It Follows Is Finally Getting A Long-Awaited Sequel

Pardon the pun, but the idea of an It Follows sequel has been following Maika Monroe around for a long time. Shot in the suburbs of Detroit with an up-and-coming director behind the camera and a burgeoning star in front of it, the film debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in 2014. By the time it hit theaters nine months later, it was already a cult classic, part of a new and exciting wave of independent horror movies (see also: The Babadook, The Witch) that was reinventing the genre at the time. Critics loved it, and fans debated it endlessly on Reddit, picking apart the intricacies of how the film’s shapeshifting “It” — an inescapable evil that’s passed from person to person through sexual contact — operated.

Monroe parlayed the experience into roles in films both big (she co-starred in 2016’s Independence Day: Resurgence) and small, reclaiming her “scream queen” status as the star of Longlegs in 2024. Mitchell has been less prolific, and has only released one feature film, the divisive Under The Silver Lake (2018), since then. (To be fair, he has another movie called The End of Oak Street scheduled for August.) Throughout it all, interviewers have been asking the pair the same question: When will they make a sequel to the movie that kickstarted both of their careers?

Finally, in 2023, the duo had a real answer: A sequel called They Follow was in development through NEON, and was scheduled to shoot in the summer of 2024. The distributor even teased an ominous title card for the film, which they simply said was “coming soon.”

Two years later, “soon” has come and gone. But at a Q&A at this year’s SXSW, Monroe casually teased that They Follow is filming this summer: “I did this tiny little movie called It Follows at the very beginning of my career,” she said. “We’re filming the sequel this summer.” She added, “It’s been very cool reading the script and seeing what this character who’s been so important to me and changed my life in so many ways has been up to over the past 10 years.”

Monroe also confirmed as much on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, where she said that They Follow is “the next job” on her calendar. “It’s very dark,” she added. “We’re pushing the boundaries on this one for sure. Even reading the script, you get the same sense of nostalgia” — It Follows takes place in an ambiguous time period, blending ‘70s and ‘80s aesthetics with futuristic touches like the famous clamshell e-reader — “the slow camera movements, everything. I think it might be good,” she said with a laugh.

This is first time Monroe has revisited a character from a previous film, and Mitchell’s first time writing and directing a sequel to one of his. Not much is known about the plot of the film, although Monroe told Entertainment Weekly back in February that "It's not at all what I expected, where you would find [her character from the original, Jay Height], which I thought was really interesting ... I know this might sound cliché, but it's staying true to the original where we're bringing back all the same team… The story is very much still in that space, but it's just grander."

As long as Mitchell brings his eye for striking compositions and unnerving imagery and Monroe brings the bravery and determination that make all of her horror characters so memorable, it follows (sorry) that everything should be just fine.