Quentin Tarantino is Angry at Beloved Netflix Horror Movie “For not being great”
I was as surprised as everyone else when it was announced that Neon had greenlit a sequel to David Robert Mitchell’s 2014 classic It Follows in October of last year. Tentatively titled They Follow, Monroe is slated to return alongside Mitchell, this time producing. The sequel was announced almost a decade after It Follows first released, though it’s a mostly curious development largely because the horror of the original felt so singular and self-contained. Today, we’re bringing iconic director Quentin Tarantino into the conversation.
Okay, but is there franchise potential? In our IP era, sure, but the lack of larger mythos is a key contributor to why It Follows remains so terrifying a decade out. At least, in my case it is. For Quentin Tarantino, that mythology accounts for why he doesn’t really like it all that much. Maybe They Follow will change that? The new sequel from Neon is due to start shooting this year with Monroe and Mitchell bot returning.
Check out the teaser poster for They Follow here:
It Follows, well, follows a young woman, Jay (Maika Monroe) as she’s stalked by a sexually-transmitted demon. Mitchell, beholden to the best practices of cinematic lore and worldbuilding, peppers the movie with so many distinct details he irregularly explains. There’s the shell-phone, the lack of parents, and the ambiguous nature of the central threat. That’s what makes the movie so scary—it’s both real and operating pursuant to some kind of hypnogogic logic. As a result, it lingers long after it’s over. In Quentin Tarantino’s case, that logic sinks the movie for him.
In an interview with Vulture from 2015, Quentin Tarantino shared how he would “fix” Mitchell’s horror classic. While he starts with some brushstroke praise, remarking how It Follows has “the best premise I’ve seen in a horror film in a long, long, long time,” he later adds, “It’s one of those movies that’s so good that you start getting mad at it for not being great.” Of chief concern is the film’s (deliberately nebulous) mythology. Tarantino shared, “He [writer-director David Robert Mitchell] could have kept his mythology straight. He broke his mythology left, right, and center.”
Quentin Tarantino, later in the interview, had the following to say of the film’s controversial final act: “The movie keeps on doing things like that, not holding on to the rules that it sets up. Like, okay, you can shoot the bad guys in the head, but that just works for ten seconds? Well, that doesn’t make any fucking sense. What’s up with that? And then, all of a sudden, the things are aggressive and they’re picking up appliances and throwing them at people? Now they’re strategizing? That’s never been part of it before.”
The rest of the interview, I kid you not, has Quentin Tarantino incredulously questioning why no one in the movie had sex with “gorgeously handsome geeky boy” Keir Gilchrist earlier, which—as a fan of The United States of Tara—is a fair line of questioning, I guess.
What do you think? Do you agree with Quentin Tarantino? If you need to catch It Follows again to be sure, you can stream it now on Netflix. Let me know either way over on Twitter @Chadiscollins.
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