Deadlights: You Could Cut It With a Knife

Where does tension come from? How do movies manufacture it? As with most atmospheric effects the answer stems from no single source. Score, storytelling, acting, editing, blocking, and camera work all play a part in creating a feeling of suspense. David Robert Mitchell's It Follows relies heavily on suspense to imbue its action with immediacy and to bring viewers into the mindset of protagonist Jay, a young woman being hunted by a faceless and seemingly unstoppable entity. It's an ideal place to observe how movies incite and build suspense through a variety of interdependent techniques.

It Follows establishes in its very first sequence that something is pursuing people and that if it finds them it murders them gruesomely. The sight of a teenage girl's body, one leg snapped in half to dangle like a broken branch after a storm, lying on an empty beach tells us everything we need to know about what happens when the titular "it" catches up with its quarry. Later, when Jay's boyfriend drugs and restrains her after they have sex, he spells out the entity's powers and behavior in a few quick sentences. First, it never stops chasing you unless you pass it to someone else via sex. Second, it's invisible to anyone outside the "curse" and can change its appearance at will in the eyes of those who can see it. 

The nature of the entity renders any shot in which we can't see it inherently stressful. The longer the entity is offscreen the greater the chances are that it's about to appear. Mitchell does clever work rendering each shot as thoughtfully with regard to its unseen spaces as to the seen. Slices of background obscured by characters, sight lines clearly leaving blind spots in the group's collective field of vision -- in one scene the camera rotates at a steady pace in the middle of a hallway, leaving us unable to get a fix on which of the milling figures might be something other than it seems or which direction it might be approaching from, if any. 

When the entity does appear we know exactly how it's going to act and what the consequences are if the characters fail to escape it. This is one of the most basic tenets of any kind of action-oriented filmmaking. We need to know the stakes if we're going to invest in the scenario. We need to trust that the universe we'll shown will continue to behave according to the rules it's given us. The more tightly bound by rules and understanding -- not just delivered through exposition but communicated organically -- a narrative is, the easier it becomes to imagine one's self in the shoes of the girl fleeing down an empty street from a thing no one but her can see.