Caltrops - Peter Molyneux's The Movies





	[quote name="Fullofkittens"]While I don't think it's scary, I do think <i>It Follows</i> is interesting and it stuck with me and so I will call it a good horror movie. Why it's interesting: it kind of works as a feminist remix of <i>Let The Right One In</i>. In it, we witness the birth of a vampire, who then takes on a familiar/vampire progeny. If you haven't seen <i>Let The Right One In</i>, don't read on, watch it. It's a great horror movie and is actually scary in parts. ... ... OK: in <i>Let The Right One In</i> a young boy befriends a new kid in his scandinavian winter town. That kid turns out to be a vampire, and the kid's apparent "dad" is actually his/her familiar (it's unclear if the vampire is a boy or a girl) (in the US remake, definitely a girl). The current familiar is getting a little old and sloppy, and gets kicked to the curb...meanwhile, vampire kid becomes friends with the protagonist, a social misfit who runs afoul of the local bullies. Things progress until, in the film's scariest scene, it really seems like the bullies are going to either drown the protagonist or like, cut his eye out and then BOOM the vampire pops in and fucks everybody up in a moment of ultraviolence. It's then clear that the protagonist kid and the vampire kid care about each other and the protagonist becomes the vampire's new familiar (presumably eventually suffering the same fate as the prior one, abandoned to die a few decades from now). Structurally <i>It Follows</i> has a similar template but the details obscure it a bit. Vampirism is sort of a sex thing in horror; the allure of vampires is related to ravishment fantasies, vampires need to repeatedly take their victims pseudosexually by force on a schedule in order to survive. The vampirism in <i>It Follows</i> dials the abstraction down a notch; instead of a Victorian metaphor for sex, it's just sex. You become a vampire when a vampire has sex with you, and then you need to have sex with somebody else to survive. Then they have to, on and on ad infinitum. What makes <i>It Follows</i> interestingly similar to <i>Let The Right One In</i> is that in both movies, the supernatural problem is in media res at the beginning of the movie, and at the end of the movie it absolutely has not been solved; in fact, the main character is now the villain. The scandinavian kid is now the vampire's familiar (which we have seen involves murdering people at times), the midwestern girl has convinced a boy that had a crush on her to have sex so that she can live (and now he is her familiar, driving over to the next town to give the vampire bug to other girls). (Also, it's a PRETTY BIG COINCIDENCE that both movies have a climactic scene that seals the characters' fates at a big public pool.) The reason it might have a lightly feminist(?) vibe is that it starts out seeming like sex is a vulnerability to the female protagonist but by the end she uses sex to save herself and push the vulnerability down on to men. So yeah, in my opinion they're both interesting good movies that stuck with me long after watching them. FOOTNOTE: there's an American remake of <i>Let The Right One In</i> called <i>Let Me In</i> which - like the US remake of <i>REC</i> - is so similar that there was no reason at all it should have been made. The only justification for it is that some people just cannot tolerate subtitles, it's a shot-for-shot remake other than that.[/quote]