It’s been a long time coming, but now it’s officially official, barring some heinous act of treachery: we are really getting a sequel to David Robert Mitchell’s seminal 2015 horror film, It Follows. The sequel, aptly titled They Follow, sees both the writer-director and star Maika Monroe returning for the long-awaited follow-up, and it was just recently revealed that the project has officially wrapped filming ahead of its 2027 release date via Neon.
If you’re unfamiliar, It Follows became a bona fide cultural sensation when it released in 2015. The film initially premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2014, earning early rave reviews. From there, the film entered limited release in the U.S. in March of 2015, before going to a wide-release debut by the end of that month. The film cost just over a million dollars to make and earned more than twenty-times that back at the box office, but even that figure fails to portray just how much of an impact It Follows had.
Between home release and streaming options, It Follows registered as a seismic tremor of what was to come, both commercially and culturally, within the horror genre. Later that same year, Robert Eggers’ The Witch debuted, and within just a few short years, filmmakers like Julia Ducournau (Raw), Jordan Peele (Get Out), and Ari Aster (Hereditary) would follow suit with ambitious genre debuts that helped to usher in a whole new era for the horror genre.
It Follows was an integral first step in this cultural re-evaluation of modern horror, and it’s a film that has so rarely gotten its flowers. David Robert Mitchell followed the film up with his 2018 film, Under the Silver Lake, a neo-noir starring Andrew Garfield that has become something of a cult classic in the years since but was met with divisive reviews at the time and even shunted off from a theatrical release altogether by A24, with it instead going straight to home-release platforms. For years after, the filmmaker seemed to be caught in some sort of limbo, but this year saw him return to the screen with the absolute banger that was The End of Oak Street.
Oak Street was more than enough proof for me that David Robert Mitchell very much has still got it, and the fact that he’s now getting to return to It Follows on the heels of such a success is awesome. Little has been revealed about the story for They Follow, other than the fact that it will be set a decade after the first film and continue to follow Monroe’s character of Jaime "Jay" Height.
Not only do I think that They Follow has the potential to be something special artistically, given who all is involved, but I also think it could become something of a commercial sensation, effectively cashing in the checks that first film wrote years ago. It Follows is a film that persevered through the years because it’s simply that good, and I think the audience for this film is going to be significantly larger than maybe even Neon is anticipating. I, for one, am supremely jazzed for They Follow and will be there opening night.
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