This is an unusually humane horror film, made more chilling by its warmth towards its characters. After a brief prologue of inexplicable, bone-snapping terror, it lets us live quietly for some time with 19-year-old heroine Jay (Maika Monroe, perfectly natural and poised for stardom), till her naive visions of a date with a sexy city boy end with her drugged, bound, and cursed to be followed by an implacable, shape-shifting thing only she can see.
Writer-director David Robert Mitchell was inspired by a recurring nightmare, and his monster moves and morphs like a bad dream. Whether taking the guise of disturbingly naked men or women, glassy-eyed, hospital-gowned old or feral young, or a giant which lurches out of bedroom door blackness, its manifestations feel queasily wrong. Jay looks isolated and exposed in widescreen long-shots, in which you nervously await the first, distant movement of the relentless stalker towards her.
Mitchell’s cinematographer Michael Gioulakis intensifies the golden summer light Spielberg gave his Eighties suburbs. Made deliberately timeless, like a fairy tale, Jay’s Michigan suburb has no mobile phones or computers, and her family sit together watching Fifties sf films, or read Dostoevsky on a futuristic, make-up-style compact. When Jay’s teen circle (Monroe with Lili Sepe as sister Kelly, pictured above) leave the suburbs for desolate Detroit to confront her nemesis, darkness falls.
Watched again on DVD, the fears of first cinema viewing lessen. Emphasised instead is a tender portrait of teenage friendship’s private world, as those closest to Jay tighten their protective bond. Their climactic battle with her hunter has the cockeyed optimism and courage of youth. Horror films tend to strip teens, then slaughter them. Mitchell has made a fond tragedy about them at their best.
A short interview with Disasterpeace, the composer of the subtly atmospheric score, is the only significant extra.