If you’ve ever wondered how it felt to log on to the internet in the early ‘80s and read a news story about someone making a sequel to Halloween—an arguably perfect horror film that didn’t really need a sequel—then you don’t need to wonder any longer: As announced today in a press release, David Robert Mitchell will be directing a sequel to his 2014 horror film It Follows. Who asked for this? Someone, evidently, but in the spirit of cautious optimism, we’d like to reiterate that at least Mitchell is involved and that means the odds of this being a bizarre cash-grab are slightly smaller. (John Carpenter was also involved in Halloween II, but we’re trying not to diminish the power of cautious optimism.)
In addition to Mitchell, original It Follows star Maika Monroe will also be returning, once again playing Jaime “Jay” Height. The movie is being co-produced by Neon and will begin filming next year. It will be called They Follow, following the Alien trend of pluralizing the sequel to a movie about one scary thing, but that’s about all we know about it—and that’s probably for the best.
For anyone who missed the original film, It Follows focused on Monroe’s Jay as she learned that she was being pursued by a seemingly unstoppable, shape-changing entity after having sex with her boyfriend, who had lied about his name and tricked her into sleeping with him so he could pass the entity’s curse onto her. He then laid out the rules of her life going forward: The entity will follow you forever until it brutally kills you or until you have sex with someone else—and once it kills that person, it will go back to following you. It was full of all sorts of fun metaphors, it looked great, and it was a clever play on some horror genre tropes that still felt wholly original.
Neon has released a teaser image for They Follow, which you can see below. It’s mostly just a logo, but maybe something scary will happen to you if you follow Neon on Twitter from that post? Maybe the account will… follow you back?