BELATED AFTER WEEKEND REVIEW OF IT FOLLOWS

year: 2015 rating: **

If M. Night Shyamalan directed John Carpenter’s HALLOWEEN with Carpenter still scoring the ominous soundtrack as Goblin and Tangerine Dream provided various riffs while Kubrick's THE SHINING remained a subliminal influence...

Combine all this with an extremely bizarre venereal disease exploitation and you have an avant garde horror flick that successfully puts you into a hypnotic world of suburbs and semi-rural borderlands with teenagers and various spooky images infiltrating their mellow, moody existence...

Which seems to occur when one person transmits a particularly gruesome hallucinatory curse starting with a teen boy who, after having sex with his pretty blond girlfriend i.e. our lead ingénue, clues her in on the unique plot-line: she will now see things that no one else sees, and that basically… IT FOLLOWS.

The strange thing is, the giver isn't lifted from the spell, remaining paranoid and completely screwed up. But the story-torch is passed onto the girl and a handful of her friends – at this point truly resembling HALLOWEEN with leafy lawns, metronomic synthesizers, hunted high schoolers and an impenetrable wraith… a few of them actually.

Despite the extremely bland acting in a realm where parents don’t seem to exist, the Sudden Jolt Thrills are effective; since the overall vibe remains edgy and quiet (between music breaks), anything erupting from that eerie silence comes as a shock. But when computer effects intrude upon the more subtle, implied moments, you’ll be taken out of the claustrophobic nightmare while ultimately, the characters have the same problem as the movie: one can't shake the ghosts while the other never quite stretches beyond its own self-aware, overly artistic template. RANK: Jedi, Rebel, Droid, Sith