Anodyne
Wednesday, June 24, 2015
 

"We spoke in code and told tall tales of fragmentation that were full of lacunae we could fall into to hide from uncomfortable things like dental braces, math tests, and semi formals.

It Follows is David Robert Mitchell’s mixtape, or assemblage project, if you will, that collects many of the best shards and slivers from the refuse heap of the ‘80s, and recombines them into something of great gloss. If you’ve seen A Nightmare on Elm Street or Halloween or Phantasm, It Follows' cut-and-paste touchstones will not be a surprise to you. In fact, they’ll be something better: subterranean homesick postcards from yourself from an erased time that have arrived 30 years late. Remember that scene from Back to the Future II when Marty is handed Doc’s 70-year-old letter by Western Union on that rain swept road? We are nostalgic pop culture travellers lost in time, stranded by our reminiscences.

Mitchell has put together a mixtape that has it all: the ennui of suburban space and hounding menace from Halloween, the band-of-brothers-and-sisters surreality of A Nightmare on Elm Street, the night time cavalcades of Phantasm, a soundtrack by Disasterpeace that is a composition for the ages, up there with the best synth scores by John Carpenter. The ramshackle residences of Detroit that sweep by the glass of the passenger side, as the teen protagonists drive around the city as only teens can, filled with such hope of going somewhere quick but going nowhere fast, serve to heighten the suburban dread."


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