Metacritic reviews

Despite borrowing cleverly from the best, It Follows still manages to feel like no other example in recent years - tender, remarkably ingenious and scalp-pricklingly scary.

It’s impossible adequately to describe the haunting intensity of It Follows: this is a film that makes a virtue of silence, that lives in the shadowy spaces between the splattery kill scenes that punctuate your average stalk-and-slasher.

A horror film that will haunt your waking hours for weeks. Every frame of It Follows is stamped with nameless dread.

Its thematic textures run deep, but the picture retains real visceral force.

No matter its conceptual intentions, It Follows never ventures too far from visceral horror. Mitchell populates a number of scenes with well-timed jump scares as the being frequently bursts out of the shadows or appears in unexpected forms, while the score provides a screaming punctuation mark.

Creepy, suspenseful and sustained, this skillfully made lo-fi horror movie plays knowingly with genre tropes and yet never winks at the audience, giving it a refreshing face-value earnestness that makes it all the more gripping.

A first-rate horror movie, It Follows adds a new monster to the pantheon expect pranksters to imitate the Follower for cheap shocks soon — and has a refreshing, unpretentious sense that a meaningful subtext doesn’t undercut spookiness.

At its best, the film has moments that are creepy and that work on some strange primal level.

It Follows worked like gangbusters as an exercise in atmosphere and allusion, but a little less so as an out-and-out supernatural horror, and only at certain times did it achieve a perfect synthesis of the two.

It Follows is remarkably effective for most of its running time, ratcheting up the tension, then stinging the audience periodically with one of those jolts that sends everyone levitating a couple inches above their seats. But the excitement wears off after a point.