It Follows To Become The Next Horror Franchise?

It looks like the studio behind recent horror release ‘It Follows’ have high hopes for a sequel - and we have our first hints as to what direction a follow-up film might take.

Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, Tom Quinn of Radius/TWC - who co-distributed ‘It Follows’ in the US with Dimension Films - says “I don’t want to give away too much, but we’ve thought about it,” and suggests the second film might “flip the title,” adding, “there’s so much you could do.”

If this means the sequel would literally be entitled ‘Follow It’ - or at least follow that theme - this might make for an interesting development on the enigmatic supernatural chiller.

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In case you missed it (which is a distinct possibility, given that the film wasn’t a particularly massive box office hit, despite a largely ecstatic critical reaction), writer-director David Robert Mitchell’s film centres on a teenage girl, played by Maika Monroe, who unwittingly finds herself pursued by a malevolent supernatural entity which wants to kill her.

The twist is, she has ‘picked up’ this monster via sex - and the only way to avoid it is to ‘pass it on’ to someone else, also via sex. But once it kills whoever you passed it on to, it will make its way back to you, then the person who passed it on to you, and so forth.

To make it that bit trickier, the creature is only visible to the ‘infected’ people, disguises itself as human, and never looks the same twice.

While this writer for one didn’t think ’It Follows’ was quite the masterpiece that many seem to have hailed it as (too much build-up and not enough pay-off for my liking), it’s still nice to see a genuinely new horror film from independent beginnings, which isn’t a sequel or remake, gaining such attention from the mainstream.

It’s also easy enough to envisage ‘It Follows’ spawning sequels. Very low on exposition (again, just a little too low to my mind), the film leaves a great many questions unanswered about its sexually-transmitted monster - questions which could easily be addressed in further films.

Further to Quinn’s implication of ‘Follow It’ as a sequel title, EW speculate the sequel might follow the trail of sexual history back to the origins of the demonic antagonist.

Of course, this raises the question - would we really want to run the risk of seeing it demystified? Rarely, if ever, does an explanation of a monster’s origins do much to help a horror franchise (see Rob Zombie’s ‘Halloween’ remake for evidence of this).

Still, at present neither director Mitchell nor actress Monroe are said to be in talks about an ‘It Follows’ sequel, so it may remain a mystery for some time yet.

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Picture Credit: Icon/Radius-TWC/Dimension