Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, dying time is here. That's right. We're talking about It Follows on Kill by Kill. Well, greetings and salutations, Internet. It is your old pal, Patrick Hamilton, coming to you once again from the outer boroughs of Detroit this. is the Kill by Kill podcast, where we're dedicated to celebrating the least discussed component of any horror film.
The characters, we're going to unpack all the goriest of details of 2015's It follows in the hopes that a young person just exploring their sexual nature's untimely end. This is just the beginning of the jokes we might make at their expense. And as always, there's only one person I trust to ask me, is anything going on when she finds me running in a circle?
In a nightie and high heels. The one, the only, Gina Radcliffe. How are you doing today, Gina? You know, I was thinking about, because sometimes I like to think in advance of what, choose your own deathbencher I'm going to pick.
I think this might be a new high or low, depending on how you look at it. No one here in this movie has a good death. No, no, no. These are all tragic... bad deaths and choosing one is going to be an interesting process the other question we have to ask ourselves even up front is do we do we count any of the entities deaths Because they're not permanent.
It's just another ghostly visage they're occupying rather than an actual physical body that dies. No, I think we need to only count characters that were actually living. Beings at one point and then art. And, you know, how they come back. So my question to you is before we get into any of the film itself.
When was the first time you watched it? What was your impression, first impression, that sort of thing? Oh, I did see this in the theater. I believe I mentioned a number of times that after being very, very into horror, somewhere in the... mid-90s or so. It went hard. Tentitude to be focused more on drawing in a young teen audience. I kind of lost interest in it at that point when everything, when I became very grumpy, oh, everything's a remake now, or, you know, it's...
Everything's a sequel now. Blah, blah, blah. I just thought... really stopped watching them and and then also there was a point where like the hostile movies were were starting to become a thing and i was very not into those i was not the torture porn never really did anything at all for me so there was a pretty long period of over over a decade where i was not watching much in the way of new horror and then i heard about it follows and i'm like oh
Well, that sounds interesting. So I decided to give it a shot. I think it might have been the first... horror movie I saw in a theater since, again, somewhere in the mid-90s. And I went and at the end I was just kind of like blink, blink, blink, holy shit at the end of it. So, yeah, I had never seen anything quite like that, and I'm not sure if I have seen anything quite like that since. It is an interesting demarcation point.
I would think this is what for many people might have been there. The elevated horror sort of subgenre comes out of this to a certain degree. There's certainly movies before this that count. But I think this is where it sort of synthesizes, where it captures a larger cult audience in a lot of degrees. And it's staying power. in terms of that cult, I think has waxed and waned over time. Certainly it's been enough where they're going back for a sequel. So...
That'll be interesting to see how they follow this up because it's so kind of perfect the way they don't really tell you how it ends. I had certainly heard of the movie. I didn't see it in theaters because we had just moved into this house, and I just didn't make it to a theater very often. But I listened to the soundtrack in bed, and it was so scary I had to turn it off.
The soundtrack was too scary. Yeah, the soundtrack is very effective. And you're right. I think that this marked the beginning of the era of elevated horror. a genre that I've come to love very much, and it kind of draws a line in horror fans. You've got people who love it, and you've got people who are constantly griping that it's the worst thing that's ever happened to horror.
Generally speaking, and I don't want to get into this again because we've been ranting about this a lot, but you're finding there is a big overlap between people who don't like elevated horror and people who don't think horror is ever political. Yes, it just has to be popcorn. It can't be anything other than that, which it never really has been, but we've been, we, we can.
grind that axe yet again or we can actually just you know enjoy what i think is a pretty damn good horror flick and i don't think you can really qualify this as anything other than a horror movie There's no mincing about. It absolutely is designed to give you the creeps the entire way. It has jump scares. It is effectively disquieting. It's a lot of things that... some elevated horror.
shies away from because they don't want to dip their whole toe into the genre. And I think this absolutely is attempting and succeeding at being a horror flick. I find it lovely to watch.
just a constant dreamlike state it lulls you in it you get into these kids lives and i i think there's so much of it that harkens back to a ton of classical horror movements that it's it's also not just coming out of thin air there there's a lot that leads up to what makes it follows and There's a lot that happens after it follows where people are almost attempting to not replicate it, but okay.
That did horror in a very specific way. Now I'm going to give it my shot. The movie that leaps to mind and that we've threatened to cover for a while has talked to me that I feel is a very...
it follows coded motion picture. Oh, yeah, yeah, 100%. That is not to say it's ripping it off in any way, but it does have that tone. It does have that dreamlike feel. There's... vibes that it's putting out that you can feel are drawn from that lineage of motion pictures very quickly i did not do a ton of exploration as to you know, what was the direct inspiration for David Robert Mitchell, who wrote and directed this film, to what made him make this movie. But as I was watching it, I was like,
There's so much of it that comes from all these classical sources. And the most simple explanation that you, if you just Google, it follows explained. it'll immediately say that the movie's premise is a sexually transmitted STD death curse. It's just a demon that is passed via sexual contact. And as such, it's easy to take a very... conservative view of the film's plot which you know plenty of people would encapsulate as casual sex is dangerous and you know but this is the same rap that we've
you know, got hung on slasher movies in the eighties post Laurie Stroud's magical Hyman, the one and only reason she survives 1978 Halloween. But I think there's a lot more going on to this motion picture than that. brief explanation as you had mentioned before we started recording there are multiple interpretations as to how to view
what this movie is attempting to put across. Right. Like, again, you know, as someone who, you know, struggles with mental illness, you know, I could certainly say there are some elements of it.
it that were very relatable just the the you know the sense of that there's always something you know just behind your shoulder that needs to do you harm then you have the fact that that the for lack of a better word the ghost that that that haunts jay is her is her father yeah and and you know it's okay you know and at this point say well it's about trauma is a little bit of a cliche
But, you know, it can be. That certainly could be one interpretation of it, that she's literally haunted and terrorized by her trauma. And there's an element to this where... because she's the only one who can see it until it's so painfully obvious to her friends, they kind of rally around her in a way that's like, listen.
We don't think this is actually happening, but she obviously needs our support. Whatever she's going through, we should be there for her. And there's some competing reasons why some of these people show up. But there does, at least amongst your female friends, seems to be this, we need to be there for her in whatever she's going through. This is an interesting empathetic.
movie like you you don't have like her her as you say her friends are not belittling or minimizing or mocking what she is experiencing the attitude is you something is going on with her you know we have to we have to help her with it Yeah, throughout the movie, I just started to wonder, like, the method of transference between sexual partners might be poisoning the well in terms of...
people analyzing the film's themes are are we just like applying occam's razor too quickly here and so i just i went down a rabbit hole every time an element of it popped out to me i was like Let's investigate this. And so just as a method of conceiving how we get to it follows, I wanted to examine a couple. of these things one obviously is the element of sexual violence but in particular demonic sexual violence and a little thing i like to call
The devil with two backs, Gina. Now, Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby was published in 1967, and the film rights were snapped up by schlock impresario William Castle with an eye towards adapting it for the big screen in order to... kind of class up his resume but paramount pictures made a deal with castle where he would stay on as producer
But they wanted to hire future sexual assault enthusiast Roman Polanski to direct the film. It's a pretty simple tale for those who might not know. A couple moves into an apartment. Husband makes a deal with the devil to knock up his wife so he can get more acting roles. Tale is old as time. Thing is, turns out.
The neighbors are all Satanists whose HOA includes selling your soul. And while Rosemary Baby lacks the curse element that is very evident and it follows, it directly is tied to sexual violence as Rosemary is drugged. and raped by the devil himself while everyone watches, and terrible, terrible consequences follow.
Because Rosemary's Baby's positioning in the timeline here that's 1968, along with Night of the Living Dead, it would essentially start an arms race between indie horror producers and studio-crafted horror films that essentially... I would highly encourage people to read Shock Value, How a Few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares.
conquered Hollywood, and invented modern horror by Jason Zinemann. It's fucking amazing, and I read it like once every four years. It fucking rules. After Rosemary's Baby, the next thing that kind of occurred to me is... 1976, The Omen, which we've covered on the show, where Rosemary's Baby digs into more intimate conspiracy along the lines of the Manson murders in L.A., which...
One year later resulted in the death of Polanski's wife and unborn child, The Omen. That plot unveils a global conspiracy in the aftermath of Watergate. covert wars in Southeast Asia, the reveal of Operation Paperclip, in which Nazi scientists were recruited by the United States government to advance our military and space capabilities. That's right. We've been embracing Nazis for a long time. It's not just for the 2025s anymore. No, they're just more open about it now. Yes. And as such...
The other element of the mid-70s that's so important about The Omen is that it's like... At that hyper fixation point, every cryptozoological thing, people become obsessed with Bigfoot and then alien conspiracies. And man, you got a stew going, baby. So the Omen and its compatriots. like Rosemary's Baby, The Exodus, The Devil's Reign, Race with the Devil, just to start, are the mainstream's reaction to a society in which secular ideas are coming to the forefront.
A lot of people are becoming evangelically deconstructed and the exploration of the reality of God's existence and the necessity of religion in our society. The movie in and of itself is the brainchild of producer Harvey Bernard and the screenwriter David Seltzer, who were... very serious about the film being a true religious warning to the world about an actual antichrist.
Coming to play in politics, a warning no one would pay attention to in either 2016 or 2024. But what's important for us about the omen isn't the plot. It's that it revolves around the idea of a contact-born curse and horror. Once people know about Damien's true nature... or that knowledge causing Damien any harm in his path towards world dominance via politics and anal sex.
They made a terrible end that can be explained away as an unfortunate accident or death by misadventure. That element of I've made contact with something demonic, something bad happens to me. is something that begins to pick up steam over time. The final movie in this triumvirate would be 1983's The Entity. in which Barbara Hershey's single mom is continuously sexually assaulted and raped by a ghostly, invisible creature. Nothing seems to be able to abate its attacks.
You can move. You can travel. You can learn more about it. Doesn't matter. It keeps coming after you. Eventually. The paranormal investigators that Barbara Hershey's character tells about this set up a reproduction of her house and managed to momentarily freeze the entity in a liquid helium. And then it.
shatters, but I guess it kind of proves that she was telling the truth the entire time. If you want to watch The Entity, it is a very good movie, but it also is insanely triggering if you have any history. of sexual assault yeah because it turns out that the ghost is of her dead husband who is sexually assaulting her and so it is a precursor in many respects to things like what we were talking about
the Invisible Man remake, the 2020 version, it has a lot in common with that. And it's rather brutally and honestly portrayed for such a... paranormal focused motion picture i do think it is effective in multiple ways particularly in the very real hell that domestic and sexual assault victims live through and the disbelief they face when they report these attacks. It just happens to be filtered through this...
you know, horror, supernatural lens. Yeah, which is often the best way to get these things through the people. And you can obviously see elements of that in this movie as Jay's friends are like... I think whatever happened to her, this was bad. And we don't know the full story, but this is the way she's processing it. They do believe her. They do listen to her. But there are so many scenes of her just looking out the window and, you know, her multiple visits to the hospital.
where you feel like no one else does believe her about what's happening. Right. It literally takes one of these entities pulling her hair. Like, oh, wait, there is something weird going on here. Yes, it cannot be. explained but what happens they witness and so they have to like they can't explain exactly why it's happening but they know it's happening now they have to believe her it pushes the plot along plot along in a very specific way that I really appreciated.
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They also, at certain points in this movie, decide, we need to get out of town. That's the way we escape this thing. We'll just leave. So our next section will call, let's take a trip. And of course, any... Horror trip really has to start with 1961's cult, well, I wouldn't call it a classic, Carnival of Souls. After a car race that leads to the death of her two friends, our lead character, Mary, makes the second worst mistake of her entire life.
She moves to Salt Lake City. But even worse, she's being followed everywhere by a ghostly figure who eventually drags her soul back to the death that we thought she escaped. Okay. So now you're starting to see elements here that are aligning in terms of where do you get a movie like it follows, which is incredibly original.
but is also drafting in the place that other people have. I'm not saying that the writer-director here is ripping these things off. I don't know that he's ever seen these movies before writing the script for this. But these are elements that keep popping up over time. And there's this really weird epicenter of this in the early 80s, starting with 1981's...
The Survivor. Have you ever heard of this movie? No. I only heard about it after watching the documentary on Ozploitation. This was kind of a big budget affair. where they recreated a crash of an airplane, and it was like they spent a million dollars on it, and they never spent that amount of money on an effect sequence in Australia before.
And I'm like, I gotta get my hands on this movie. And finally, I found a copy. It's directed by continuously drunk actor David Hemmings and based on a novel by giant rat enthusiast. James Herbert. And that tells the story of a pilot who survives an airline disaster and then learns that the victims of the airplane crash are haunting him and knocking off people trying to exploit the tragedy.
And Gina, it fucking slaps. Really? Yes. Now, next of kin is my favorite exploitation movie. But the survivor's up there. It's very understated. It's not very graphic, but I think it is very well done. I love the airplane crash sequence. It's tame, but I really, really enjoy it. Author James Herbert did not. He described the movie as, quote, terrible, absolute rubbish. And that is from the writer.
Known for quality giant rat books, Gina. And crabs? Is it crabs? I don't believe he is the crab guy. I mean, we... Honestly, we should have Megan Sunday. She's our giant crab expert. Oh, you know, that's a guy something. But one of his giant rat books was actually covered on this show, Gina. It was loosely adapted for previous... Animal Attacks April entry.
Deadly eyes. Yeah. The one where the baby gets eaten. Scatman Crothers pulls one of our absolute favorite. It's been a good run style. Yeah, he sure does. He gives like. I'm being eaten. I'm being eaten. You know what? Fuck it. I'm just going to get at. He just kind of like.
just turns over and like, yeah, it's been a good run. Yeah, you know, sometimes when the rats are coming to eat you, you just let the rats eat you. Now, the movie that I heard the most about when this came out, that it felt like... People were questioning whether or not was being directly referenced by Mitchell.
is 1984's sole survivor have you ever heard of this i think i've heard of it i don't believe i've seen it though it's just also weirdly airplane based as the survivor is the lead character is denise and she's lucky enough to be the only one who survives a plane crasher. It's the seat that she's in literally falls in the middle of the street and she's fine. But it's not long after that she begins to know she's being pursued by a growing number of dead people.
all with the intent of making sure that Denise meets her quote-unquote true fate. Director Tom Eberhard is better known for his follow-up, Night of the Comet. but Soul Survivor is dripping with dread and mood. Once you see it, you're like, oh, this is kind of it follows before it follows, but it's also Carnival of Souls. after carnival of souls they're all of a piece it's again slow but a real vibe and it didn't get much of a release in theaters and it was hard to find
on VHS, never was on DVD, and finally got a Blu-ray release about a decade ago after It Follows came out. It's just people wanted to see it again. We should cover it someday. It's... It's a weird companion piece to this movie. And then the last one is a whole franchise we've covered last season, and that was Final Destination.
where our curse is once again a survivor's unavoidable fate. You can run, but you cannot hide. It's another one that's very directly tied to the way things happen in The Omen. where any of the deaths that happen could be explained away as accident or suicide by misadventure. The Survivor's all about revealing the truth about the film's air disaster. and soul survivor adds a pre the hidden like twist where anyone who dies by that film's entity can then be used against the main character
And then you have Carnival of Souls, ghouls, where anyone who's killed becomes Death's bounty hunter. Wink, wink. So, final destination, Death is... Operating in a way where it can't be seen because, as we talked about many, many times, death is under active investigation by the FBI and must cover his tracks for some reason. Like I wrote a lot of Sean Diddy Combs jokes.
that I eventually erased here but Final Destination of course the first movie comes out in 1999 and that ties in to our next set of things where I think that While not direct inspiration, it's all in the air. And that is our East Asian curses of J-horror. I would never call myself a J-horror expert, but I did happen to live in Osaka when the genre started to pop off with films like Hideo Nakata's The Ring in 1998, Takashi Miike's Audition in 1999.
and Takashi Shimizu's Jew on the Grudge in 2002. Now, let's take... Miike's audition off the table here because that's just a straight ahead. I'm auditioning new wives and one of them wants to kill me. Tale as old as time. So let's focus on our two brains of cursed movies of J-horror, and that is The Ring and Juwan. They're kind of different strains. The Ring...
The curse is transmitted via technology. First, you watch a VHS tape, and then you get a phone call after that that tells you you have seven days to live. The Ring gives birth to a number of films that each riff off of its... technology virus transmission of a death curse, especially Pulse, One Last Call, Shudder, just for starters, almost all of those earned middling to terrible American remakes. But...
you can see its influence on things like Sinister, where the curse is transmitted through home movies and photos. And then... You have Ju-on's curse, which is transmitted when someone enters a house that is haunted by ghosts of a murdered mother and child. So it's like it follows in that it requires entry. Get it, Gina? I do get it. I do get it. I do. You have to enter into it to get it. So Ju-on's success gives birth to a few movies that follow its haunted house where the...
haunting follows you outside the house aesthetic. You've got dark water, which got remade badly. You have the found footage variation of Nori, the curse, and no one's attempted that one yet. And then you have a Singapore, Hong Kong. based motion picture called The Eye which was also remade badly here. Only the first and last got their bad remakes but in America I think where you see that happen is in Insidious.
where a child and his family are haunted past the first house they live in where it started and then You could also view like poltergeist to the other side as an early attempt of that sort of idea. But to me, it follows is a synthesis of.
all of these movies processed through a uniquely American lens. You've got demonic sex consequences, you've got Eastern and Western curses, and you're blending the concepts into this very... winning, focused, empathetic hook where your exes are human shields against ghouls that are looking to claim your life just for getting lucky once.
And at the end of that, you get this movie that is uniquely its own, but obviously is drawing from all of these pop culture sources as well. Right, yeah. I mean, you... You know, I can see that, you know, all these influences here while still, you know, being such a unique and unsettling and really unforgettable movie. You know, I...
Personally, I think that sex angle is fun and it's very easily digestible. You can almost hear that as the elevator pitch for the movie. And it's the sugar that helps the medicine go down. But... The other element that I really enjoyed watching this time, or enjoy, I'll put that in text. Appreciate. Is that Jane and her friends are kind of trapped in a reality where progress has...
Yeah, I would say also there is a case to be made for this movie being of liminal horror, in which there are a lot of... establishing shots, half empty classrooms and not very active college campus. And you've got these very, you know, quiet to the point of, is there even anybody living here, shots of like suburban streets. And there's a real sense that... These are the only people in this entire town. Everything is so desolate and so empty.
Yeah, you can run, but where are you going to go? You're trapped in a place where there's no help to be found. There's so much time where, and we've talked about it before, where there's movies where we're like, where are the... And here, you do see parents, but they're always on the periphery. They're never interacting with young people. They're... They've almost cut themselves off. You know, there's also, and I'm hardly the first person to point this out.
But to give you a sense that this is a little bit of a place out of time is her friend Yara has an e-reader. Yeah. But it doesn't look like any sort of e-reader that exists in reality. It's almost like a clamshell shape. Yeah. And it just looks like, you know, okay, I know what that is.
But I've never seen anything that looks quite like that. And again, it just kind of gives you a little bit of an unsettling sense of where the hell are these people? I mean, yeah, you know, we say it's out somewhere outside of Detroit, but like. Where and when and where, why are there no other people here? Yeah, this is where I immediately got vibes of another franchise that we have covered at length. And if you swapped out the...
playing boo demon for, let's say, a demon who drives your dreams. I'm not talking about Hardcastle and McCormick, Gina. I'm talking about one Freddy J. Krueger. But you can see how... Jay and Paul and Yara and even Kelly are kind of abandoned by all competent adult figures. They cannot tell anyone.
of age what is really happening here. They don't know themselves, but they also don't try. There are no adults that are going to fucking help them out of this. Unlike A Nightmare on Elm Street, where Freddy is the direct... result of the actions of the adults there's also this demon started somewhere right we have no idea if The majority of this town has met death by misadventure because they too have gotten snapped up in this curse over time.
We don't know the levels to which this is happening. Is this just a societal breakdown? Is this simply because Detroit is at that moment? eating itself from within something that's obviously used by other films to great effect like don't breathe and barbarian this is of a piece with that there's almost this element of like The adults can't help because they already fucked over the world.
And the our only way forward is to help each other. Right. And that's what makes the ending of the movie, which, again, is open for interpretation, which I appreciate, where you have... Jay and Paul walking hand in hand and, you know, there's something about their behavior that's a little, you know.
i don't know sinister is the word i would use it's a little it's a little weird but if you look way in the back and you can see someone walking behind them and it's like well that could be a person or They're still being terrorized by this thing. It's still, you know, whatever they do, it's still not going to be good enough. And their relationship with one another is very, very strained.
all of this backstory to Jay wanting to have an adult experience to... kind of crossover from being a young person to someone who's sexually active something that obviously horror movies has been been dipping into for a while and the tragic results of of that action but then you have this guy that she's who's obviously so obsessed with her and the answer to all of his quote-unquote problems of thinking
just be with Jay. And then he gets that chance and he's no more fulfilled than he was before. Just in the same way as her, you know, having sex with his other, with, with. Greg didn't help anything before that. And having sex with Hugh didn't help anything with that. None of this element of this is what your life is going to be like from now on.
is actually helping them progress because it feels like they're walking to a cliff and all the ground behind them is falling away at the same time. Right. It's like, you know... They don't look like a young couple in love. Like they're holding hands, but they both look like a bomb went off. And because I feel like a bomb did go off. How do you recover from something like this? How do you live your life knowing that?
No matter how far in the rear view mirror you think you can put this experience, it will keep coming after you unless you put more human collateral in the way. That's where it kind of connects to a movie that doesn't come out for a few years later, Jordan Peele's Us, which is the movie, I think, from this decade that haunts me the most in terms of its premise.
No amount of comfort or happiness that you have doesn't directly result in unhappiness and torture and pain for someone you don't even see. That, to me, is something that I wake up in the middle of the night thinking, not, hey, let's make this my follow-up to my big premiere movie, like Jordan Peele. That's why he's him and I'm me. And again, much of this is more implied than shown, but obviously it is heavily implied that Jay...
He goes to meet this boat full of fishermen to have sex with them and pass on these beings to them. And then I sort of think that when you see Paul... driving past a bunch of sex workers again it's implied oh he's trying to Pass it on to other people. But then in the end, well, guess it didn't work. You're still being haunted by this thing. I don't think you can fully outrun it, which is where I think it alludes to ultimately.
Whatever this entity is, it is just the death that is constantly stalking all of us. And whenever you first realize that you're not immortal is the entity of it follows. It's why it appears to her as her grandfather and her father, because she's of a lineage of people who have died. And so will she. No one gets out of this life alive. Yeah, and one could say that is truly when you stop being a child. It's not when the first time you have sex or whatever. It's when you realize...
I'm not going to be around forever. I think it took until this era of horror of what people started referring to as elevated horror. where people are really trying to directly tackle this rather than, let's say, adding that subtext onto it after the fact. in a lot of ways. I don't think Halloween is a particularly politically driven motion picture, but obviously it's making a lot of choices.
that reflect on the era in the aftermath of Vietnam, in the aftermath of Watergate, in the aftermath, you know, the future oncoming conservative collapse. of governmental authority and responsibility. All that's inherent in the movie, but it's not, it's direct, you know, they weren't. going for that necessarily it just all happens because they're making the movie in a time and place and this is very much i feel like focused on making that subtext forward
and also making it an entertaining horror movie. We're a very character-based show. We really like to dig into what makes people tick. And it's kind of hard to do that here outside of some personal dynamics this group of young people have. They're weirdly... Plain Jane in a lot of respects. Like, what do we know about Jay? She's cool with a pool. Yeah. She loves to float. But... I don't think the film ever suffers from the sort of...
surface interpretation of all these characters. They seem like a believable friends group, which, again, as you know, for me, that goes a long way with me for caring about a character. These people all seem to genuinely... like each other i mean you know every friends group has a has a paul who is desperately in love with another member of the friends group but can't bring themselves to admit it and and you know he's kind of the dorky guy who who you know
you know, gets to glumly look on while, you know, Jay, the love of his life, you know, goes off with, you know, cooler guys than him. But she's also not mean to him. I mean, I think she does care about him and is probably aware of how he feels about it. her and you know it is You know, it's more of, you know, an awkward, bittersweet situation than one that can be, you know, mine to be manipulative or cruel to him. But there's also this, they cling to one another because...
Who else are they going to cling to? The place is like a ghost town. Right. You know, people, when she comes out of a classroom at one point, she passes through two girls talking. They look at her like, wait a second. Someone else is in this hallway. They've never, it's like they've never seen anybody else at school. What I think the most, you know, and that's why I said, I think it's a lot of it, you know, plays in a literal horror where, where you just really get a sense.
of just how abandoned everywhere they go is. Yeah. Like, there should always be, wherever they are, there should always be more people there than there is. Like, she's in a college lecture hall. There's baby, like... nine other students in there yeah Is it because people have abandoned that area of Detroit? They talk about not crossing over a certain area of eight mile. It's discussed that it is Detroit, but it also feels like.
There's like one modern car in the entire thing and one modern device in that clamshell e-reader, but everyone else is... driving an older model car. No, everyone is watching a black and white broadcast on television. They're all watching tube televisions in 2015. I think Yara's reading The Idiot, I think. She's reading some, like, 150-year-old novel, like, you know, as opposed to, you know, what you would think like a young person.
and you would be reading would be like a romance novel or just something contemporary. It feels like there's been an economic collapse, which I do feel is something that is the cloud hanging over this movie. It's sort of... millennial exceptionalism of being the kids who were about to come into the cusp of the world during the 2008 financial collapse. And this has that vibe to it. It's just like they're operating like life is going on, but none of them are really sure that life will. Yeah.
Watching that right now, that's a little jarring because, you know, I feel like we're all kind of just, you know, trying to live as normal lives as possible, you know, while everything, while we're all the it's fine dog. Again. And yeah, these kids are all the it's fine dog. But I don't know that they have any other choice. No. That is the element of this that is so haunting. And like you said.
now becomes immediately just as prescient 10 years later. Like, are all the kids who are going, that we're seeing in this movie at this time, just sensing a collapse of social order. that we are experiencing in slower motion. Yeah, it's interesting. And that's what's the beauty of this movie is you can apply so many different aspects to it, and all of them have the same chilling result.
It's remarkable. You know, I think it's tough for any filmmaker when you knock one out of the park as hard as Mitchell does in this. Your follow-up has a lot of expectations added to it. And he's another one of these guys who's like, you know what, I'm going to take. all of my ideas and put it into one movie next and under the silver lake i think is interesting
but nowhere near as successful in execution as it follows. That was the one with Andrew Barfield, right? Correct. I haven't seen that one yet. It is an interesting time. Obviously, you're... watching a really great actor try to evoke a I don't fit into this world aesthetic and it's very much about Hollywood but also doesn't quite hit.
The way, you know, it has this like nearly three hour runtime at one point when it premieres and then they pull it back and it kind of put him in director's jail for a while. It'll be interesting to see how you can make a sequel out of this because I feel like explaining it. Which is the tragic mistake most sequels make. Yeah. Undoes some of the magic. I am not super enthusiastic for a sequel because I do think that, you know, we're going to end up...
you know, getting a, you know, well, I've seen this before, flashback, flashback, flashback. And I was like, you don't need an explanation. That's what makes it scarier. You could take it in a lot of interesting directions. So I'm interested. But I'm really trying to lower my expectations because it felt like... You take on a lot of responsibility. You get heralded as the next big thing as a result. And those are tough expectations to follow up. Some people...
obviously wear that a little bit better than others. Jordan Peele, I think, is a person who's like, this is what I wanted to be doing. These are the kinds of art that I have. wanted to explore and i want to make the most out of these opportunities as i can and to my mind has not delivered one dud in his three movie no absolutely not and then you've got
People like Oz Perkins, who I think delivers a lot of great stuff, is dripping with style. All the information I've heard from people who were at the Monkey premiere was that it was a damn good time. So I'm really looking for, we're recording this episode before covering the movie on the show, but this episode I think comes out well into March. So I think Oz has some, is another person.
whose sense of dread and the way he's able to put atmosphere into the horror movies he creates elevates him as well. I think we're living in a weird golden era. I mean, our boy... Nosferatu now following up with werewolf. Werewolf. So fascinating. Werewolf. Werewolf. Which I cannot say. not in the werewolf scientist voice from the mystery science theater 3000 episode. Let's fasten that in, in Coriel for John. Like there, what I love right now.
is that there's a lot of people who are really finding that personal voice to use horror for. And on top of that, a lot of fun popcorn shit. You got radio silence out there. doing stuff you know christopher landon is a i love watching his movies they're a lot of fun they're always either full horror or horror adjacent
It's a good time to be a horror fan. We said it before. We said it again. It's a good time to be a horror fan. And I do think that it follows ushered in that renaissance. Yeah. It's not to say it's the beginning. But I do think it's that moment that crystallizes that horror is not simply something. That is Friday night fodder that that goes away quickly, that there are really personal elements of it that you can explore within the form without.
having to necessarily be as cookie cutter about it as we saw through much of the 2000s, the millennial nasties era. And I love plenty of those movies. For example, House of Wax has a lot to offer that I don't even know I appreciated at the time I saw it. But there's a lot of care. There's a lot of personality. Pardon me. There's a lot of personality. And there's a lot of verve.
going on there but it is green lit specifically because someone at warner brothers was like we have a title called house of wax can you do something with that whereas no one came to Mitchell and said, we have a title called it follows. Can you do something with this? This, this was something born of all of its influences and a central idea. That's hooky as hell. They're just. Something about capturing that Detroit crumbling infrastructure. They're surrounded by this normal life.
that is withering. And then this terminal nostalgia of they can't see anything that's new. They're just surrounded by these 50s and 60s black and white broadcasts. and hundred year old books. Nothing fresh is happening in their lives. So escaping into casual sex, I don't know why anyone wouldn't expect it to happen. It's just not the refuge they think it is. As it turns out, it doesn't make things any better. and yet you can't blame them because they're not doing anything wrong.
And it is a way to connect with someone if not just for, you know, a few minutes. In a world where they're having a hard time connecting to anything else, it's very easy to understand. and where I think people get very trapped in that thing we ended up putting on a lot of 80s slasher movies that is not necessarily representative of the truth. There's certainly plenty of examples of it.
But it isn't all that concept that Randy yells at the world of men, women, and chainsaws where sex equals death. Sex happens. And plenty of people don't die. It's just that people don't know they're in a horror movie when they start to have sex. It's not that... That misogynistic patriarchy idea isn't inherent in Halloween and Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street. These artists are making these choices.
and they have political ramifications you can read into it they're part of a whole and a slice into themselves it is worth exploring the idea that much of the things that happen in those movies and in It Follows are more the fault of these absent adults than these young people. Right. They've been more or less abandoned. It's obviously evident in 78 Halloween how Lori and her friends are just... They exist in a world where...
It seems like adults should be around them. Yes, they're babysitting. But all these adults are like, see ya, wouldn't want to be ya. And they have... an existence to themselves where they have a semi-adult night where they're responsible and how they handle that responsibility. does result in a few deaths in that film. It's an interesting lens to disassociate it from the sexual angle, which I'll grant you. is absolutely in the movie from the opening moments. I mean, Michael's sister gets it.
simply because she dares to have the shortest sexual intercourse ever timed. And we just witnessed an even shorter one in Dremania. Oh, boy. I mean, it'll be evident to our Patreon subscribers, but we did a commentary over David Dakota's Drumaniac, which has multiple. very short sex scenes in which you begin to wonder, does anyone understand how sex works in that motion picture? Oh, I think they do. They just don't understand how heterosexual sex works.
And nor should they, honestly. I mean, it's messy business, to be sure. You know what? They're better off being on their end of it. It's better to fulfill their true wants and desires than to get involved in... whip cream licking incidents that result in, where are the chips? Exactly. I think I'll go get something to drink.
And the only other thing that occurred to me while watching the movie this time is I think this is the only other time where the reason why the horror movie is happening is explained. Via a slideshow presentation. And we haven't covered the other one, which is the first urban legend. Yeah. When are we going to cover urban legend? I think people have asked us. It is one of those things I hip pocket.
Then I'm like, when do we yank this out? Because it is both successful and unsuccessful. It looks really, really good. But I feel like if we ever did it, we'll run out of horror movies to talk. I don't know. I don't know why I'm worried about it. We also have to deal with the glaring issue of Jared Leto. But again, he doesn't remember making the movie. So why should I remember that he's in it?
True, true. There are plenty of other people who are actually intellectually engaged with making that motion picture, even if he's decided he isn't. But... We should put, I mean, it's obviously in the bullpen, but we've never pulled the trigger. Season six is upcoming. What will we do? There's plenty of discussion behind the scenes. Let me tell you that, folks. Anything else we have not said?
about 2015's It Follows. No, I mean, if you haven't seen it yet, I highly recommend it. It is a very, very unsettling movie. There's a lot of skill. It's very controlled. It is very purposeful. There aren't any shots in it that shouldn't be in the movie. It's well-appointed. There's care. There's empathy. It's well-performed. All the elements of it are very present. It feels like...
it's very thought out, or the happiest of happy accidents. But I happen to believe there is real skill on display. Yeah, and it doesn't need to... If you need everything explained and if you need a very solid, unambiguous ending, this is not the movie for you.
Because it literally just ends with two people walking down a street together. And it's also a movie that subverts its own rules at a certain point, which notably... angered a massive cinematic rule follower quentin tarantino and of course the movie he used as an explanation of a horror film that definitely follows its own rules is a nightmare on elm street which I am sorry, everyone.
Absolutely abandons its own rules in the final minutes. No, absolutely. She drags Freddy to the real world where he can be harmed. She sets him on fire and he's like, ouch. And then he walks upstairs and starts choking. out her mom while on fire this is not this these these are not the rules that it set out for itself it also subverts its own rules so if you're example of a movie that's Totally a horror movie that follows the rules.
I wouldn't use a nightmare on Elm Street. Then again, I'm no Quentin Tarantino. But who is? As far as the world's feet are concerned, just one person. Before we can really, you know, do the nasty ourselves with our chosen partners and... fear death and its oncoming we should choose our own death venture that is where we decide of the deaths presented in the movie if you were forced to die in one of those ways which one would it be and why up forbid we have broken to death on a
beach who is snapped that's a that is a that is a hell of a smash cut too that is literally a smash cut i mean it really sets the tone of the cold opens of the 2010s this is probably the best. It's hard to overcome this. Yeah. It definitely sets a tone that other people are like, let's see if I can do something like that. Let's see if I can set the audience expectations.
what the rules and the vibe of this movie are. Why that girl emerges from her own house and a nightie in high heels runs in a circle, I can't tell you. But that question... is something that you will never be answered. Nope. Like I said, don't look for things to be explained. And the other person who dies is... Greg is... Killed by his mom? But I'm not entirely sure how. I mean, it kind of looks like she's having sex with him. It really does.
It looks like he is being raped by his mom. Yeah, so I am unsure of how he dies. But I'll tell you right now, I'm not choosing that one. No. This might be controversial. I do not want to be raped by my mom to death. No, there are no good deaths in this. No, but I'm taking a snapping over that. Yeah, I mean, you know, figuring out, I'll take you on my mind. my leg not bending that way as my desk. Just...
twisted in an impossible twister experiment is the way I'll choose. Yeah, I mean, like, these things can kill you, and, you know, that is the only, you know... How they can kill you is apparently so horrified that they don't actually show it happening. Like, you only see the, mostly see the aftermath. And you can definitely pick up the vibes of this, of, like, how people die and terrified. Okay, terrified we have to fucking cover on the show. What a motion picture.
I love terrified. I'm going snap to death. Yeah. A thousand percent. Yeah. Folks, write and review us on your podcatcher of choice. When you see us pop up in your social media feed, tell people about us. Talk back to us on any of the... Those social medias are on Spotify. We'd love to hear your comments and what you have to say about the show. You can join us on Facebook. We're on Instagram threads and mostly blue sky and join us over on Patreon for bonus.
That's really good. Here's talk over Dramaniac. What a motion picture. Gina, where can people find you on these here internets? I write about movies and television and pop culture at my substack, ginawatchesthings.substack.com. And I, too, am mostly on Blue Sky and Regina does things. Do it today, people. Check it out. Don't worry, folks. The bonding count will continue for myself and for Gina. Bye-bye, everybody. Bye!