Episode 608 - "It Follows" (2014)

NARRATOR: “Welcome back to Reign of Terror 2019! 31 straight days of horror movie reviews and interviews. Today’s episode will feature Erik Kosnar and Aicila (Eye-Sil-A) Lewis of the Bicurean Podcast, who will be reviewing the intense horror allegory, ‘It Follows’. A promo will run before the review.”

NARRATOR: “But for now, let’s turn our attention back to the fate of our host, Joseph, in Part Three of “FOR YOUR AMUSEMENT”.”

SCENE: Tall grasses. 

JOSEPH: “So... sick... of... running...”

NARRATOR: “Joseph was running from two threats, a small child’s voice...” 

ANDREW: *meek child voice* “Help me.” 

NARRATOR: “...and whatever else was chasing him from the circus tent. It wasn’t so much that he was tired of running, but just sick of it. You could only move so fast through the grass, until suddenly...”

NARRATOR: “Just as Andrew said, Joseph came to a parking lot. An abandoned one, of course, complete with two rusted out cars, and two strange figures, standing around and talking.” 

JOSEPH: “Hey!” 

NARRATOR: “The two turned towards Joseph, and waved him over, going immediately back to their conversation while he approached.”

ERIK: “I think this whole leader/follower paradigm is insane.”

AICILA: “I agree. Does someone have to follow and someone have to lead? Can’t we just work together.”

JOSEPH: “Hello there.”

ERIK: “Oh, hello there.” 

JOSEPH: “I have a problem I could use some help with.”

AICILA: “You’ve come to the right people.”

ERIK: “We specialize in finding insightful solutions to many problems.”

JOSEPH: “Oh, good, because I have two people following me.”

AICILA: “Ah, see! It’s like he was meant to stop by!”

ERIK: “Tell me. Are you leading them?”

JOSEPH: “No, this is more of a being chased situation.” 

AICILA: “What exactly is chasing you?”

JOSEPH: “Well, the one sounds like a child, but is probably a monster.”

ERIK: “All children are monsters. Go on.” 

JOSEPH: “The other is... I think a psychopathic clown.” 

AICILA: “Morphing into bizarre creatures or typical slasher variety?” 

JOSEPH: “Slasher variety, I think. Definitely likes his blades.”

ERIK: “Yes. Well, the first thing I would do is to stop leading them.”

JOSEPH: “How do I do that?”

AICILA: “I’d throw them off the scent. Maybe consider an alternate route.” 

JOSEPH: “Such as?” 

ERIK: “How do you feel about sewers?” 

JOSEPH: “Ummm, not if I can help it?” 

AICILA: “How do you feel about sewers as compared to monsters or stabby clowns?” 

JOSEPH: “Not so bad, when you put it that way.” 

ERIK: “Well, if you look down, you’ll see a manhole. I’d drop down there, and let them get lost looking for you up here.” 

NARRATOR: “He didn’t have much time to think, but between a monster and a knife in the gut, the sewer really didn’t seem so bad.”

NARRATOR: “Joseph moved the manhole cover, assaulted immediately by the rank smell of the sewer.” 

JOSEPH: “On second thought...”

AICILA: “I think you may be out of time.”

NARRATOR: “Joseph took one look back towards the field, then one back down the sewer, then took his last breath of fresh air before climbing down and pulling the manhole cover over him.”

ERIK: “Do you think we should have told him about the clown in the sewer?” 

AICILA: “No. Otherwise, ‘It’ wouldn’t follow for Joseph.” 

NARRATOR: “Now that’s how to do a movie pun.” 

NARRATOR: “Where would Joseph end up? Find out tomorrow in Part Four of “FOR YOUR AMUSEMENT”, when we run Joseph’s classic review of 2017’s “It”, and part two of Joseph’s interview with Kerry Fleming will be available on Patreon. Let’s see if Joseph floats, shall we?”

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<< BICUREAN PROMO >>

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ERIK: “Hi, I'm Erik.”

AICILA: “And, I'm Aicila.” 

ERIK: “And we are from the Bicurean podcast.”

AICILA: “And we hope you'll come and have a conversation with us. We love to talk about everything from politics to geek culture to horse racing. And find the points of connection in traditionally polarizing topics.” 

ERIK: “We also seek to be the change that we want to see in the world. We would love to teach our audience the ways in which they can be better at critical thinking and understanding of what other people are experiencing in their lives.”

AICILA: “So, we hope you'll come and join us. ... We're at bicurean.com/podcast. Or you can find us all over social media and on pretty much any podcasting platform.” 

AICILA: “Today’s movie is “It Follows” (2014), this horror film is written and directed by David Robert Mitchell. Maika Monroe plays the lead character, Jay, a young woman who contracts a sexually transmitted supernatural stalker after she sleeps with her boyfriend.

Spoilers ahead! 

ERIK: “So when this movie came out, I saw the trailers for it, and I had no idea what to expect. It looked like there was definitely going to be the creeping factor of something chasing after the characters and creating a world in which the terror was never ending. But I saw jump scares and things like that that they made into the trailer, and boy, was I pleasantly surprised to see a well-crafted movie. Very Carpenter-esque. And for those unfamiliar with Carpenter movies, that's everything from the original “Halloween” movies... He had a specific style in the eighties, even down to the music. And ‘It Follows’ really had that kind of magic.”

AICILA: “So I don't come from a horror film background. And Erik actually really wanted me to see this movie. And I was pretty reluctant overall to see any horror films. However, I found this one to be just the right amount of creepy without being gross I guess.”

ERIK: “Yeah. I can't actually think... there is a little bit of blood and gore towards the end, but not actually over the top. And not in like the gore porn type of movie that is so prevalent these days. It was dramatic. There's a scene in the end when the swimming pool is filling with blood because they've damaged this entity in some way. And it's creepy. It's not gory.”

AICILA: “One of the things that I've been getting out of my horror introduction education, that informally that you've been leading me through, is the ways in which it's such an intense metaphor for the different kinds of fear that we have. And so that fear of, you know, being intimate with someone and the consequences of that. Like this creepy supernatural stalker may not happen, and yet, you have trails of things after you're intimate with someone that stay with you. And that can feel like they're bringing you down or hurting you.”

ERIK: “Absolutely. And an interesting aspect to this, that I absolutely found added another layer to it, was that when they realize that Jay, the main character and her friends realized that, she has this stalker coming and that it was from her sexual encounter, with who is somebody who ends up essentially being a stranger. But they find him, and they talk to him. And this stalker will continue to follow the last person in line. So, if Jay dies, it's coming back after him again. And assumably it would go after whoever he slept with and got it from. And so, the reality is even if you get rid of it, it's not gone. And that was a whole other layer to it that I found really intriguing in this.”

AICILA: “He went to the trouble of, after he infected her essentially, explaining to her how to avoid it. And then you realize like, oh, he wasn't being altruistic necessarily.” 

ERIK: “No. He was entirely self-serving.” 

AICILA: “He was helping her because it's in his best interest to help her. Which is enlightened self-interest. Which is what our country is built on. Look it up.”

ERIK: “Yeah. That is true. But yeah, just in general I highly recommend this movie for somebody who wants to kind of see what horror movies were meant to be twenty years ago. But you know and thirty years ago actually. You may watch something like the original ‘Halloween’, and it's not gonna grab you the same way. At the time it was terrifying. And so, they've taken that style of movie making in this and really made it work in a modern way. And it's evidenced by the fact that it is so highly rated by all of the critics that ever saw it.” 

AICILA: “Yes. As part of the research for this show, I had to look up the Rotten Tomatoes. And it was at 96. I mean, that just doesn't happen.”

ERIK: “For a horror movie? I mean you assume that they're gonna get a fifty percent at best. And then you may or may not like it depending on what kind of a horror movie fan you are. But ‘It Follows’ is a genuinely good movie that happens to be in the horror genre.”

AICILA: “Yeah, I would second that. And the acting, I felt like the actors all gave really solid performances. I don't think anybody was, like, phoning it in. And the characters were pretty well fleshed out. There was a feeling of genuine connection to the people. I know that that's one of the things that I both like and dislike in scary movies, is I do get connected. And when I do it's really a harder watch. But that was absolutely what happened for me in this was I did get connected to the characters. And so, then when they were threatened, I was quite upset about it.”

ERIK: “What's interesting about that, is I feel that that is an aspect of movies just in general, that we don't see as much, which is character development. And this has that. And it's almost shocking because you're like, ‘Wow, I care about these characters and it's not a drama or a rom com.’ You know most action or horror movies you get a maybe some basic information to their motivation. Why they're in the situation they're in. And then that's it. But this we really learn about the characters. We learn that one of the guys running around in the crew has had a crush on Jay forever. But Jay has obviously had a crush on other people. And he's so willing to sacrifice for her. And it comes up in the movie in different ways. So, yeah you really start to feel for them. And meanwhile you're also kind of filled with this dread of when this thing that's chasing them is gonna show up again.” 

AICILA: “Right, because it doesn't follow them consistently. And one of the things that the guy who infected her told her was never go into a room that has only one door.”

ERIK: “Yeah.” 

AICILA: “Or one exit I guess. And he said something like and it moves slowly.” 

ERIK: “Yeah. But it's always coming.”

AICILA: “But it's always coming. And so that, and there's something about that set up as well. I don't know why. Cause that was right at the beginning, that was really chilling for me. I guess because it was so practical.”

ERIK: “Right.”

AICILA: “And it just was like, ‘Whoa, wait a minute. That's horrible.’ And the ways in which Jay, unlike him and you know, potentially other people, had a huge group of people supporting her. ... Although there was that moment that was kind of like hard to watch, and you didn't even see it. Where she'd been running and running and running. And her friends and her family were helping her. And she could see that it was just having this huge issue. And so she swims out to this boat.” 

ERIK: “Yeah.”

AICILA: “And it's a boat with a you know, she's like in her maybe early twenties. And it's a boat with these older guys. And the next thing you know, there's this like older guy supernatural thing coming after her.”

ERIK: “Yeah.” 

AICILA: “And you're like, oh I just know what happened and it was so creepy.” 

ERIK: “Yeah.” 

AICILA: “And disgusting.”

ERIK: “For sure, yeah. So to summarize...”  

ERIK: “’It Follows’ is a solid horror film with a unique kind of terror. Even if you are squeamish around horror like Aicila is, you might likely enjoy this one.

Rotten Tomatoes: 96% (CERTIFIED FRESH).

Metacritic: 83 (MUST SEE)

One Movie Punch: 9.0/10

AICILA: “’It Follows’ (2014) is rated R and available on Amazon Prime, iTunes, Vudu, and PlayStation to rent.”

NARRATOR: “Welcome back to Reign of Terror 2019! 31 straight days of horror movie reviews and interviews. Today’s episode will feature Erik Kosnar and Aicila (Eye-Sil-A) Lewis of the Bicurean Podcast, who will be reviewing the intense horror allegory, ‘It Follows’. A promo will run before the review.”

NARRATOR: “But for now, let’s turn our attention back to the fate of our host, Joseph, in Part Three of “FOR YOUR AMUSEMENT”.”

SCENE: Tall grasses. 

JOSEPH: “So... sick... of... running...”

NARRATOR: “Joseph was running from two threats, a small child’s voice...” 

ANDREW: *meek child voice* “Help me.” 

NARRATOR: “...and whatever else was chasing him from the circus tent. It wasn’t so much that he was tired of running, but just sick of it. You could only move so fast through the grass, until suddenly...”

NARRATOR: “Just as Andrew said, Joseph came to a parking lot. An abandoned one, of course, complete with two rusted out cars, and two strange figures, standing around and talking.” 

JOSEPH: “Hey!” 

NARRATOR: “The two turned towards Joseph, and waved him over, going immediately back to their conversation while he approached.”

ERIK: “I think this whole leader/follower paradigm is insane.”

AICILA: “I agree. Does someone have to follow and someone have to lead? Can’t we just work together.”

JOSEPH: “Hello there.”

ERIK: “Oh, hello there.” 

JOSEPH: “I have a problem I could use some help with.”

AICILA: “You’ve come to the right people.”

ERIK: “We specialize in finding insightful solutions to many problems.”

JOSEPH: “Oh, good, because I have two people following me.”

AICILA: “Ah, see! It’s like he was meant to stop by!”

ERIK: “Tell me. Are you leading them?”

JOSEPH: “No, this is more of a being chased situation.” 

AICILA: “What exactly is chasing you?”

JOSEPH: “Well, the one sounds like a child, but is probably a monster.”

ERIK: “All children are monsters. Go on.” 

JOSEPH: “The other is... I think a psychopathic clown.” 

AICILA: “Morphing into bizarre creatures or typical slasher variety?” 

JOSEPH: “Slasher variety, I think. Definitely likes his blades.”

ERIK: “Yes. Well, the first thing I would do is to stop leading them.”

JOSEPH: “How do I do that?”

AICILA: “I’d throw them off the scent. Maybe consider an alternate route.” 

JOSEPH: “Such as?” 

ERIK: “How do you feel about sewers?” 

JOSEPH: “Ummm, not if I can help it?” 

AICILA: “How do you feel about sewers as compared to monsters or stabby clowns?” 

JOSEPH: “Not so bad, when you put it that way.” 

ERIK: “Well, if you look down, you’ll see a manhole. I’d drop down there, and let them get lost looking for you up here.” 

NARRATOR: “He didn’t have much time to think, but between a monster and a knife in the gut, the sewer really didn’t seem so bad.”

NARRATOR: “Joseph moved the manhole cover, assaulted immediately by the rank smell of the sewer.” 

JOSEPH: “On second thought...”

AICILA: “I think you may be out of time.”

NARRATOR: “Joseph took one look back towards the field, then one back down the sewer, then took his last breath of fresh air before climbing down and pulling the manhole cover over him.”

ERIK: “Do you think we should have told him about the clown in the sewer?” 

AICILA: “No. Otherwise, ‘It’ wouldn’t follow for Joseph.” 

NARRATOR: “Now that’s how to do a movie pun.” 

NARRATOR: “Where would Joseph end up? Find out tomorrow in Part Four of “FOR YOUR AMUSEMENT”, when we run Joseph’s classic review of 2017’s “It”, and part two of Joseph’s interview with Kerry Fleming will be available on Patreon. Let’s see if Joseph floats, shall we?”

/////

>

///// 

ERIK: “Hi, I'm Erik.”

AICILA: “And, I'm Aicila.” 

ERIK: “And we are from the Bicurean podcast.”

AICILA: “And we hope you'll come and have a conversation with us. We love to talk about everything from politics to geek culture to horse racing. And find the points of connection in traditionally polarizing topics.” 

ERIK: “We also seek to be the change that we want to see in the world. We would love to teach our audience the ways in which they can be better at critical thinking and understanding of what other people are experiencing in their lives.”

AICILA: “So, we hope you'll come and join us. ... We're at bicurean.com/podcast. Or you can find us all over social media and on pretty much any podcasting platform.” 

AICILA: “Today’s movie is “It Follows” (2014), this horror film is written and directed by David Robert Mitchell. Maika Monroe plays the lead character, Jay, a young woman who contracts a sexually transmitted supernatural stalker after she sleeps with her boyfriend.

Spoilers ahead! 

ERIK: “So when this movie came out, I saw the trailers for it, and I had no idea what to expect. It looked like there was definitely going to be the creeping factor of something chasing after the characters and creating a world in which the terror was never ending. But I saw jump scares and things like that that they made into the trailer, and boy, was I pleasantly surprised to see a well-crafted movie. Very Carpenter-esque. And for those unfamiliar with Carpenter movies, that's everything from the original “Halloween” movies... He had a specific style in the eighties, even down to the music. And ‘It Follows’ really had that kind of magic.”

AICILA: “So I don't come from a horror film background. And Erik actually really wanted me to see this movie. And I was pretty reluctant overall to see any horror films. However, I found this one to be just the right amount of creepy without being gross I guess.”

ERIK: “Yeah. I can't actually think... there is a little bit of blood and gore towards the end, but not actually over the top. And not in like the gore porn type of movie that is so prevalent these days. It was dramatic. There's a scene in the end when the swimming pool is filling with blood because they've damaged this entity in some way. And it's creepy. It's not gory.”

AICILA: “One of the things that I've been getting out of my horror introduction education, that informally that you've been leading me through, is the ways in which it's such an intense metaphor for the different kinds of fear that we have. And so that fear of, you know, being intimate with someone and the consequences of that. Like this creepy supernatural stalker may not happen, and yet, you have trails of things after you're intimate with someone that stay with you. And that can feel like they're bringing you down or hurting you.”

ERIK: “Absolutely. And an interesting aspect to this, that I absolutely found added another layer to it, was that when they realize that Jay, the main character and her friends realized that, she has this stalker coming and that it was from her sexual encounter, with who is somebody who ends up essentially being a stranger. But they find him, and they talk to him. And this stalker will continue to follow the last person in line. So, if Jay dies, it's coming back after him again. And assumably it would go after whoever he slept with and got it from. And so, the reality is even if you get rid of it, it's not gone. And that was a whole other layer to it that I found really intriguing in this.”

AICILA: “He went to the trouble of, after he infected her essentially, explaining to her how to avoid it. And then you realize like, oh, he wasn't being altruistic necessarily.” 

ERIK: “No. He was entirely self-serving.” 

AICILA: “He was helping her because it's in his best interest to help her. Which is enlightened self-interest. Which is what our country is built on. Look it up.”

ERIK: “Yeah. That is true. But yeah, just in general I highly recommend this movie for somebody who wants to kind of see what horror movies were meant to be twenty years ago. But you know and thirty years ago actually. You may watch something like the original ‘Halloween’, and it's not gonna grab you the same way. At the time it was terrifying. And so, they've taken that style of movie making in this and really made it work in a modern way. And it's evidenced by the fact that it is so highly rated by all of the critics that ever saw it.” 

AICILA: “Yes. As part of the research for this show, I had to look up the Rotten Tomatoes. And it was at 96. I mean, that just doesn't happen.”

ERIK: “For a horror movie? I mean you assume that they're gonna get a fifty percent at best. And then you may or may not like it depending on what kind of a horror movie fan you are. But ‘It Follows’ is a genuinely good movie that happens to be in the horror genre.”

AICILA: “Yeah, I would second that. And the acting, I felt like the actors all gave really solid performances. I don't think anybody was, like, phoning it in. And the characters were pretty well fleshed out. There was a feeling of genuine connection to the people. I know that that's one of the things that I both like and dislike in scary movies, is I do get connected. And when I do it's really a harder watch. But that was absolutely what happened for me in this was I did get connected to the characters. And so, then when they were threatened, I was quite upset about it.”

ERIK: “What's interesting about that, is I feel that that is an aspect of movies just in general, that we don't see as much, which is character development. And this has that. And it's almost shocking because you're like, ‘Wow, I care about these characters and it's not a drama or a rom com.’ You know most action or horror movies you get a maybe some basic information to their motivation. Why they're in the situation they're in. And then that's it. But this we really learn about the characters. We learn that one of the guys running around in the crew has had a crush on Jay forever. But Jay has obviously had a crush on other people. And he's so willing to sacrifice for her. And it comes up in the movie in different ways. So, yeah you really start to feel for them. And meanwhile you're also kind of filled with this dread of when this thing that's chasing them is gonna show up again.” 

AICILA: “Right, because it doesn't follow them consistently. And one of the things that the guy who infected her told her was never go into a room that has only one door.”

ERIK: “Yeah.” 

AICILA: “Or one exit I guess. And he said something like and it moves slowly.” 

ERIK: “Yeah. But it's always coming.”

AICILA: “But it's always coming. And so that, and there's something about that set up as well. I don't know why. Cause that was right at the beginning, that was really chilling for me. I guess because it was so practical.”

ERIK: “Right.”

AICILA: “And it just was like, ‘Whoa, wait a minute. That's horrible.’ And the ways in which Jay, unlike him and you know, potentially other people, had a huge group of people supporting her. ... Although there was that moment that was kind of like hard to watch, and you didn't even see it. Where she'd been running and running and running. And her friends and her family were helping her. And she could see that it was just having this huge issue. And so she swims out to this boat.” 

ERIK: “Yeah.”

AICILA: “And it's a boat with a you know, she's like in her maybe early twenties. And it's a boat with these older guys. And the next thing you know, there's this like older guy supernatural thing coming after her.”

ERIK: “Yeah.” 

AICILA: “And you're like, oh I just know what happened and it was so creepy.” 

ERIK: “Yeah.” 

AICILA: “And disgusting.”

ERIK: “For sure, yeah. So to summarize...”  

ERIK: “’It Follows’ is a solid horror film with a unique kind of terror. Even if you are squeamish around horror like Aicila is, you might likely enjoy this one.

Rotten Tomatoes: 96% (CERTIFIED FRESH).

Metacritic: 83 (MUST SEE)

One Movie Punch: 9.0/10

AICILA: “’It Follows’ (2014) is rated R and available on Amazon Prime, iTunes, Vudu, and PlayStation to rent.”