(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
It follows Directed by: David Robert Mitchell, Photo: Mike Gioulakis Sex is the engine of many horror movies, but rarely as non-committal desire: as a rule, it is precisely the sexuality that activates the series of events that lead to death and destruction. Sex without obligation always has costs in the horror world: I Scream, Fredag den 13de og Nightmare on Elm Street the monster becomes a "moral" revenge that punishes the "extraordinary" youth. In these films, the evil is indirectly in partnership with society's preserving institutions, such as the family and the marriage, no matter how alien to the well-organized nuclear family the killer had to be experienced. The horror films' conservative sexual morality thus becomes a disciplining tool for reactionary forces – it is not without reason that many such films come from the Christian fundamentalist United States. In the critically acclaimed It Follows by David Robert Mitchell revives well-known tropes from the genre, and here too, sex is the protagonist. But unlike most horror movies, shepherd time itself is not just the origin of the cruel; it is the medium of terror. Here there is no moral guardian with ax or hockey mask we become acquainted with, but a personified primordial power linked to desire itself. "The". The movie begins with the beautiful Jay Heights date with the handsome Jake Weary. It ends up in the back seat of a car, but it doesn't go as planned: Jake stunts Jay with a chloroform-soaked cloth. When she wakes up tied to a wheelchair, weeping in an abandoned industrial building, Jake tells her that she has taken over his curse: Through sex, he has infected her with a demonic force that can take any human form. This entity is looking to kill her, he says. "Someone gave it to me, now I've given it to you. The only way you can get rid of the curse is by having sex with someone else, ”says the charmer. The rest of the movie is a nerve-wracking escape from "it." The result is one of the best and most intelligent horror films of recent years. The plot is reminiscent of the Japanese horror film Ringu (Hideo Nakata, 1998), where a group of youngsters watch a video that leads to a gloomy ending, unless they show it to someone else before the disaster occurs. But It Follows has most in common with the iconic Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978), in which the seemingly immortal Mike Myers hunts down stray middle-class teens in the United States. suburbia. In Mitchell's film, we are in the same class team and geography, and the soundtrack of Disasterpeace is an effective sequel to Carpenter's chopping synth music from Halloween. It Follows would not exist without Carpenter's film – yes, it is in many ways an unreserved tribute to its predecessor.
The conservative sexual morality of horror films thus becomes a disciplining tool for reactionary forces.
Intimacy. The curse in It Follows can also be considered a vampirism, albeit without blood. In vampire movies, lust is linked to addiction and contagion, as in Tony Scott's arty The Hunger from 1983. Here the moral is pushed aside for a reflection on the darker sides of desire: We get a report on sexuality within the framework of the shortness of life and the decay of the body. Sexuality is reflected as part of a larger myth of eternal life, unyielding sexual appeal and beauty. The punishment for being part of extended life is to have taken the step over to a reality where one, literally, has to live in the shadows. In the shelter of the night, one must hunt down their victims and suck their blood to live on without being overtaken by decay and death. At the same time, there is more at stake in It Follows, for the monster appears optional up by that you have had sex, as if intimacy itself is a provoking mechanism for the demonic force. The threat also has a fluid identity: "It" transforms into anyone, depending on the circumstances, even one of your loved ones. Along the way, I begin to wonder if "what" haunts these young people is actually a variant of the young people themselves, or at least a reflection of the identity that is triggered, or cultivated, in the sex act. A close comparison is David Cronenberg and his thoughts on infection, reproduction and disease formation across common diagnoses, genealogies and established social ties and developmental stages. Here we are talking about a monstrosity that is not so much an identifiable being different from healthy citizens' normal reality, as a crack in the order of things. think about The Brood (1979), where antipathy and hatred are expressed both as physical outgrowths on the body, and – which is most important here – materialize in the form of murderous little people designed to annihilate and terrorize your enemies. Their identity is, like in It Follows, without moral depth, since their life mission is solely to terrorize and harm. The "offspring" are conceived by the very fact of hatred and the mind: a virgin birth without reproductive organs, pregnancy or birth canals. Dorian Gray. Are there such externalized emotions or lines of power outside the ordinary institutions and world orders that Robert Mitchell touches on? It Follows? Well, it is so decidedly something more than the usual stalker film he conjures up, for the cruel is, like Cronenberg's overgrown bodies and anger materializations, associated with a release of violent, unconscious forces that cannot be limited to the individual. If we consider the film as a fable about culture, a critical picture of the balance between beauty and decay, and how access to pleasure is distributed, a quite different picture emerges than what we are familiar with from the horror film universe. In Oscar Wilde's novel The image of Dorian Gray it is told of a young and adorable dandy who at all costs will retain his own beauty and, like the vampire, suppress decay and death. The solution is an aging painting instead of Gray, who with art as an instrument contests the cycle of nature in his boundless narcissism. Maybe we could say something similar about a culture that cultivates youth and beauty? There are at least few rooms where aging, physical decay, illness and death in today's Norway can unfold – especially when it comes to sexuality. Old age and serious illness are seldom associated with free sexual expression – which, it seems, is reserved for young and / or beautiful people in our common imaginary world. Our reality, like Dorian Gray, pushes these aspects under the rug in favor of a fetishization of eternal youth and standardized sex appeal. Linguistic sexuality. Is the demonic power of It Follows shaped by the sexual life of the repressed individuals – the old, the sick and the dying, who no longer have any natural part in the culture's preferred tales of lust? It is at least an unconscious content that is redeemed by sex: The figures that "it" wears are almost without exception very sick or old people. They seem threatening because they do not belong to the young, healthy clan that can "spread the disease" through casual sex with many partners. Usually these are individuals opposite of scary – if they "stay in place" and do not demand anything from us. But here they, or "it", do not agree with traffic, people or social conventions. For example, we see an old lady walking straight towards Jay Heights while sitting in the classroom at school. The beautiful schoolgirl catches sight of the lady when she is still far away, but the determination, and the one-sided movement towards Jay, sets her apart from the crowd. The young people around her move irregularly and according to the whimsical method. "It" – here in the form of the old woman, wearing a hospital gown – moves like a machine, with an iron will.
Is the demonic power of It Follows shaped by the sexual life of the repressed individuals?
Another character "it" appears in is a worn-out, lost prostitute who, with half-torn clothes and an uncontrollably leaking bladder, stumbles against Jay in her own home. What about such a woman's desire? When have an updated claims to be seen as a sexual being outside the body trade, there are few places she can turn to – unfortunately. Maybe the scary thing here is especially disturbing because there is no language for this type of sexuality? At least the discomfort in the film has a lot to do with the discomfort outcast individuals bring with them when they demand recognition with a strength they never otherwise show. Perhaps the horror of this successful rysare comes from the fact that it touches on issues that go deeper than the horror genre usually does.
