The sequel to It Follows has been officially announced with the titillating title They Follow. But just what could the plot be to the indie horror darling’s follow-up?
The original 2014 hit It Follows focuses on Maika Monroe’s Jay Height, who is returning for They Follow. In addition, writer-director David Robert Mitchell is also returning to helm the sequel. As one of the biggest surprise horror hits of the 2010s that was created on a shoestring budget and has since gone on to be hailed as a modern classic in the genre, it’s no wonder a sequel has been greenlit.
The first film traced Jay’s journey as a young woman whose early sexual encounter goes suddenly, horribly wrong. After hooking up with somebody, she finds herself tied to a chair and informed that an entity — one only she can see — will now stalk her. The entity in question is a shapeshifter, and can disguise itself as anybody; people she knows, as well as complete strangers. The only way to break the curse is to have sex with someone else, or face certain death.
While the film did come to a satisfying conclusion, with Jay and her pals eventually luring the entity to a swimming pool and seemingly shooting it to death, the ending of It Follows was also notoriously ambiguous.
You see, Jay and her new boyfriend, Keir Gilchrist’s Paul, eventually hook up after seemingly defeating the entity. After that, it is implied that Paul then seeks to deliberately pass the curse on to a sex worker. The film ends with what seems like a stranger following Jay and Paul as they walk down the street holding hands, implying the entity is perhaps still active.
Now that we have a recap of It Follows, let’s take a look at the five best theories for what the plot of the sequel, They Follow, might be (in no particular order).
The entity shows up on Jay’s doorstep after being absent for several years
If it really is true that Paul passed the curse on by paying for sex with a sex worker, that in itself could’ve bought Jay years of respite from the entity. You see, the way the curse works is that the entity will kill the most recent sex recipient. Only the most recent sex recipient and their immediate predecessor are the ones who can actually see the entity, albeit in its disguised form as a different person for every encounter. Therefore, if a sex worker received the curse, and then passed the entity’s wrath onto another person by way of having intercourse with another client, this could create quite the distance between Jay and the entity, as CBR explained.
Once the entity kills the most recent sex recipient, however, it will move up the chain to the previous person. Following this logic, the entity can kill its way up the chain, back to the very first person to be cursed. Suffice it to say, the entity could easily kill its way back into Jay’s orbit. Jay would become aware of the entity’s return by seeing the various people — strangers and familiar people alike — stalking her once again.
Jay traces back the origin of the entity by following the chain of sexual partners
Remember how I mentioned that the entity can move up the chain of sexual partners by killing the most recent recipient and moving on to the previous person, and on and on? Well, perhaps Jay and her friends will opt to stay two steps ahead of the entity by tracing back the chain of cursed sexual partners themselves. In fact, this very premise was teased by a producer as a possible plot for the sequel to It Follows back in 2015.
“I don’t want to give away too much, but we’ve thought about it,” remarked Tom Quinn on the topic of sequel prospects for It Follows (via Entertainment Weekly). Quinn was the co-president of the now-defunct Radius-TWC, the company that distributed It Follows alongside Dimension Films.
“Flip the title. There’s so much you could do,” Quinn went on to say. This would seem to suggest “Follow It” was the original working title for the sequel before ultimately being changed to They Follow. Though there’s no indication Quinn is involved with the sequel, it’s still interesting to think that talks for It Follows 2 originally centered on a premise such as this.
Frankly, we can’t rule out the possibility that They Follow will have some kind of element of Jay performing the type of contact tracing that would make the most jaded COVID-19 health worker shudder with disgust. In fact, that seems like the perfect premise for finding out how the curse began.
Jay discovers there are multiple entities roaming the world
Even though They Follow could easily refer to Jay and her group of friends tracking down the origin of the entity, sometimes referred to by fans as the “STDemon,” the title could easily have an entirely different meaning; just like real-life sexually transmitted infections, there may be multiple “outbreaks” of the demon unfolding all around the world. Thus, the title pivoting from singular “it” to plural “they” for the sequel. This theory seems to be supported by They Follow’s tagline, “It’s everywhere.”
The film will focus on a new set of characters
Though Jay will undoubtedly be part of They Follow, since Monroe has been confirmed to be returning for the film, that does not guarantee it will be a straight-up sequel following the same group of people as the first film. The filmmakers could take the series in the direction of the Final Destination franchise, as ScreenRant pointed out, in which each new installment focuses on an entirely different group of people. This could certainly work if we are thinking the movie will take on the premise of multiple “outbreaks” all around the world; Jay could be the sole filament of connective tissue between the two movies, one that the new set of characters leans on for answers as to what is unfolding.
We find out what happened to the three men on the boat
There is a cryptic scene in It Follows in which Jay is actively trying to shake off the entity from stalking her. It involves Jay swimming to a boat where three men are on board. We don’t see what happens, with the movie instead cutting to Jay sobbing in the aftermath. However, it’s clear she hasn’t shaken off the entity, even after this ambiguous encounter.
There are a couple of possibilities for what transpired on the boat. The first is that Jay propositioned the men in order to pass the curse on to them, but they rejected her. The second possibility is that she did end up having intercourse with one or more of them, but the entity then showed up and immediately killed the newest recipient, making her the target once again (this would explain why the entity continues to stalk her for the remainder of the film).
Either way, this plot point could easily get followed up on with the sequel. What happened to the men on the boat? Did one or more of them die at the hands of the entity, with an intrepid surviving family member tracing evidence back to Jay? Or conversely, did they all survive but become curious about the woman who propositioned them, and subsequently decide to try and make contact with Jay, to determine if she was all right? After all, a person randomly swimming aboard someone’s boat with a sexual proposition could be a sign someone’s in trouble, and they could’ve brought this information to the authorities.