It Follows Beat Sheet Analysis

Why We Chose to Do a Save a Cat! Beat Sheet Analysis of It Follows

It Follows is a masterwork, a slow burn horror film with a nerve-wracking visual style that builds dread, a creepy ambiguous time period, and an unsettling score that adds to the narrative tension. The film hits the Save the Cat! beats and illustrates many of the terms from our best-selling book, Save the Cat!® Writes Horror.

It Follows

Written and Directed by: David Robert Mitchell

Genre: Monster in the House (Subgenre: What the Curse?!)

We open on an all too peaceful suburban street, complete with cheerfully chirping birds. Suddenly, a young woman in babydoll pajamas and incongruously bright red high heels comes dashing out of one of the homes. As her father calls out from the door, “Annie? What’s wrong?” she runs around in a jagged circle, breathing hard and panicky, looking over her shoulder, then jumps into her car and drives away.

On the shore of a lake, she tearfully calls her parents on her cell phone, tells them she loves them, and smash cut to… Annie’s mangled, broken body, one high-heeled foot dangling above her face in a gruesome backwards pike.

It’s a first kill that stuns and confounds, a malevolent notice that we are in the hands of a madman.

Theme Stated

As Jay Height (Maika Moore) floats in her backyard swimming pool, she observes two preteen boys peeking over the fence at her. Accustomed to this sort of thing as the small-town hottie, Jay chuckles, “I see you…” and they duck out of sight. This sense of being watched, followed, even stalked, both in public and in your most private moments, infuses the slow burn dread of this film.

Nowhere is safe, no one is who they seem, and sex is a threat to your very existence.

Set-Up

In Jay’s thesis world she’s started dating Hugh (Jake Weary), but is obviously being crushed on by most of her neighborhood, including her geeky childhood friend Paul (Keir Gilchrist) and the man-slut across the street, Greg (Daniel Zovatto).

Her popularity would be annoying to her sister, Kelly (Lily Sepe) and friend Yara (Lily Sepe), except that Jay is sweet, too, and perhaps a tad naïve. She cares that their mother will be upset that Kelly is smoking and is ambivalent about having sex with Hugh since she doesn’t know him that well, but what other options are there for an attractive 20s-something girl in the suburbs? It’s not like community college is giving her much stimulation, after all.

And thanks to filmmaker Mitchell, Jay seems to live in a dreamlike period outside of time—her clothes say 1970s, the TV loops on 1950s horror films, and a random person here and there has a cell phone, um, a clam-shaped cell phone from which one can quote Dostoyevsky. What the atmospheric dread flag is this place?!

Catalyst

Jay and Hugh have sex for the first time in Hugh’s car outside an abandoned building in a run-down neighborhood.

Debate

Post-coital Jay ruminates a bit mournfully on the freedom of being the adult she used to dream about but hasn’t yet managed to achieve as Hugh grabs beers from the trunk of the car. Unfortunately, that’s not all he grabs—there’s also a chloroform-soaked rag stashed back there that he places over Jay’s mouth to knock her out.

We fear all sorts of sadistic and criminal things he will do to her, but the truth is somehow even worse: Hugh has tied Jay to a chair so that she can bear witness to what he’s been dealing with, a malevolent entity that has been following him ever since he had a one-night stand with a stranger.

Hugh has passed this “virus” to Jay through intercourse and now he gives her the rules for survival: this thing can take the appearance of anyone, it’s slow but methodical, and Jay should have sex with someone else as soon as possible to pass it along, otherwise it will track and kill her no matter where she goes.

The first “It” we see is a nude 40s-ish woman pacing towards them and, just sayin’, the last naked middle-aged lady to inspire this level of shock and awe in a viewer was Kathy Bates getting into a hot tub with Jack Nicholson. Hugh allows Jay to register the gravity of the situation before whisking her back into the car and making their escape, and we officially have identified our three elements of MITH: Monster, the malevolent entity; Sin, lust; and House, the whole world.

Break into Two

Hugh dumps Jay on the street by her house and takes off, leaving her to her own destruction.

B Story

Jay and Paul have been friends since they were kids, but it’s no secret that he’s in love with her and she looks on him as a nerdy little brother. The transformation of their B Story relationship over the course of the film is both amusing and poignant, perhaps raising a question about safety being an element of sexual attraction in an extremely unsafe landscape.

Fun and Games

In Jay’s upside-down antithesis world, she is now the hunted in dread & games territory. The police don’t know what to do with her story and neither do Kelly, Yara, or Paul; they want to believe her, but since Jay is the only one who can see the entity, it’s a challenge.

After Jay is followed by a creepy old woman at school, Paul offers to stay the night and keep watch, although Kelly warns Jay that it’s more likely that she’ll wake up to Paul humping her leg than an evil spirit attacking her.

That night as Paul and Jay reminisce about being each other’s first kiss, Jay sees the entity in its new form, a slatternly woman who looks like she’s been submerged in the ocean for a few months, but within minutes, it’s a freakishly tall man who chases Jay out of her bedroom and away from her house.

Desperate for answers, Kelly corrals boy-hottie Greg from across the street and our makeshift Scooby-Doo gang go on a hunt to try to find Hugh and learn some lore.

Traveling through the decidedly seamy side of Detroit, they find Hugh, whose real name is Jeff Redmond, and he hypes the horror about the eternal curse nature of the entity: if the latest recipient of the virus is killed, everything works backwards as the entity revisits the previous victim, and the one before that, all the way down the line.

There seems to be no way out of this nightmare, but Greg takes the group to his family’s lake house as a sort of hopeful hideout.

Midpoint

We have an out of the frying pan Midpoint when the gang’s bucolic hideaway turns out to be more dangerous than the inner city. The entity, masquerading as Yara, brazenly attacks Jay as she sits with her friends on the beach. The sudden appearance scare of Jay’s hair being wrenched upwards by an invisible hand raises the stakes by showing actual physical contact with the supernatural, so the time clock is now ticking—the next bodily interaction will obviously be a death blow.

Bad Guys Close In

The world-collapsing claustrophobia of an incredibly shrinking House is now a reality and as the entity turns into a boy with sharpened teeth, then our first kill victim Annie, Jay steals Greg’s car and drives away, trying desperately to find a safe space. After she has an accident and ends up in the hospital, the constant footsteps up and down the hallways of the hospital nearly drive her mad with fear, so Jay resorts to sleeping with Greg to pass the curse along.

Of course, Greg is a monster mocker from way back, so we know it’s only a matter of time before he gets his. Days pass with no sightings which only builds our dread. Jay can’t stop watching Greg’s house, terrified for him.

One night, she sees Greg walking jauntily outside in his underwear (a moment of dark humor as she questions whether it’s the murderous entity or just Greg being Greg), but when the tighty-whities figure smashes a window in Greg’s house and slips inside, she knows.

All Is Lost

Jay tries to stop the entity, but it poses as Greg’s mother, attacking and killing Greg.

Dark Night of the Soul

Jay escapes again, sobbing hysterically, and ends up driving back to the lake. Desperate and hollow inside, she succumbs to her inner bad guys by taking off her clothes and wading out to three strange men in a boat in order to pass the curse away, but the act gives her no peace.

Break into Three

Faithful, geeky Paul has been waiting in the wings this whole time hoping to have his moment as hero, and suddenly… he has an idea.

Finale

It’s the final stand as our little gang of mystery busters, sans poor Greg, gather their team and execute the plan: they will return to a sacred place from their childhood, the indoor public pool far past the border of the “safe” part of Detroit.

In their we have to kill it naivete, they place electrical devices all around the edge of the pool and plug them in, hoping to lure the entity into the water to electrocute it. Jay floats in the center as bait and as they wait, we get the added bonus scare of a dark and stormy night outside.

The entity enters, but is invisible to us at first. All we see is appliances being picked up and flung into the pool as—no great high tower surprise—their plan fails to work and Jay just gets conked repeatedly with toasters and hair dryers. Kelly throws a sheet over the entity and we finally see its shape. Paul shoots and it falls into the pool, grabbing at Jay’s leg and pulling her under. Paul shoots it again and the pool fills with blood. But is it dead or just temporarily incapacitated?

Jay’s not taking any more chances. In a last-ditch effort for synthesis, she and Paul sleep together, and then Paul ventures into the seamy side of Detroit to cruise for prostitutes, a stomach-churning and rather sad version of the evil lives on.

Final Image

Jay and Paul, now a couple for better or worse, walk down the street, holding hands. We can see a man walking about half a block behind them. Is he “It” or just some random dude strolling along? Like the madman he is, David Robert Mitchell leaves it up to our imaginations—and our nightmares.

Interested in how to write a great Monster in the House? Check out Save the Cat!® Writes Horror>>