Dreamers of dreams
Dreamers of Dreams
In the often quoted poem “Ode” by Arthur O'Shaughnessy we find the opening line
“We are the music makers, And we are the dreamers of dreams”
I often associate this phrase to the beautifully haunting Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory with Gene Wilder’s masterful performance as both joyvoyal inspired creator and mistrusting, anxious hermit. While not a horror movie persay, there are many parallels including the removal of characters one by one, Charlie’s virtuous and honest final “girl” / character role, a backdrop of what can be described as a haunted mansion full of horrible wonders, and of course Mr. Wonka himself that when we really draw the comparisons we find a stricking resemblance to Jigsaw’s character motives.
So why on earth am I bringing up Willy Wonka when we are talking about the second film on our Hacker Horror Nights marathon, It Follows? For the sinking reason that this film was inspired greatly by writer and director, David Robert Mitchell’s dreams. We see that Mr. Wonka’s dreams have lead him to create tantalizing sweet treats that the world all over love, but at what cost? So it is here that David has brought his dreams from the foggy realm of shadows and hard to contain truths of the subconscious to the very real and very present art form we call film for us to enjoy and delite in just like a gold wrapped bar of chocolate.
Citing Wikipedia, It Fellows debuted at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival and was ultimately purchased by Radius-TWC, distributing both in limited as well as wide release to critical acclaim and box office success. Unlike many of modern horror films, It Follows does not take its story from previous works but rather its originality is what keeps the viewer engaged and searching for meaning in its parellels. The plot brings two central themes; being cursed and passing on that curse for self-preservation, however there are many many more to be found that I think are worth diving into the film a few times to enjoy. In an effort not to give too much of the plot and twists away I will hopefully provide a high level summary.
The film circles around our protagonist Jamie “Jay” and her relationship with her new love interest / boyfriend Hugh. From the onset of the film there is an understanding that all is not well in this universe with Hugh having occurrences of visions or visitations of entities that Jay cannot see. The uniqueness of Hugh’s visions does not last long with Jay being brought into the fold with a post sex confontation that is a bit unerving with an effective kidnapping and direct exposition of the films driving threat. With a $1.3 million dollar budget, It Follows relies on its fair share of exposition with conversations such as this one, laying the cards on the table, but to its credit does a very good job of respecting the audience and moving the story along without having to pause obesseivley to “let” the audience catch up. Once passed through intercourse the “entity” will forever stalk and attack the latest person in the chain. If the entity is successfully in killing the latest person it will move on to the previous person to have passed on the curse.
One other thing that is fantastic is that the film never breaks its form, never makes reference to its similarities to other concepts in horror, rather it plays it straight and leans into its originality. In my opinion, the knowledge that this is a film coming from dreams makes it all the more terrifying to me. I can’t speak for anyone else, but in my experience I rarely make the corelation waking from dreams of the many different themes or reference points that may have inspired me, I just dream the things that my subconscious throws at me and deal with them as my time in the word permits. So by that standard, I don’t feel that David’s film is a paint by numbers of “good” to use concepts and ideas, rather the film is a reflection of his own experiences, emotions and feelings that came from his dream state and that to me makes the film so much more real. The thought that I could have dreamed this is absolutely wild to me.
It Follows explores the idea of transmitting this threatening entity through sex in really interesting ways. While the parellels can be drawn on so many fronts what I found most interesting was the feeling that intimacy can be the source for so many things; positivity and love, bonding and union, creation and passion and yet also sacrifice and fear, pain and suffering, death and terror. The duality of how sex is used in the film is really worth diving into more.
The film itself is shot increíble well and really capatilizes on the directors visions for each framed shot. It may just be me, but I had the occuring thought that the blocking was always really good without feeling forced or unnatural. That confidence in film making has lead Radius-TWC to announce the potential for a sequel (nice work David)!
Ultimately the fim will leave you with many things to work through and unpack with the ultimate interpetation up to you on what the symbols mean in this day and age. One amazing qoute from David Robert Mitchell really hit home for me:
"I'm not personally that interested in where 'it' comes from. To me, it's dream logic in the sense that they're in a nightmare, and when you're in a nightmare there's no solving the nightmare. Even if you try to solve it."
With that I leave you with my parting thought, I really enjoyed It Follows and immediately was left reminded of the qoute from the start of this post, “we are the dreamers of the dream’, just sometimes those dreams turn out to be way freaking scary.