FOLLOW YOUR DREAMS
David Robert Mitchell puts the stuff of nightmares on screen
Director Robert Mitchell’s wicked and ruthless horror tale It Follows was borne out of his childhood nightmares.
It Follows Oct. 9, 4: 30 p. m. | Rio Theatre Tickets and info: viff. org
Sometimes nightmares leave an impression.
One of David Robert Mitchell’s certainly did: He remembers the childhood dream vividly, and he speaks as if it never stopped haunting him.
“I was at recess, sitting with my friends,” he says. “I looked across the parking lot and I saw this other kid walking towards me from far away. I could see him and I just knew there was something wrong. I remember pointing him out to the kids I was with but nobody knew what I was talking about.”
Mitchell tried to run away. “Then I looked down the block and saw that the kid was turning around the corner, still walking toward me slowly.” This glacial chase continued until Mitchell woke up.
Other dreams followed. Whatever the scenario, one thing remained the same: the walking figure, never at rest.
“I like to have people in the background of shots that the characters don’t see and the audience may not. DAVID ROBERT MITCHELL DIRECTOR OF IT FOLLOWS
“In the nightmares it would always look like different people,” he says. “Maybe I’d be having dinner with my family, and some other person would walk into the room — maybe an adult or something.
“But I always knew it was this same thing.”
A creative mind could hardly squander so indelible an image, and so it was perhaps inevitable that Mitchell would eventually conceive a horror film around his recurring nightmare. Thus the It in It Follows, Mitchell’s new horror film, is the very same It that tormented him through childhood: an ambiguous figure steadily ambling toward its victim, never hurrying but never, ever stopping. Around this slender concept Mitchell has constructed a simple but elegant narrative framework, furnished with a minimum of detail.
The story concerns the efforts of a young woman named Jay ( Maika Monroe) to remain at least one step ahead of the apparently unceasing ghoul following her — a curse of sorts inherited after a night of passion in what may be the world’s most terrifying case of sexually transmitted disease. Now Jay is in constant danger: wherever she goes, it follows.
Mitchell gets a lot of mileage out of what may strike some as an insubstantial premise. Indeed, once the nature of the threat is duly established, the film doesn’t need to show much more than a marginally conspicuous extra on the periphery of the frame for the tension to mount.
“I like to have people in the background of shots that the characters don’t see and the audience may not,” Mitchell explains. “We shot the film with pretty wide angle lenses and open compositions, so you can see far into the distance. The idea is that you’re suggesting to the audience that they should look in the background and look around the edges to see what you can find.”