The modern horror movie was born in the darkness of the 1970s, and no matter how many incarnations it goes through — sincere and ironic, restrained and gore-addled — it keeps circling back to the same places, tropes, images, and haunts. When the car stalls out and the dirt road beckons, it’s always some version of Leatherface at the end of it. When there’s something wrong with your child, your house, your neighbors, you never call the doctor; it’s probably the devil, and only the exorcist can help. And when the implacable killer comes to call, his hunting ground is always some variation on Michael Myers’s Halloween hometown — the empty, eerie suburban streets of Haddonfield.
The latest Haddonfield is an out-of-time Michigan suburb, just a little ways into autumn, in the retro, unhurried, and taut It Follows. The movie’s setting is sort of the present — one girl has a clamshell e-reader, at least — but other details place the story in a kind of eternal ’70s. The cars are wide, the TVs still look as if they need rabbit ears, and nobody’s tapping or texting or yakking on his iPhone. In fine Me Decade style, there’s also no adult supervision. The grown-ups have their own problems, and the kids are on their own.
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