Last night, Wes Craven passed away from brain cancer. And now, four months after It Follows staked its claim as this generation's Elm Street, the latter’s brilliant creator has left this world far too early. Mitchell’s film blessed horror with the most original mythology and supernatural agenda since, well, Elm Street. The titular "It," an entity that takes the forms of various soullessly mobile and unstoppable marauders, is Mitchell’s sexualized answer to Elm Street's Freddy Krueger the ways in which "It" uses teenagers’ promiscuity and mankind’s need for sex against Mitchell’s film’s characters mirrors how Krueger turned the unavoidable and uncontrollable act of sleeping into an inescapable homicide venue. But It Follows' refreshingly original subversion of teenage horror makes it a down-the-line disciple of A Nightmare on Elm Street. Indeed, Mitchell turned to Carpenter for his film’s aesthetics, channeling the hypnotic photography and dread-coated atmospheres seen in Carpenter-made works like Halloween and The Fog. The sole creative proprietor of the 2015 indie horror sensation It Follows is, of course, writer-director David Robert Mitchell, but even Mitchell would quickly admit that he and his film owe a great deal of the credit to one of the genre’s towering icons-and, no, in this case it's not John Carpenter, whose wide-angle suburban image and powerfully creepy synthesizer scores directly inspired and informed It Follows. The horror god had given many times, and now the horror god has been taken away.
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