[This post isn’t a news item, but after watching and appreciating the unusual, well-regarded 2014 horror film It Follows recently and reading up on interpretations of the many ambiguous and subtle aspects of the film, I found the explanation from Yahoo! Entertainment below by the film’s director of how the film was designed to be immersive and evoke spatial (and I’d argue social) presence. Though it’s not mentioned here, I also noticed several examples in which relatable sensory experiences are emphasized to evoke presence as perceptual realism, for example dabbling one’s toes in water, applying lipstick, holding hands, walking on various surfaces, etc. The original version of the Yahoo! story includes four different images and the film’s trailer (also available via YouTube) and for much more analysis of the film see stories in Looper, Grunge and a three-part deep dive in Montages Magazine. –Matthew]
The Yahoo Movies Interview: ‘It Follows’ Director David Robert Mitchell on His Surprise Horror Hit
By Gwynne Watkins
March 20, 2015
To watch the buzzy new horror film It Follows is to feel trapped inside a nightmare. It’s no surprise, then, that writer-director David Robert Mitchell took his inspiration from a recurring childhood nightmare of his own.
In the movie, which opened in limited release last week and will expand over the next two weeks, a 19-year-old girl named Jay (Maika Monroe) is relentlessly pursued by an evil, slow-moving presence intent on killing her. The monster can take the form of any person, and it cannot be stopped — but if an intended victim has sex with someone, the evil creature’s attention will be diverted to their partner.
The film’s story sounds ridiculous when it’s described in literal terms, as Mitchell acknowledges in this interview with Yahoo Movies. But It Follows isn’t about the plot, so much as it’s about an inescapable feeling of dread and terror that grabs the viewer and doesn’t let go. To that end, the director has taken great care not to over-explain the film’s dreamlike elements, including the monster’s appearance and the movie’s ambiguous time period. (Mitchell incorporated many props and set elements from previous decades, and at least one that doesn’t actually exist: a flip-phone-style e-Reader shaped like a shell.) Yahoo talked to the writer-director about the movie’s sex metaphor, the horror clichés he deliberately avoided, and the camera technique that makes ordinary suburban life feel so scary. (Warning: Minor spoilers.)
[snip]
The camera plays a big role in keeping the audience on edge in It Follows; you use a lot of wide angles and long takes, and it feels like the monster could come out of anywhere at any time. But also, there were a couple times when the characters turned to the camera and I thought maybe the monster was me. I realize this is like asking you to explain a magic trick, but how did you do that?
[Laughs] Where to start? I knew that I wanted to have the film be as immersive as possible. And so it was about placing the viewer and the audience within the world. So we slowed down some of the pacing; we’ll hold on a cut a little bit longer than I think some people will be used to. And that is about letting people be familiar with the frame and the geography of the space, so that you can see the character, and you’re on that frame long enough that you might start to scan in the background, in the edge of the frame. And so when we cut to a shot it’s not about, “How quickly can you understand what’s within this composition before we cut to the next?” It’s “Okay, well, this is the space that we’re in right now.”
Based on the language of the film, you get used to the idea that you have time to look around. And I’m not sure that I’m explaining this in a way that makes sense, but it’s really about placing the viewer in that world. So if you’re on the beach, we sit there, we can look into the background, and we feel like we are within that environment. Or at least, the shot design is built with that goal in mind.
Like you mentioned, a lot of the film is shot with wide-angle lenses, and so there’s a little bit more depth of field: you see into the background. And it’s really just about creating that language where you understand that this monster is going to have to break into the frame, ultimately. That the camera isn’t going to cheat and allow it to get in. We don’t really cheat distance very often with the camera via longer lenses or a quick cut. There may be places where we break that rule, just for a particular reason – but for the most part it’s about being honest with geography and distance. So it’s about understanding space.
[snip to end]