Naomi Ackie Might Be Joining The Highly Anticipated It Follows Sequel
Over a decade later, It has returned to haunt our nightmares.
We’ve been in the throes of the “elevated horror” wave for so long that it feels almost trite every time a new release has the revolutionary idea of using the genre as a didactic allegory, but there was a point in time when it was a fresh departure from a decade of generic studio releases. From the early 2000s up to the mid-2010s, mainstream horror was a wasteland of found footage Paranormal Activity clones and a race to see who could escalate gore after movies like Saw opened the floodgates, but around 2014, there was a pivot, and there are two movies in particular that were at the forefront of that change – The Babadook and It Follows.
While The Babadook is probably patient zero for the current trend of “horror as a metaphor for grief and depression,” It Follows was a comparatively esoteric affair. Its central plot (which sees a young woman relentlessly pursued by a tireless supernatural entity passed on through intimacy) was brilliant due to the fact that it could be interpreted in any number of ways beyond the obvious STD evocations, and the subtly anachronistic setting and Disasterpeace’s synth-heavy fairy-tale-turned-nightmare score helped it become pretty much an overnight cult classic. The announcement of a sequel back in 2023 was a completely unexpected shock, and after two years of relative silence on the project, we’ve now received our first major update about the status of the It Follows sequel — They Follow.
With an incredibly simple yet disturbing premise, It Follows launched itself into horror history.
As reported by Deadline on Tuesday, I Love Boosters, and Mickey 17 star Naomi Ackie is in final talks to join the highly anticipated sequel in an undisclosed role. As of right now, returning lead Maika Monroe is the only cast member confirmed for the project, with there being no current indication that her friend group from the original film will be joining her. As of this update, there still haven’t been many plot details revealed, but the one element that has been disclosed opens up a whole can of questions: apparently, the sequel will take place ten years after the first movie.
The original It Follows ends on a rather ambiguous note: Jay and her friends lure the entity to a local public pool and attempt to murder it through electrocution and then finally by shooting it in the head, which fills the pool with blood and seemingly ends the curse. She then sleeps with her friend Paul, who has an unrequited crush on her throughout the entire film – the final scene of the movie shows the two of them walking down the street together holding hands, only for an ominous figure to begin following them in the distance. A sequel with Maika returning as Jay all but confirms that the ending of the original is certainly not a happy one, and raises the question of what happened to Paul and whether or not Jay’s decision to sleep with him was her version of an insurance policy in case the horror hadn’t truly ended.
Thanks to the original, this sequence is burned into our collective night terrors.
With They Follow taking place over a decade later, there are a lot of different directions the story could go in. There’s a chance that Naomi Ackie could play a new victim of the entity, with Maika Monroe returning as a weathered survivor attempting to help Ackie’s character survive – it could also be the reverse, with Ackie playing someone who has already survived the curse and providing answers to Jay in a potential search for It’s origins. Considering principal photography hasn’t started yet, answers to any of those questions are still a long way off, but that only adds to the anticipation for a follow-up to what has become one of the most beloved horror movies of the last 20 years.
