This weekend, we squeezed into a sold-out screening of It Follows, the made-in-Detroit horror flick that's earning heaps of critical praise. The low-budget film makes an intriguing twist to the horror genre, imagining the ghostly slasher as a sort of sexually transmitted curse.
MT critic Jeff Meyers had the chance to catch up with filmmaker David Robert Mitchell at Sundance, where the writer-director elaborated on the film's allegorical take on sex:
It’s never my intention to present sex as something that someone should not be doing or something that should be looked down on. When a character has sex they might open themselves up to this danger, but at the same time it’s the thing that can, at least temporarily, liberate and free them. One idea is that, basically, we’re all dealing with our mortality on some level. Sex and love are some of the ways that we’re able to push it away or push it a little bit into the distance. It’s how we cope. It’s finding some peace through our relationships with other people. Sex is an important part of that. To me, that’s what it comes down to — you’re not going to get away from it, but you can still find some happiness in between. But that’s just one read on the film. I’ve heard all kinds of theories and I think they’re all interesting.
Check out the full interview over at MovieMaker Magazine.
In other news, the film has been doing so well that its video on demand release has been delayed in favor of an expanded theatrical run, so there could be some opportunities to view it in larger theaters in the near future.
Read Meyers' review of the film for MT here.
