Author Archive: jsomers

It sure as hell does.

I saw the film It Follows over the weekend, and it was pretty damn good: I love the premise, and I thought the execution was excellent, for the most part.

If you’re unfamiliar, It Follows is a horror film with a simple premise: A young girl has sex with a new boyfriend and is promptly informed that she has now been cursed: “It” will begin following her, and if it catches her, it will kill her. She can pass “it” on to someone else by having sex with them, but if that person is caught and killed, “It” will return its attentions to her. “It” can only be seen by the people who have been infected, and it takes various forms, all chosen to be particularly terrifying to each of its victims; this means sometimes “It” takes the form of loved ones.

“It” always walks at a steady pace, “It” always walks in a straight line, and “It” never stops.

The Heroic Heebie Jeebies

Now, for my money that premise rocks. Yes, the slut-shaming angle is a bit musty, but at least it’s unisex, but the relentlessness of “It” is horrifying. Something about the slow and steady approach of horrifying death that only you can see is effective.

Even better are the moments in the film when people are talking or doing something else, and you (the audience) become aware of someone (or something) approaching from the background. Naturally, you begin assuming “It” is always lurking, slowly walking towards the camera, and it is very effective at making you feel the dread that the characters must be feeling.

In fact, the one flaw of the film, I think, is that it doesn’t do this very often. There are only perhaps three moments in the movie (that I’m aware of) where extended shots show someone approaching from a distance, prompting this sort of dread. That dread is powerful, kids, and the film would have been better served, I think, to set up a few more sequences when you find yourself desperately searching the middle distance of the shot.

Diminishing Returns

Which prompts the question: If you have a powerful device in your story (or film), how often should you employ it? Once too many and it loses steam and can even become a joke. Not enough and you miss an opportunity. Certainly in It Follows if every scene had been a game of “spot It!” the effect would have worn thin very quickly, and become kind of boring and predictable by the end. While I think once or twice more, in variations, would have served the film well (and since it’s only 92 minutes long now, two more long sequences like that wouldn’t make it overlong), five or six more would have become kind of tedious.

So how do you know? It’s difficult. You want that magic number one less than boredom, so the rule of thumb should always be to use a device or technique only as often as you need to – once to establish it for the reader/viewer, once more to make it a technique instead of a one-off, and then … as many more times as you can get away with without cheapening the whole affair.

It Follows played it safe with its most powerful aspect, and that’s fine – it’s still a pretty good movie that kept my interest. But a little more of It Following might have made It Follows the creepiest movie I’ve ever seen.

Terrible indeed. Note: This is how I remember my Cub Scout uniform.

When I was a sturdy young man in Jersey City, New Jersey back in the previous century, I was a Cub Scout (eventually, an Eagle Scout, a fact that blows minds to this day–suffice to say when you meet me, Eagle Scout is the last thing that comes to mind). As a Cub Scout (a WeBeLo, no less, which will mean nothing to you if you weren’t involved in the scouts at some point) I got to go on a week of summer camp every year with my pack. The first time I went was pretty great, and I remember one very odd detail: Every night in the dining hall, they would make announcements. And every time the guy got up to make the announcements, everyone would chant:

“A-NOUN-cements, A-NOUN-cements, a terrible death to die!”

(or, yanno, something like that; I was nine or ten years old).

It was so oddball. Obviously an ancient custom at the summer camp, and I never quite understood it, although of course being a very nicely socialized little bugger (Jebus, did I mention I was in the fucking Cub Scouts?) I chanted along with everyone else. If you do some light Googling, you’ll find that this song is pretty universal in scouting environments, for some bizarre reason (note: almost all of my scouting memories must be followed by the phrase for some bizarre reason). There’s little information about its provenance or the reasoning (if any beyond a little light ribbing for the authority figures) behind this little ritual.

Now, normal kids might have remembered the knots they learned. Or the funny songs. Or swimming in the ice-cold lake, or the campfires, or the time our camp counselor took us on a hike and got lost and we were tramping through the wilderness for 8 hours (oh wait – I do in fact remember that). But what I remember is the dumb A-NOUN-cements song, because that’s the sort of insane detail that seems completely impossible, and yet is real. As a writer, this is important, because it helps you trust that instinct that some insane detail you want to include in your work won’t actually make everyone start passing it around on the Internet for the lulz, but actually might sell the whole story to a reader, because the detail is lived-in, and real, and crazy enough to be somebody’s normal.

The world seems like a continuum, with generations passing information on to the next in an orderly fashion, and so the assumption is that because we know how to refine gasoline today, we will continue to know how to do so in the future. But the fact is, this “passing on” is messy. I learned the stupid “Announcement” song, but I don’t the why or the history of it. I know a verse, and if the collective survivors of the Zombie Apocalypse came to my door and asked for help reconstructing this portion of world culture, I would provide them with a really shitty answer. Details get glossed over. Origins get lost. A cosmic game of “Telephone” is played with the details, and the future is a little fuzzier than it used to be.

And now I have that damn song in my head.