It Follows (2014) is one of those rare horror films that earns its reputation through method rather than shock. Written and directed by David Robert Mitchell, it follows Jay (Maika Monroe), a teenager in suburban Detroit who contracts a supernatural curse after sex with a boy she's dating. The curse manifests as a figure: slow-walking, unstoppable, wearing a different body each time. Only she can see it. And it will never stop. The It Follows 2014 movie review consensus has been near-unanimous since its Cannes premiere, and the film holds up. Here's why.
What Mitchell actually built here
Mitchell's stroke of genius is structural. The entity in It Follows doesn't run. It doesn't hide. It just walks, at the pace of a determined person crossing a parking lot, always in a straight line toward its current target. That single rule does more work than a hundred jump scares. The tension comes not from surprise but from the knowledge that something is always somewhere, always closing the gap.
The Detroit suburbs become a character in themselves. Mitchell shoots wide, open streets with the flat Midwestern light that makes distance feel illusory. There's no safe center. The threat can come from any direction, at any moment, on any ordinary afternoon. Cinematographer Mike Gioulakis rotates the camera slowly on its axis in several scenes, scanning the background constantly, and the audience starts doing the same. Every extra walking in the far distance becomes a suspect. That's precise filmmaking.
The allegory, taken seriously
The film's STI allegory is legible but not didactic. The curse passes through sexual contact. It can be passed on to someone else, but if that person dies, it comes back to you. Some critics dismissed this as a cautionary-tale construct from 1980s slasher films, but Mitchell doesn't moralize. Jay isn't punished for having sex. The film doesn't linger on her guilt or shame her. It treats the curse as an inherited problem, the kind you didn't ask for and can't entirely solve. That reading sits far closer to The Babadook (2014), where the horror externalizes something the protagonist carries internally, than it does to any puritanical Friday the 13th offspring.
Mitchell also doesn't resolve the allegory tidily. The ending is genuinely ambiguous. A figure may or may not be visible in the final shot's background. The curse might be gone. It might not be. Mitchell trusts the audience to sit with that uncertainty, which is harder to pull off than it sounds.
Maika Monroe and the cast
Monroe carries the film. Her performance is quiet and specific. Jay doesn't behave like a generic horror protagonist: she's confused, frightened, and stubborn in realistic proportions. When she attempts to pass the curse along to someone she barely knows, Monroe plays the calculation and the guilt simultaneously without commenting on it. It's a grounded performance in a film that could easily have tipped into camp.
The surrounding cast, including Keir Gilchrist as Paul and Daniel Zovatto as Greg, feels genuinely teenage in the way horror films rarely manage. These aren't archetypes moving through plot functions. They argue about strategy, make bad decisions, and occasionally say the wrong thing. The friendship dynamics feel lived-in.
Disasterpeace's score
The score by Disasterpeace (Rich Vreeland) deserves its own paragraph. Working in a John Carpenter-adjacent register but with a distinctly digital texture, the music operates as a second protagonist. It doesn't swell to signal danger. It drones and pulses at a frequency that sits just below comfort, the way a sound you can't quite identify keeps pulling your attention. Compare it to Carpenter's own Halloween score: both use repetition as psychological pressure, not decoration. The comparison is earned, not lazy.
The score works specifically because Mitchell trusts silence too. Some of the most effective scenes in It Follows are nearly quiet, ambient suburban sounds filling the frame while something terrible walks into frame at the edge. The music returns when Mitchell wants the audience's heart rate up, which means the return itself becomes a signal. That's disciplined horror craft, the same instinct that drives Halloween (1978) and separates patient horror from reactive horror.
Where it stumbles
The third act is the film's weakest section. Mitchell moves the action to an outdoor pool for a set piece that requires the characters to behave in ways the film hasn't prepared you to accept. The entity, which has been terrifyingly simple in its method, suddenly does things that complicate its established rules without sufficient setup. It's not a disaster, but it's the one stretch where you feel the screenplay straining to manufacture a climax.
There's also a tonal inconsistency in how the film handles time period. Mitchell deliberately makes the setting temporally ambiguous: the cars are vintage, the houses are retro, but a character reads an e-reader shaped like a clamshell compact. It's an intriguing choice that some viewers find evocative and others find distracting. It's worth knowing going in rather than discovering mid-film.
The verdict
It Follows belongs in serious company. It does what the best slow-burn horror does: it installs a rule, keeps the rule, and lets dread accumulate from that consistency. Mitchell made a film that understands suburban space, understands how teenagers actually talk, and understands that the most frightening thing in horror isn't what you see. It's what might be walking toward you from just outside the frame. The film earned its place among the decade's best horror entries on craft alone. Watch it in a room with the lights low and the windows at your back.