Quentin Tarantino Explains How He Would Have Made IT FOLLOWS a Better Film
It Follows was one of this year's most buzzed-about horror films. Since I saw the film at Sundance, I've been saying that I loved the concept of the film, but that the execution of it didn't work for me. The first 30 minutes of the film were wonderful and creepy, but after that it completely fell apart with all kinds of ridiculousness. It should have been a great horror film, but instead it turned out to be mediocre.
During an interview with Vulture, director Quentin Tarantino talked about the film and said "it was the best premise I’ve seen in a horror film in a long, long, long time.” But he didn't think that it reached its full potential either, and he explains how he would have made the film better:
"He [writer-director David Robert Mitchell] could have kept his mythology straight. He broke his mythology left, right, and center. We see how the bad guys are: They’re never casual. They’re never just hanging around. They’ve always got that one look, and they always just progressively move toward you. Yet in the movie theater, the guy thinks he sees the woman in the yellow dress, and the girl goes, 'What woman?' Then he realizes that it’s the follower. So he doesn’t realize it’s the follower upon just looking at her? She’s just standing in the doorway of the theater, smiling at him, and he doesn’t immediately notice her? You would think that he, of anybody, would know how to spot those things as soon as possible. We spotted them among the extras.
"The movie keeps on doing things like that, not holding on to the rules that it sets up. Like, okay, you can shoot the bad guys in the head, but that just works for ten seconds? Well, that doesn’t make any fucking sense. What’s up with that? And then, all of a sudden, the things are aggressive and they’re picking up appliances and throwing them at people? Now they’re strategizing? That’s never been part of it before. I don’t buy that the thing is getting clever when they lower him into the pool. They’re not clever."
He completely hits the film's issues of not sticking with the mythology on the nose. Maybe Mitchell wasn't interested in paying attention to those details, or maybe he just wanted to ignore them to just make a creepy film, which obviously seemed to work for some people. The thing is, it probably would have been a hell of a lot better and scarier had he stuck to the mythology like Tarantino suggests. He goes on to say that he also has an issue with Jay refusing to have sex with Paul. He says:
"Also, there’s the gorgeously handsome geeky boy — and everyone’s supposed to be ignoring that he’s gorgeous, because that’s what you do in movies — that kid obviously has no problem having sex with her and putting the thing on his trail. He’s completely down with that idea. So wouldn’t it have been a good idea for her to fuck that guy before she went into the pool, so then at least two people could see the thing? It’s not like she’d have been tricking him into it. It’s what I would’ve done."
Well, that's what Tarantino would have done to make It Follows a better film. For me, it definitely would have been a better version, and it's interesting to see what his take on it would have been like. That being said, I would love to see Tarantino direct a horror film one day. He wrote the screenplay for From Dusk Till Dawn, but I'd like to see him do something batshit insane with the horror genre.
What are your thoughts on how Tarantino would have made It Follows better?