnum opus and Mitchell’s scary, death-pierced love letter to America’s Stalingrad, as well as to the youth we all want to relive.
Richard Houck often writes about what we in the West have lost through a familiar, though fleeting, sense of place at one’s neighborhood stomping ground, be it 7-11, Pizza Hut, or the mall, places which are increasingly either being closed down or overwhelmed by unfamiliar, “vibrant” diversity. Every decaying, overgrown, boarded-up factory, train station, and house in Detroit is a resonant time capsule from largely white families and the community-building of yesteryear, where bonds of shared joy, labor, struggle, and laughter are now frayed, like the sites’ rusting steel frameworks, in a sea of ruins.
You can buy Jef Costello’s The Importance of James Bond here
While watching It Follows, I could not help but fall back on the Right-wing Zoomer meme of being nostalgic for a time and place I have never been to. In fact, I felt a somewhat ephemeral but pronounced sense that perhaps I was actually there myself, living vicariously through Jaime and her friends, or better yet their ancestors, whether they were auto workers, engineers, or even the eighteenth-century French settlers who built Detroit out of a wilderness — the latter of which is now returning to the city landscape. Such connectedness is at the heart of the haunting beauty I initially ascribed to this horror film.
It Follows was a gem of the 2010s, an era of steep creative and cultural decline in Hollywood, and its cinematography takes on a similarly herculean task of uncovering beauty in destruction. While Detroit can no longer sell the best cars or offer abundant union jobs to high-school graduates, the city increasingly rakes in revenue from bugmen tourists who are eager to experience authentic, gritty, edgy urban decay. We can laugh and cry, but given the eternal mystique of lost civilizations, I must admit that I can see where these bugmen are coming from. We will rightfully mourn what we have lost, but we will never lose pride in what our people created as we seek out reminders in stories such as Jaime’s. Halloween is right around the corner as I write this review, making it a perfect time to watch It Follows. Curl up with some very white pumpkin spice and enjoy a new take on horror. If you are in the area, maybe you will find time afterwards to put on a scarf and explore the lost world of Detroit in the crisp, cool autumn air. Just always remember to keep an eye over your shoulder.
Credit: SNweb.org Photography LLC. The ruins of Michigan Central Station in Corktown, Detroit. It was purchased by Ford in 2018 for restoration.
* * *
Like all journals of dissident ideas, Counter-Currents depends on the support of readers like you. Help us compete with the censors of the Left and the violent accelerationists of the Right with a donation today. (The easiest way to help is with an e-check donation. All you need is your checkbook.)
For other ways to donate, click here.
Enjoyed this article?
Be the first to leave a tip in the jar!
43 comments
Dan Gilbert, founder of Quicken Loans and owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers. Has bought up entire neighborhoods in Detroit for $50-100 per lot. He’s just sitting on the property for now. How convenient to have human wrecking balls to do all the dirty work for free.
Smash that personal life button on Wikipedia.
I’ve often wondered why Detroit experienced such a steep decline the past 50 years in comparison to other large American cities. Was there a large black population there before integration and if not why were so many attracted to this city in particular? Or has its decline just been driven by the decline in the American auto industry?
As the old joke goes: Why are so many blacks moving to Detroit?
Because there’s no work there.
One town’s loss is another town’s gain ;).
I knew a black girl that found that one hilarious
Lol, that’s hilarious. Well, it had to do with the gutting of American industry and the decline of the rust belt, but some former rust belt cities are doing very well such as Pittsburgh. Why? Small percentage of blacks! The books of Paul Kersey analyze the urban decline along these lines very well.
As I read it, Detroit started “going black” when Henry Ford began importing blacks from the South to bust up white unions in Detroit.
Also, the 1967 riots in Detroit killed 43 people. Nothing remotely similar ever happened in Pittsburgh.
I partially blame George Romney, governor of michigan during the riots and father of the ultimate cuckservative Mitt Romney. Being a total cuck with zero principles and convictions in actually defending your own white voter base while being an empty, vacuous shill for soulless corporations demanding more diversity runs strong in that family.
It’s even worse than that with Mitt.. He appears to be acting under very strong, albeit misguided principles:
https://counter-currents.com/2021/01/the-mormons-minority-strategy/
I really like this director, and his ability to conjure what you say, hmm, this sense of sitting on the verge of urban legend. It Follows is probably his most realized film, but myth of the American sleepover and under silver lake are also good.
Obviously the demon in it follows symbolizes teen sexuality, but I question whether it is condemnatory or avenging. I think it simply recognizes that teens will engage in sex even though they understand the risks of vd or pregnancy or jail. Mitchel is frank about sexuality in young people. The guys look at porn in his movies. Young males look at porn a lot.
Another facet, which I think you allude to, but I’m not sure you state, is that I think there is a deep subtext of white flight in the movie, and on that I think the director is rightist. As you mention, the 8 mile line is the line between white and black in Detroit. It Follows means that something murderous is following us from the city to the suburbs, namely blacks. The vintage cars allude to Detroit’s lost greatness as the motor city. He shows the deserted mansions in the city. Why did these things happen? The movie points to the cause by omission. There are no blacks in the movie! The only other person to mention the white flight subtext is the Soiled Sinema guy. He, the commenter called Priss Factor at unz, and myself are my greatest teachers about film.
Under silver Lake by the same director is interesting. I was initially disappointed, as it was his first high budget production with big stars, and it turned out less good than it follows, but I rewatched it again with lowered expectations and enjoyed it more. Basically it’s about me and the IT or cabbalism in the media or whatever you guys call it and all my wacky theories. The guy in it even looks like me! It’s interesting in a way. I like the songwriter. “All your phases and revolutions are just me.” It’s really like that!
I am strongly debating whether I should review Under the Silver Lake next for Counter Currents. It is clearly not as good as It Follows, but I do have to hand Mitchell some credit for presenting it in a similar aesthetic to his Detroit Odyssey with a unique Los Angeles twist. They both have old time cars and old time movies with Mid Atlantic-accented actors interestingly.
I really liked the first and second acts, but the third act of Under the Silver Lake was kind of a let down. I agree with you on its messages of cabbalism in the media alongside hidden messages and conspiracy theories everywhere acting as treasure maps. Maybe I should lower my expectations like you did and watch it again. I will also likely be more impressed by the movie than I originally was, perhaps making it worthy of a Counter Currents review.
I’m honored by your response! Well, it doesn’t really have any rightist or racialist content, other than implicitly, as I suppose everything does really, so I would not think it appropriate. Yes, watch it with lowered expectations and it’s actually fairly decent.
I highly appreciate your encouragement, thank you for the compliment!
No problem! Keep up the good work. Cc desperately needs a film critic since Trevor lynch retired. One point I would like to get through to you guys is that lengthy plot synopses are bad. I think you can give a few basic plot points and flesh them out with commentary and not ruin the entire film, sort of like what I did with Clueless above. Interested people will watch the movie.
There are many seemingly silly and lite films out there which have fascinating alternative readings. For example, I have cabbalistic interpretations of gi joe and transformers mythology that I would like to write up, lol! Err, fascinating to me…. well, then…
Yes, the fact that there are no blacks in a movie about Detroit (save for the background) probably means that It Follows could not be made today, and it was only released in 2014! I allude to white flight and the problems Detroit currently faces throughout the review.
I think there is something especially dominating about the Plymouth Gran Fury in which Hugh has sex with Jaime. Its silhouette suggests strength and hyper-charged masculinity from the final years of a whiter America churning out the world’s best cars. We still had a respectable industrial base for a strong, white middle class even as Detroit was then on its last legs as a functioning city. It would be beyond out of place in any bugman Zoomer’s garage today. Now, we are told by the global elite that we have to drive these emasculating fake electric cars with no sense of unvarnished, raw horsepower. Their key components and raw materials will all be sourced from China in the most environmentally ruinous extraction of course.
Hmmm, have you ever seen Clueless? If you are looking for something to analyze this is a deep movie. It’s very entertaining, supposedly a take off of Emma. I watched it again the other night. Cher played by Alicia silver stone is a beautiful JAP, with a very Jewish father, in case there were any mistaking. She is “clueless”, an air headed valley girl with a good heart. She has a series of love interests. Elton is a rich suave gentile, but an ignorant date rapist jerk. The next guy is a silly stoner who is tolerable but not to be taken seriously. Cher falls hard for Christian, who seems relatively smart, but is obviously gay to other Guys.
Finally Cher “gets a clue” and realizes she loves josh, her Jewish unrelated stepbrother played by Paul Rudd. Moral: Jews should marry other Jews. Her father implicitly approves. Cher’s friends are Dionne, a stylish rich black girl who drops sat words and a Mexican immigrant. I really think there is no black girl like this Dionne. It’s like a fantasy creature like a unicorn.
there’s a lot to sink ones analytical teeth into.
Interesting. As a kid, I vaguely remember my older sister loving Clueless which was a new movie at the time. I will check it out, thanks for the recommendation.
This sounds like it draws heavily from the fantastic Lovecraftian 1957 film Night of the Demon, where a slip of paper is the way the demon’s attention is transferred from one person to another.
I will have to check it out, I wouldn’t be surprised if that was an inspiration for It Follows. Also, the Ring from 2003, which was also set in a once-great American city, Seattle, has a similar premise of a curse killing people on a chain after being passed down through a unique event, in that case watching a VHS tape of a family’s tragedy.
Night of the Demon (based on M. R. James’s story “Casting the Runes”) is my favourite horror film. Director Jacques Tourneur hadn’t wanted the demon to be shown, so that it remained ambiguous as to whether or not the whole episode had been psychological. (Shades of 1961’s The Innocents.) He was probably right but was overruled.
Peggy Cummins is delightful; she also starred in Gun Crazy (1950), so that’s two cult movies to her credit; much better than starring in any number of Hollywood blockbusters.
There is a British version (Night of the Demon) and a, shorter, American version of the film (Curse of the Demon). When I was younger this film made an impression on me and I’d watch the moveie on TV and be confused as to why one version was different than the other. I hate that.
As for Tourneur’s instinct on the monster, I think he was off-base. I like the fact that the monster gets shown…because the demon they created is so cool. I don’t know if anyone was actually frightened by it (ever), but I know I was always fascinated by it. When you’re a kid, ‘atmospheric’ horror is mostly lost on you. But monsters? Hell, yeah. Thinking back on it, the film also sets up the template for the X-Files (thought with the sexes reversed): Two people of two different sexes, one skeptical, the other not.
Peggy Cummins is great. Also, you really cannot go wrong with Dana Andrews as a leading man. He did so much good work in so many films. A real pro.
It’s really nice to watch a well-made film not festooned with darkies.
M.R. James’ Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories is a great compilation, and I believe it included the story you mention.
This is really an outstanding, unique film.
There’s nothing else like it. Watching this movie feels like effortlessly gliding through the twilight zone.
This is sort of off-topic but I want to know. Back in the 90s when I was reading a lot of printed zines, I read about a “rural legend” in a magazine that had higher production values than zines but was not sold at newsstands, only hip indy bookstores or in the mail. The story was that in a rural area in NW Florida, right on the Alabama border, there was a legend that blacks could not go down a road that was a shortcut to the nearest business district, in Alabama. As long as anyone could remember, any black who did so disappeared. In post-civil rights times–say, the 1980s–a young black wanted to walk to see a girl in AL and scoffed at the legend. His friend told him not to go or to take the longer way, but he took the shortcut and was not seen again. This time unlike all the others it was brought to the attention of the authorities AND they listened and investigated. Frustratingly, my memory ends here. I have so little info, don’t know years, place names, the title of the zine, etc. If it rings a bell with anyone, please add anything at all. I’ve done a fair amount of Internet searching, albeit a while ago, but got nowhere.
I would really like to know more about this. That is somewhat related to the subject matter of this review at least. Had this legend been ongoing in 2022, I am sure the FBI would send armies of field agents to Alabama to investigate and prosecute whichever “white supremacists” they felt were involved.
Really nice essay. This movie stuck with me, too. Looking back at my younger days I can easily say the biggest mistakes I made, with the worst consequences, all involved sexual behavior. Making out was fun, but it was hard to stop there.
Thank you very much, I am very glad you liked it. Writing has always been a passion of mine, and I am happy to further put pen to paper at Counter Currents. Expect more film reviews from me on this site in the future…
Thanks for the excellent review. I loved this movie, very good scares.
I think I’ll pass on his movie set in LA due to the setting which I find is not the best for a good horror. This is one of my main criticisms of A Nightmare On Elm Street.
Halloween is set in Cali. One can even see trunks of palm trees, however it was pretty well concealed all in all. Except for the part where Dr. Loomis calls from a payphone where a mechanic was killed and his overalls stolen; the arid hills are a dead giveaway that this ain’t Illinois. Curiously, it takes place late October (naturally) but the trees have leaves on them, and Carpenter scattered leaves on the lawns and streets
Under the Silver Lake isn’t horror. Here’s a link to the trailer. It’s just a weird mystery/indie caper with some comedy. It’s done by A24 of course. That reminds me, maybe I should review Midsomar next? Now that has some potential for our discourse…
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mwgUesU1pz4
Thank you for this, I will give it a shot, if only because I like the retro esthetic and I liked Riley Keough in Logan Lucky, a movie I very much enjoyed. Had no clue she is Elvis’ grandkid. She looks like Laura Dern in that pool scene.
I am into The Watcher now, a Netflix series, mostly cause I love Bobby Cannavale and Naomi Watts. I’m kinda hooked.
Edit, I meant Halloween was filmed (not set) in Cali.
The Redford Theatre marquee appears in “It Follows.” Not knowing much about Detroit, I found this visual appealing and the street scene quaint and inviting. Of course, movies manipulate us, so in 2016 I visited Detroit and sought out the Redford and environs. What I saw and felt made me shudder. The reality was more like a scene out of “Gran Torino.”
That’s the scene where Hugh and Jaime are on their date, and you see the old dude bizarrely playing a pipe organ in the movie theater orchestra pit. Another funny anachronism from the movie that makes you feel something is weird.
Great movie! Try “Prince of Darkness,” they figure out that god is actually evil.
Hey, I absolutely agree. I’ll check that movie out, thanks very much.
Watch “Don’t Breathe,” (2016), look at all the abandoned two and three story, brick homes that once housed white families–it’s depressing.
A top shelf horror film to transfuse a frequently anemic genre. I don’t see it as a ‘white’ film. Along those lines, what might be most relevant is that the filmmakers were seemingly able to make the movie they wanted without having to pander to every special interest group the demands a cameo. The arts are in a low point as diversity, inclusion, equity officers are having roles that mess with the flow of what the screenwriters and director envision.This is a tight film without a lot of extraneous fluff. No extra add ons like making sure an interracial couple gets a screen shot or some character needless mentions they are gay and it in no way advances the plot or atmosphere. Actually, imagine if one of the sexual acts in the film was bisexual or homosexual, maybe a threesome? There would likely have been an uproar claiming this was all a metaphor putting the LGB crowd in a bad light. The left needs to realize that this aspiration for homogenized racial art isn’t advancing minority groups either. Even if Miles Davis wasn’t fond of white people, cameos from Kenny G or the Yellowjackets would have sunk his music.
Mitchell’s follow up film, “Under the Silver Lake” is very different, but wildly inventive and fresh showing that “It Follows” was no accident. A meandering quasi-Chandler Los Angeles B movie in which the protagonist becomes an amateur detective falling ever deeper into cryptic mysteries. There are shades of Kiss Me Deadly, Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, Chinatown but it’s breezier and lighter and perhaps meanders too much. But the loping unpredictability is probably also going to make it grow in cult stature over time. Unfortunately there is a LOT of room for growth because at the box office it only make a quarter of percent of what It Follows did! Hopefully he will be able to make more movies he wants to, without pandering to the left or being stuck doing It Follows sequels.
Yes, I agree with your points in large part. That said, I feel like it deserves commentary when a movie about Detroit set in the modern day features no black characters, but is instead focused on the white suburban experience and how it views the decayed urban core (or perhaps periphery?) as this film is. That to me says something beyond letting the art flow, which needs to be examined.
Under the Silver Lake was good, but not as good as it Follows. It was meandering as you put it. I and other commenters mentioned it here under this review. Again, it was interesting for focusing on a majority white/Jewish neighborhood, Silver Lake, in an overwhelmingly non white city, Los Angeles. In fact, Silver Lake is basically known for being the Williamsburg, Brooklyn of LA. Mitchell is of course not our guy, but there is some interesting continuity between the two films regarding race and urban geography.
“Nice” people discovering the dark underbelly of society is a common film and literature trope, especially in suburban life (Blue Velvet, Stepford Wives). But the moment any filmmaker might be praised for excluding blacks is a sure sign they will never work again or have to make concessions next time around. Witness the exceedingly shrill scolding against such interpretation by the director of The Northman. Artists, especially young ones, are informed by where they grew up and who they hang with. The Left lives fantasies of white kids with a million black friends and they all love both Wu Tang and Eminem, but that is just not the reality of most. So I imagine the setting of Silver Lake arose similarly from the community he hangs with. The filmmaker has more interesting things about wandering into urban Detroit from the burbs than trying to be a white guy making a film about good and bad black cops in the hood. The white South African director of District 9 has taken similar heat but seems to deftly handle a potentially sticky accusations.
The modern zeitgeist lives by ‘diversity is our strength’ for every and any situation despite its implausibility even for art by minorities. If the left could invent a machine to determine whether your nocturnal dreamland is ‘diverse’ enough, you bet they would… perhaps as a successor to the Implicit Association Test as that seems to be under increasing critique.
I guess you gotta be American to feel it. Personally, I found it an OK horror, but nothing special. Mrs. Jeelvy was offended by the simplistic premise and the lack of explanation for the monster.
Barbarian (2022) is a very good horror flick that also features a block of bombed out vacant Detroit homes. There is a brief flashback in the film of a neighbor discussing selling earlier rather than late.
Comments are closed.
If you have Paywall access,
simply login first to see your comment auto-approved.
Note on comments privacy & moderation
Your email is never published nor shared.
Comments are moderated. If you don't see your comment, please be patient. If approved, it will appear here soon. Do not post your comment a second time.
Paywall Access
Lost your password?Edit your comment