It Follows, 2014
November 13, 2022 | JOHN MASTANDREA
The grave decisions over who should survive and how one should survive are put at play in the 2014 horror film, “It Follows.” The main characters in the film are placed in an otherworldly scenario with moral guidelines to follow. The film itself explores concepts of certainty of death, loss of innocence, and issues with romantic intimacy. All these themes are tied in with the main philosophical theory of contractualism and the social contract. By developing rules to abide by and looking past self-interest, the characters succeed in what they want to achieve. “It Follows,” is a tale of human’s impending end after morals are broken, and how through a contractualist mindset someone can pull themselves out of a threat.
The movie tells a haunting story of an unstoppable entity that stalks a person after engaging in sexual intercourse. This entity stalks the person in order to kill them in the end. The mere concept of the story is a bit to take in at first, but there is much to dive into on how this story is an effective cautionary tale and how it relates with social contract and contractualist theory. The main character, Jay, is a nineteen-year-old girl that starts out in a relationship with a guy named Hugh. Jay appears to be happy in her relationship with him and we soon see them on a date at the movies. When they are waiting on line for the movie, Jay plays a game with Hugh. The game is to look around the area and pick one person that you would want to be. Hugh reveals his answer is a young child that is with his parents, and his reasoning for picking the young child is, “How cool would that be to have your whole life ahead of you? Look how happy that kid is.” This becomes foreshadowing for the events that soon take place with the two of them. When it is Jay’s turn to pick a person and for Hugh to guess who she would want to be in the crowd, Hugh points out a person, but Jay says she does not see a person. This causes Hugh to tell Jay that they need to leave immediately because he does not feel well. Jay is confused by the abrupt exit, and it appears that Hugh is hiding something. Their next date comes around and they go sightseeing by the ocean at night. Jay asks if they could go back to Hugh’s car. They do so and begin to have sex. After the two finishes, Jay remains laying down in the backseat talking.
Meanwhile, Hugh gets out of the car and grabs a cloth and chloroform. He puts the chloroformed cloth over her mouth as she concludes her speaking. She then wakes up later in the night tied up to a wheelchair by a cliffside. Hugh explains to Jay that he has no intention of hurting her. He wants to show her something so she will believe and understand him. Hugh explains that when they had sex, he passed on a curse to her. He elaborates that this curse is an entity that follows you at a slow pace and can take on the form of a stranger or a person you know. The entity can only be seen by the person that has the curse and if the entity kills you, it goes down the line of who was last. In this scenario, that would be Hugh. He got the curse from a one night stand he had with a girl before he was dating Jay. She is tied up to the wheelchair so she will not run away from his explanation and see the entity once it appears. After Hugh’s explanation, the entity does appear in the form of a naked old woman. The sight terrifies Jay. Hugh drives her home and plans to not see her again.
From here on out during the movie, Jay is battling with how to protect herself and get rid of the entity before it kills her. She sees it slowly walking towards her when she is in class and chooses to leave class and run right home. She has three of her close friends agree to stay with her that night at the house. Her friends are named Paul, Kelly, and Nara. They work together in ensuring Jay’s safety but initially do not take her claims of the entity following her as legitimate. Early on with the interactions between Jay and Paul, it is hinted that they had a romantic history once. On top of this, it is also implied that the two may still have feelings for one another. The entity appears again as a naked woman with darkened eyes. Jay has all of them escape immediately. The friends are unable to see the entity, but they run away with Jay. They meet up with a neighborhood friend named Greg who offers to drive them farther away. The following day, the friends decide they want to find Hugh. They track down his house and confront him with questions about the entity.
We meet Hugh again who appears more disheveled and anxious than when we last saw him. The only advice that Hugh provides is that Jay must sleep with someone else in order to pass on the curse and ensure her elongated safety. The group of friends go to Greg’s house after the interaction and Jay runs into the entity again. She attempts to drive away from it but crashes and ends up in the hospital with a broken arm. While she spends her time in the hospital, Jay decides that she wants Greg to sleep with her to pass on the curse to him. When Paul finds out about this later, he is troubled by the news. When Jay is cleared from the hospital and the group meets up again, the entity arrives. When it does, it kills Greg in the process, and then goes for Jay once again.
The four friends decide to plan a trap for the creature at the community swimming pool and Jay volunteers as bait. Before the plan is executed, Paul asks if Jay wants to sleep with him to pass on the curse, but she says she does not want him to be at risk of dying. The elaborate trap is eventually set up and the entity appears. When it becomes trapped, Paul shoots it in the head, and it stops moving. Everyone assumes the entity has died. The group goes home, and we see that Paul and Jay do have sex. The scene shortly after shows Paul driving to two prostitutes, implying that he will have sex with one of them in order to pass on the curse. The last shot of the movie is Jay and Paul walking down the sidewalk together, and for a moment we see a person walking behind them.
Contractualism is a moral theory that deals with benefits from a social contract. Morality is meant to be relative to a contract or agreement. Therefore, there is no moral compass before there is an agreement on how to properly act. In “It Follows,” the rules with the curse are it gets passed onto someone that engages in a sexual act. The only way to get rid of it is through the act of another sexual encounter. These rules are made up by Hugh, and they are not necessarily the morally right or wrong thing to do. In the movie, there is no defined law of right or wrong. Hugh dates Jay in the first place just to pass on the curse to her. Jay also only has sex with Greg to pass on the curse. Every character has the desire to survive the entity. They are put in a “state of nature,” where they must fend for themselves. Due to this, the characters base their decisions more so on “self-preservation” and “empathy.” The “state of nature” and these two principles are what Jean Jacque Rousseau believed influenced decisions with contractualism. There are many philosophers throughout history that teach and follow the social contract. The one significant philosopher that can most easily be applied to the ethics present in “It Follows,” is Jean Jacque Rousseau.
Jean Jacque Rousseau discusses that a civilized society forgets empathy and is driven by self-interest. Everyone in the film that wants to pass on the curse only gets close to people they think will be easy to have sex with. It is all merely done out of self-interest with no specified agreement in mind. There is not much thought on the emotional damage of that or even the inhumanness of putting a person’s life at risk. The film visually shows how detached characters like Hugh and Jay become by their raggedy appearances. On top of this, we start out in the pretty suburbs of Detroit, and then when Greg is killed causing Jay to run away again, we enter the demolished neighborhoods of Detroit. One can make the argument that Hugh and Jay were not in the wrong and self-interest actions were necessary as they just needed to survive. In the movie, the entity does not have an established set of rules regarding what is morally right or wrong. The entity simply wants to kill whoever engages in a sexual activity.
During the climax of the film, the characters realize that this entity is truly a threat and has no moral compass for their existence. The group decides on a devised agreement that is influenced by the empathy the friends have for Jay. This is the first time a decision like this has been made in the movie. The whole film Jay’s friends are doubting her about the people she is seeing and the curse itself. They more so protect her because they feel obligated and in Paul’s case, he likes her. Once they realize it is real, they devise a plan that for the first time in the movie puts themselves at risk. The group realizes that in order to save Jay they need to act out of selflessness. And in doing so, the entity does get killed and Jay becomes safe again (“It Follows 2” is in the works but we will pretend that the entity is killed here.)
A major theme of the movie is maturity. Whether it be maturing sexually, getting older, or accepting death, it is a theme that is prevalent throughout the runtime. Every character in the film wants to return to a more civilized and easy time in their life after they make decisions deemed immoral. Everyone is placed in an “uncivilized state” with the curse, and they are trapped by continuously making decisions out of self-interest and not following any sort of social contract. The characters learn and mature by the end of the film by establishing their own contract to follow and guiding themselves through the empathy of others. As mentioned before, it is how Jay survives. Lastly, it is also how Jay and Paul rekindle their relationship in the final scene.
“It Follows” is a haunting tale of survival and maturity at a young age. The film can be used as a simple example in a modern setting of how people abide and do not abide by the social contract theory. It gives a visual representation of what happens when people have no social contract and how learning to follow by one creates a civilized state.