“Not just disappointed, but a little angry”: the horror movie Quentin Tarantino wanted to fix
It must be a nightmare for filmmakers to watch a movie because many of them simply won’t be able to switch off the professional part of their brain to enjoy a film for what it is. Quentin Tarantino still enjoyed a sleeper smash hit horror, but he couldn’t help but share his dismay at how it should have been better.
To be fair, he does come across as the type of person who’d struggle to take off their directorial hat and enjoy two hours of escapism, while nit-picking the issues with somebody else’s work in a public forum is something Tarantino has also developed a habit of doing throughout his career.
It’s entirely OK to say that a movie was a good one without having to explain what was holding it back from achieving true greatness. On the other hand, plenty of up-and-coming auteurs would probably welcome the idea of constructive criticism from a two-time Academy Award winner who reached the mountaintop.
In his defence, Tarantino prefaces his deconstruction of David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows by saying that it possesses “the best premise I’ve seen in a horror film in a long, long, long time”. And yet, he also found it to be “one of those movies that’s so good that you start getting mad at it for not being great”.
The high concept premise finds Maika Monroe’s Jay discovering that after sleeping with her boyfriend for the first time, she’s inherited a sexually-transmitted curse that passes from victim to victim by way of coitus. It’s shag or be killed, in essence, with a mysterious entity starting to follow her every move as the hands of fate begin closing in.
Even though Tarantino really enjoyed It Follows, he found himself “not just disappointed but almost a little angry” that it failed to maximise its conceit to the fullest. Fortunately, he was on hand to explain to Vulture what mistakes Mitchell made and how it affected his enjoyment.
Tarantino’s major issue came with the way Mitchell “broke his mythology left, right, and centre”. It Follows established one way of presenting its assailants to the audience but then switched it up for the scene set in a movie theatre, which the Pulp Fiction creator felt compelled to point out was “not holding onto the rules that it sets up”.
From his point of view, the antagonists temporarily being disabled by a gunshot to the head or developing strategies, throwing household appliances at their intended target, and gaining sentience and intelligence “doesn’t make any fucking sense” relative to the action that had unfolded previously where the beings operated under an entirely different set of parameters.
Everyone’s a critic at the end of the day, and as simple as it would be to call Tarantino pedantic when It Follows isn’t supposed to be highbrow art, he does have a point. Any movie that wants to create a unique and engaging inbuilt mythology should at least stick to it instead of adding new flourishes to suit the needs of a set piece, not that it prevented the film from winning plenty of praise and finding success at the box office.
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