Heidi Wong (23:29)
What they did to your family. You're lucky to make it out alive. Streaming on Peacock. These men are going to come after me. Taking them out. It's my only chance. Put a bullet injured head from the co creator of Ozark. Looks like a family was running drugs execution style killing. It's rare for the keys. Any leads on who they might have been running for? The cartel killed my family. I'm going to kill them. All of them. MIA Streaming now only on Peacock. Hi crime house Community. It's Heidi Wong. Are you interested in the mysterious parts of history? Like when in 1518 an entire European city couldn't stop dancing? When? Or in 1908 when something flattened over 800 square miles of Siberian forest in an instant. I'm excited to tell you about a new show hidden history with Dr. Harini Bhatt. Dr. Bhatt has spent her entire career demanding evidence and asking why? Now every Monday on Hidden History, she goes where history touches the unknown. Vanished civilizations, doomsday prophecies, paranormal phenomena and events that science still can't fully explain. Dr. Bot treats these moments like open case files. Not myths, not superstition, just incomplete explanations waiting for a closer look. At the end of every episode, she'll tell you exactly what she thinks happened and ask what if it happened today? Hidden History drops every Monday. Follow now on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen so you never miss a mystery. Okay, so this is where it follows does something really, really clever. Something that completely shifts the framework from those old slasher films that we talked about. Earlier, Jay isn't punished for having sex. She's haunted by it. There's a huge difference between those two things. Punishment implies guilt. It implies that you did something wrong, and now you're paying the price for it. But Jay didn't do anything wrong. She had sex with someone that she was dating. That's normal and that's human. She couldn't have known about the curse, and she didn't consent to it. It was passed to her without her knowledge or her permission. So she wasn't guilty of anything. She was just unlucky. She was a victim of something completely beyond her control. And that shifts everything, because it follows isn't saying, don't have sex or you'll die. It's saying something much more unsettling. Sometimes terrible things happen for no reason. Sometimes you inherit consequences that aren't your fault, and there's nothing that you can do about it. And as much as I love classic slasher movies, I feel like that's a much, much more nuanced take on sexuality and consequences that we're used to getting. And it's also much scarier. Jay is still a final girl in some ways. She's smart, she fights to survive, and she's absolutely the emotional center of the film. But she's not rewarded for being pure. She's haunted, regardless of what choice she makes. And here's what I find really interesting. As the film goes on, Jay starts trying to use her sexuality strategically. She sleeps with someone specifically to pass the curse along. She weighs whether sleeping with other people could keep her safe. Her body becomes currency, a tool for survival. And honestly, that is its own kind of horror, because it means her sexuality isn't about pleasure or connection anymore. It's become purely transactional, a survival mechanism in a system that's completely rigged against her. And isn't that kind of familiar? Women's bodies have been treated as currency throughout history, as objects to be controlled, regulated, and passed between men. It follows takes that idea and makes it look literal. The curse gets passed through sex, and women become carriers of transmission. But the film never blames Jay for any of this. It shows her doing the best she can with an impossible hand that she's been dealt. She's not punished. She's just stuck in a world that treats her body like a problem to be managed. Now, here's something else that I love about this film. The movie deliberately mixes up its time periods. The characters watch old TVs and drive vintage cars. But then someone pulls out a modern e reader. There's 70s wood paneling on the walls and 80s synth score on the soundtrack. And the characters are wearing 2010's fashion. It's all blended together in a way that shouldn't work, but totally does. David Mitchell said he did this on purpose. He wanted the film to feel like it exists in a dream space where the past and present blur together and you can't quite pin down when anything is happening. And it works because the film isn't really about any specific time. It's about a feeling. The feeling of being stuck, of living in a world that's slowly decaying around you, of inheriting a future that someone already used up before you got there. That's the world millennials grew up in, and that's the world that Jay is trapped in. Mitchell's direction reinforces all of the this dreamlike dread he shoots with wide angle lenses that make spaces feel both vast and claustrophobic at the same time. The camera does these slow, deliberate pans across rooms and streets, always searching for a figure lurking somewhere in the background. And as a viewer, you find yourself doing the same thing. You're scanning every face, every person walking on the sidewalk, every figure in the distance. Mitchell fills the frame with people, and you end up watching each other, every single one of them, trying to figure out which one is the entity. Sometimes it's pretty obvious a naked woman in a hospital gown doesn't exactly blend in at a high school. But other times, not so much. That person walking slowly towards the camera, is that just some random extra or is that it? This technique makes you genuinely paranoid. It turns every single person in the film into a potential threat. And the longer that you watch, the more the paranoia seeps into your real life, too. In the chaos of trying to survive, Greg, one of Jay's friends, decides to sleep with her and take the curse off of her hands. He figures that he can handle it. He's confident and maybe a little cocky about it. He's very, very wrong. The entity kills him. That same night, it shows up looking like Greg's own mom, half naked, standing in his bedroom doorway, and attacks him while he's asleep. He dies alone in his own bed, completely unable to explain or fight what's killing him. And then, of course, the curse bounces right back to Jay. In desperation, Paul, Jay's childhood friend, who's been quietly in love with her this whole time, offers to take the curse himself. They sleep together, and afterwards Paul drives to a part of town where he passes it along to a sex worker. The film ends with Jay and Paul walking together down a suburban sidewalk, holding hands. They look happy, almost normal, like two kids who might just be okay, but in the background, barely visible, someone is walking towards them slowly, steadily. Is it the entity or just some random person out for a walk? The movie never tells us, and that ambiguity is absolutely the point. Because the curse isn't something you can defeat. It's something that you learn to live with. You can pass it along, you can run, you can try to forget about it for a while, but it's always there, somewhere in the background, walking towards you. And that's what makes it follow so different from just about every other horror movie out there. There's no big victory at the end, no catharsis, no moment where the hero kills the monster and everything just goes back to normal. Because some things just don't go away, no matter how much you want them to. Trauma doesn't disappear. Consequences don't vanish. Inheritance, whether it's genetic, economic or cultural, doesn't just stop because you're tired of dealing with it. And that's exactly why it follows. Connected so deeply with the audiences when it came out. The film arrived at a very specific moment in horror history. Around 2014, a wave of films started getting labeled elevated horror or post horror. We're talking about movies like the Babadook, the Witch and a little later, Hereditary and Midsommar. These weren't your traditional horror films. They didn't lean on jump scares or buckets of gore. Instead, they used the horror genre as a way to explore grief, trauma, family dysfunction, and social anxiety. Critics absolutely loved them. Some longtime horror fans, not so much. They said these films were slow, boring, and not scary enough. But that's kind of the point. These films weren't trying to scare you with monsters or mass killers. I have always said some of the best horror movies ever made aren't scary. These movies were trying to scare you with ideas, with feelings, and the kind of thoughts that keep you staring into the ceiling at three in the morning when you can't sleep. And It Follows is a perfect example of this approach. Yes, there's a monster, but the real horror is everything. The monster represents time, mortality, consequence, and inheritance. The entity itself works as a metaphor, but it's also completely real within the world of the film. And that tension between the literal and the symbolic is what makes it work so well. You can watch It Follows as a straightforward horror film about a supernatural curse, or you can watch it as an allegory about growing up in a world that's already been Broken by the people who came before you. Both interpretations work, and that's what makes the film so smart. It helped establish a whole new language in horror, one that values mood and theme just as much as actual scares. And most importantly, it's a film that stays with you long after the credits roll. You'll find yourself scanning crowds, glancing over your shoulder on the sidewalk, wondering if that person walking a little too steadily behind you is just a stranger going about their day or something else entirely. That's the mark of a truly effective horror, by the way. Not the jump scares you've forgotten about five minutes later. It's the dread that burrows quietly into your brain and just decides to live there. All you can do is keep going and hope you stay ahead of it. But here's what makes it follows even scarier in hindsight. In 2020, something happened that made the film feel almost the 2020 pandemic. Suddenly, every single person on the planet was literally living in a world where other people could be dangerous, where getting too close to someone could literally kill you, where an invisible threat could be hiding in anyone, anywhere. We were all being followed. Think about it for a second. The core experience of the pandemic was this state of constant grinding alertness. Is that person wearing a mask? Are they standing too close? Did I wash my hands long enough? When was the last time I touched my face? Every person around you became a potential carrier of something deadly. Every interaction, no matter how small, carried a real risk. You couldn't see the virus. There was no way of knowing who was infected. All you could do was try to maintain distance and hope for the best. And that's exactly what Jay goes through. And it follows. She can't see the entity until it's already dangerously close. She has no way of knowing who to trust. She has to maintain this exhausting, constant awareness of her surroundings just to stay alive. During the pandemic, people talked about how going to the grocery store felt like navigating a zombie movie, how they'd walk across the street to avoid anyone walking towards them on the sidewalk, how they'd hold their breath while squeezing past someone in a narrow hallway. We all became paranoid, hyper vigilant, and totally exhausted by it. That's the experience. Experience that it follows, captured so perfectly not any specific virus, but the psychological horror of living under constant threat, of never being able to fully let your guard down, not even for a moment. And here's what's particularly wild about the timing. It follows came out in 2014, a full six years before the 2020 pandemic. But somehow it managed to tap into an anxiety that was already, already simmering just beneath the surface. This ambient, hard to name fear of disease, of invisible threats, of the terrifying fragility of our bodies and our social connections. The AIDS crisis had taught us that sex could kill. The recession taught us that economic security was an illusion. And It Follows took both of those lessons and made them horrifyingly literal. Then the pandemic came along and proved the movement movie right. Contagion really could be anywhere. Safety really was temporary. The threat doesn't ever fully go away. It just keeps walking towards you slowly and steadily, whether or not you're paying attention. That's the real power of It Follows. It doesn't just capture one specific anxiety. It captures something much more fundamental about what it feels like to live in the modern world. This quiet, persistent knowledge that invisible threats are all around us and there may not be any real escape. And by the way, it looks like we haven't seen the last of this particular nightmare. A sequel called they Follow was announced back in 2023, with David Robert Mitchell returning to write and direct and Michael Monroe coming back as Jay. As of this recording, filming is set to begin in the summer of 2026, with the story picking up a full decade after the events of the original. The tagline it's everywhere. Which means the curse is still out there, still walking, still spreading. And this time around, it might just be coming for us all. Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of Twisted A Crime House Original. I'd love to hear from you. What did you think about today's story? Anything you're dying for me to COVID Leave a comment or review wherever you're tuning in. And be sure to follow Twisted Tales so we can keep building this community together. I'll be back next week with another unbelievable true story. Until then, stay curious. And remember, there's no reason to fear the dark unless you try to hide from it. I'm Katie Ring, host of America's Most Infamous Crimes. Each week I take on one of the most notorious crimes, criminal cases in American history. Listen to and follow America's Most infamous Crimes. Available now wherever you get your podcasts. Looking for your next listen? Check out Hidden History with Dr. Haruni Bhatt. Every Monday, Dr. Bhatt goes where history gets mysterious. Vanished civilizations, doomsday prophecies, and events that science still can't fully explain. Follow Hidden History now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.