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‘It Follows’ creepy-good storytelling

The Columbian
Published: March 27, 2015, 12:00am

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.

To discuss them further would spoil some of the film’s worrying surprises. Something bewildering is menacing the area. Like many spine-chillers about adolescents, its central conceit is that sex carries a curse: Once you’ve had it, you’ve had it.

The focus of the story is late-teen college student Jay (Maika Monroe), exposed to a bizarre boogeyman following her first fling with a local lady’s man. With Jay strapped to a wheelchair, he shows her that their contact means she will now attract a violent, sexually conveyed monster that had been pursuing him.

Now the succubus is after her and her alone, unless Jay can seduce someone else to become the supernatural killer’s new target. With the help of her sister and a few friends, Jay tries to outrun the ever-changing monster.

What follows is a tour through everyday horrors — threats just out of view, strangers with ulterior motives, faulty self-defense, stalkers with all too much time on their claws. And of course, the sense of sex as a box of problems even Pandora would hate to open.

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