The 2010s were a boon for indie horror. The Babadook. Green Room. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. The V/H/Ses. Both Hereditary and Midsommar. One of the best was It Follows. It was probably an allegory about fears of losing one’s virginity. It was also so brilliantly directed that it turned the audience into paranoid freaks, scanning each widescreen frame for creeping baddies like they were readers of Where’s Waldo? It’d be hard to sequelize. And yet guess what?
Per Variety, both writer/director David Robert Mitchell and star Maika Monroe are reuniting for They Follow, which will begin filming next year, a decade after the original hit Cannes. That film concerned teens, one of whom, after having sex for the first time, finds herself plagued with enigmatic attackers only she can see. Will this one find some equally blood-curdling thing to say about ones 20s? Since the film already has a distributor, Neon, which is also co-producing it, looks like you’ll find out.
Like a number of 2010s indie horrors, It Follows was a modest crossover hit, enough that Mitchell was able to follow it up with something even more ambitious, one could call hubristic. That film was Under the Silver Lake, in which a very funny Andrew Garfield played an unemployed Los Angelino who goes way, way, way deep into the rabbit hole of kooky conspiracy theories. That movie wasn’t as well-received or seen as its predecessor, but it had cult item written all over it even before the further rise of QAnon, to say nothing of COVID/anti-vaxx nonsense. It also all but ensures that Mitchell has some real ideas, as opposed to lazy ones, about how to follow up his biggest hit to date.
(Via Variety)