RAMSEY'S RAMBLES
By Ramsey Campbell
IT FOLLOWS 2014, Icon, 104m 13s, £8.99, BD-B
“They [writers of ghost stories] drag in sex too, which is a fatal mistake; sex is tiresome enough in the novels; in a ghost story, or as the backbone of a ghost story, I have no patience with it.”
So wrote M.R. James in SOME REMARKS ON GHOST STORIES, and yet IT FOLLOWS (like RINGU) updates the occult mechanism of his tale “Casting the Runes”—a story that includes the unmistakably Freudian manifestation of “a mouth, with teeth, and with hair about it.” The film seems to echo other James tales too: a hideously dam- aged victim on a beach recalls “A Warning to the Curious,” and a ghost given shape by a sheet evokes “Oh, Whistle.” More crucially, in contem- porary terms it espouses the reticence he coun- seled, which lets it address the underlying sexual themes of horror fiction without robbing its un- canny elements of power. (On a personal note, I tried to explore the effect of making sex explicit in the horror story in a group of tales collected as SCARED STIFF, but I think the writer-director David Robert Mitchell’s film conveys more terror and is more eloquent too.)
In IT FOLLOWS, the dread threat is passed on not with a runic parchment but by having sex. We never learn how it originated or precisely what it is, but the early scene in which Jeff alias Hugh (Jake Weary) and Jamie (Maika Monroe) play a game bears elucidating. Jeff says he would like to change places with a young boy visiting the cinema with his parents. In the context of the
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film, this suggests a desire to revert to a pre- sexual persona, in which case, given the young boys who spy on Jamie in her swimming pool, it seems naïve. Equally, the little girl Jeff thinks Jamie would like to swap with proves to be the monstrous follower’s latest disguise. Jeff’s choice for his swap may also involve a yearning to be- long to a nuclear family group. Parents are sel- dom seen in the film, though Jamie and her sister Kelly (Lili Sepe) live with their mother, and the climactic manifestation adopts the form of their apparently absent father, while the killer of an- other victim takes the identity of his mother. While the film doesn’t spell the spectral rules out, we learn that anyone who has seen the follower will continue doing so, while anyone who hasn’t will see only its physical effects while it remains invisible to them. All this is the source of some of the film’s wittiest and most inventive scenes, and the ghostly moments benefit from a fine sense of timing too. Much of the dreads stem from a Jamesian sense that the follower can ap- pear anywhere, not least in broad daylight and in a crowd. I can’t think of a film since THE BIRDS that has derived so much terror from familiar everyday images (here, a distant walking figure) lent dread by the narrative situation. Can the film be read as equating sex with trans- gression that has to be punished? It seems op- posed to promiscuity, in which case it’s worth noting how morally the central couple—Jamie and
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