Horror obsessives, welcome to the age of awesome eerie movies. Until recently terror was becoming terrible. We suffered years of the “Paranormal Activity” franchise making the same convoluted film over and over. We endured genre catastrophes like “Dracula Untold” and “I, Frankenstein” trying to create horror superheroes.
But recently, ominous cinema has been showing perverse originality and spellbinding creativity. Imaginative indie entries like “Oculus,” “The Babadook,” “Spring,” “Silent House” and “Martha Marcy May Marlene” ditched the usual template of trauma. The diabolical new “It Follows” is spare, unnatural and full of chills. Writer/director David Robert Mitchell forms a provocative filmic world of slowly unfolding secrets, creating a highly disturbing, highly recommended nightmare.
“It Follows” simultaneously unfolds a story of the occult with an equally effective teen drama. It opens in a leafy middle-class neighborhood. Then we encounter a slice of visual ingenuity in a way that signals trouble.
In a sustained long shot, a teenage girl bursts out of her family’s front door, racing up the block in incongruous short shorts and high heels. Only somebody in doomy dismay would run like that, and she looks paranoid. But there’s nothing ominous onscreen. The mystery thickens when we find her hours later, lying on a pretty beach.