25 things you didn’t know about your favorite horror movies

It Follows – Story based on the director’s recurring dream

It’s a common trope in horror films that the characters who are sexually active die first, and the virgin lives. That’s not only true in It Follows, but it’s basically the entire plot of the film.

It Follows is about a teenage girl named Jay. After she goes on a date with a guy she barely knows, Hugh, they end up having sex with each other in the backseat of his car. Things immediately turn bad, and Hugh tells her that he gave her a curse that’s passed through intercourse.

This entity was following and torturing Hugh, but now that he’s had sex with Jay, it was passed on to her. After strange occurrences start to happen, Jay realizes he’s telling the truth.

While the plot clearly has some kind of underlying commentary about the way we view sex in both society and in horror films, the original idea was borne from a recurring nightmare director David Robert Mitchell would have as a child. He dreamed that he was being stalked by a predator who was always walking slowly towards him.

He only added the sexual aspect later on, as a terrible way of passing on this creepy predator to another person.

You may notice some similarities between this film and another popular horror movie, It. Both It and It Follows refer to the shapeshifting demonic entity as “It” and both spirits terrorize groups of youths. There are also a lot of sexual undertones in It, though more so in the Stephen King book than the movie.