I said in an earlier post that I love movies. We have a grand collection of DVD’s, Blue-Rays, and movies on the cloud. More than anything else, I love scary movies. My kids like them, too, so when I saw the preview for It Follows, my daughter and I went to see it.

This movie is incredible. I had to digest for about a week before I could decide how I felt about it. The time period is skewed throughout the movie. The cars look like the 1970’s, but the clothes are 1980’s. The houses look like the 1980’s or 1990’s, and in one house, a television sits on top of a broken television. Neither are flat screens. I don’t know what time period that is, but I know that just about every house I visited as a kid had a set up like that. I guess you didn’t throw out a perfectly good television cabinet back then.

But . . . one of the girls has a vintage Avon clam-shell compact that is an e-reader. An e-reader! I would love to get my hands on one of those! In the opening scene, a girl is talking on her cell phone, but when it shifts to the protagonist, time seems to distort.

In the opening scene, a girl runs out of her house, down the street, back into her house, and out to the car, and then she drives down the street. The camera never cuts, so it is a two or three minute long scene of continuous filming. That is incredibly hard to accomplish because one mistake means a do-over. It reminds me some of Rope when Hitchcock filmed each seven to ten minute scene continuously, just as it was written in the stage play.

The music is phenomenal. Reminiscent of the 1980’s slasher films, it creates tension before we have anything to fear. It is not fitting of the usual soundtrack where things jump out at you in a cheap scare. It builds. And builds. And builds some more. And the scares are subtle, which means they are even more chilling.

One of the best things about the movie is that the monster that follows the girl changes every time she sees it. One time it looks like a hooker, another like an old woman who wandered away from a nursing home. In the scariest scene, it looks like her father. It walks. It never runs, but it is always walking towards you. It seems like that shouldn’t be terrifying, but it is. It’s eternal, forever, and inescapable.

I haven’t seen a really good scary movie since Sinister, and this one was a great attempt to scare us under the skin.