The Big Picture
- It Follows is a chilling throwback horror film that has gained a cult following and mainstream success through streaming services.
- The film follows Jay, who is pursued by an entity after having sex with a guy named Hugh, who passed it on to her.
- The movie explores themes of loss of innocence, emerging sexuality, and mortality, ultimately conveying the idea that death is inevitable and always lurking.
Almost a decade after its initial release, 2014's It Follows (it didn't arrive in U.S. theaters until 2015) is now on Netflix. Director David Robert Mitchell's film is one of the most chilling of the last decade, a throwback film that's part Halloween and part A Nightmare on Elm Street, but also its own brilliant creation. While It Follows wasn't exactly a huge hit when it came out, it did make a respectable $22 million worldwide. In the years since its release, It Follows has gathered a cult following before becoming more mainstream thanks to streaming services and the rise of Maika Monroe as a known actress in the horror genre. It Follows might feel familiar, but its themes go much deeper than your typical teenagers-in-danger horror flick. Whether you're revisiting it for the tenth time or only being introduced to it now, here's a full breakdown of everything that happened in the film's finale.
What Is 'It Follows' About?
It Follows takes place in the suburbs of Detroit, in a community filled with lower middle-class homes. Like some of the best horror, the movie looks like it could happen anywhere. The first scene shows a young woman name named Annie (Bailey Spry) running out of her house looking absolutely terrified. She's wearing heels as if she was suddenly interrupted, but despite her fear and now running back to the house, we can't see anyone chasing her. There's no one after her either when she quickly drives away. The movie cuts to her alone on a beach at night saying goodbye to her father on the phone, before another quick cut shows Annie dead on the beach in the morning, one leg snapped and twisted at a disgusting angle. Whatever was following Annie found her.
The main lead of It Follows is Jay (Monroe), a college student who lives at home with her rarely seen mother (it's hinted that her father is dead and her mother is an alcoholic), and her younger sister Kelly (Lily Sepe). Jay is excited to go on a first date with Hugh (Jake Weary), but at the movies, the fun-loving guy suddenly turns scared and asks to leave. He and Jay end up parked outside an abandoned warehouse, where they have sex for the first time in his car. Jay is happy, but her life is suddenly turned upside down when Hugh knocks her out with chloroform. When she wakes, she's in a parking garage, bound to a wheelchair. Hugh tells Jay to listen. He says an entity was after him, but now he's passed it on to her. It will keep slowly following her until it kills her. The only escape is to pass it on by having sex with someone else. Right on time, a naked woman is shown slowly walking toward Jay and Hugh. They leave, and Hugh dumps Jay in her backyard before he flees.
The second act of It Follows is filled with frightening scenes of Jay being stalked by the entity. It takes the shape of an old woman in a nightgown (Ingrid Mortimer) at her school. It takes the shape of a half-dressed woman (Alexyss Spradlin) and later a very tall man (Mike Lanier) at her home. While hiding out with her friends on a beach, it takes the form of her friend Yara (Olivia Yuccardi) and a neighborhood boy (Charles Gertner). Each time, Jay barely escapes. She tries to find a way out by passing the entity to her friend Greg (Daniel Zovatto), but it manages to catch Greg and kill him. With the entity now back on her, one scene shows Jay on the beach starting to get undressed as we see several men out on a boat. It Follows hints that she may have swam out to the boat and had sex with one or more of the men, but we never get that answer. What we do see is her friend Paul (Keir Gilchrist), who obviously has feelings for her and has been by Jay's side, offering to take the entity from her, but she won't do it.
How Does 'It Follows' End?
By the finale, Jay and her friends have found Hugh, who tells them what he went through. He has no answers, however. It Follows isn't a movie where the characters meet an expert, go to a library, or hop on Google to read about some demon and how to defeat it. They don't know what they're up against, therefore they have no idea how to kill it. It leads to a finale that is realistic in its depiction of the desperation of youths who are just trying to help a friend survive another day. The group can only come up with one idea, and that's to gather up all the electrical devices they can find, like TVs and hair dryers, take them to a closed indoor pool at night, plug them in, get the entity to go into the water, and then throw the devices in to hopefully electrocute it. Some viewers could see that as hilariously pathetic, but it only elevates their hopelessness. What else can they do?
The climax of It Follows sees Jay in the pool, but the entity is too smart to follow her in. Worse, it takes the form of her dead father. It walks around the outside of the pool, chucking the devices at Jay before one of her friends is able to put a sheet over the invisible (to them) monster. Now knowing where it is, they can shoot it in the head. The entity collapses into the pool, but still alive, it tries to pull Jay under. Another headshot from the gun allows Jay to get out of the pool. When Jay is brave enough to look into the water, the entity is gone, replaced by a cloudy sea of expanding blood.
The final scenes have Jay and Paul finally having sex, not just out of a desire to live, but out of love. Paul is then seen driving by prostitutes on a street corner, implying that he will then pass the entity onto them. It Follows ends with Jay and Paul walking down their neighborhood street holding hands. It could be a sweet ending, but way off in the distance behind them, someone slowly walks down the sidewalk. Is it just a neighbor out for a stroll, or does it follow?
'It Follows' Leaves the Audience With More Questions Than Answers
It Follows ends without giving us an answer to that question. The film leaves the viewer with a lot of questions, rather than spelling everything out for us. There is a lot going on in David Robert Mitchell's film. Some of the themes are more obvious, such as how it uses teenagers, sex, and death from sex to speak on the loss of innocence. (It's also why Jay's father is dead and her mother is no help.) It also deals with emerging sexuality, and even mortality, which is something that we start to think about as we leave our teenage years and move into young adulthood. Yes, there is the use of STDs as an allegory, and while It Follows does seem to warn about the dangers of sex, it also came out at a time when the fear of STDs had significantly decreased. This isn't to say that they don't exist, but there is no longer the immense anxiety around them like we had in the '80s and '90s. It's not sex that's to be feared, but the unknown. Sex might bring life, but in It Follows, it brings death.
Death and mortality are at the center of It Follows, hence the hopelessness of the final fight scene, as we can't truly fight death. The final image of the entity possibly stalking Jay and Paul shows that death can be around any corner, slowly stalking. We can try to outrun death through youth, by taking care of our health, but it will always find us in the end. It Follows does make one attempt to spell things out for the viewer at the end. In the pool scene, Yara is accidentally shot. She survives, but in the hospital, she's in bed and reads a quote aloud from Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Idiot. "And the most terrible agony may not be in the wound themselves but in knowing for certain that ... your soul will leave your body, and you will no longer be a person, and that this is certain. The worst thing is that it is certain."