It Follows Ending, Explained

Content Warning: this article contains discussions of violence, sex and sexual abuse.

The It Follows ending concludes David Robert Mitchell’s horror movie on an open-ended note, leaving plenty of room for interpretation. Released in 2014, the film introduces a terrifying and relentless monster that ceaselessly hunts those inflicted with its sexually transmitted curse. Similar to John Carpenter’s The Thing, It Follows unsettles the viewers with the feeling of uncertainty about what form the threat will take and when it will strike next. Also like Carpenter’s movie, It Follows‘ ending is ambiguous, leaving it unclear if the monster is defeated.

It Follows doesn’t need gore to give viewers chills. Instead of horrifying deaths and jump scares, David Robert Mitchell’s movie establishes a dreadful atmosphere of paranoia and desolation, gradually elevating the danger and building to a disturbing climax. While praised by critics as one of the most exciting horror movies of the 2010s, the highly ambiguous It Follows ending left many questions that needed explanation — some of which may also arrive in the upcoming sequel They Follow.

What It Follows Is About

David Robert Mitchell’s 2014 Horror Movie Explained

While it has an ambiguous ending, the main premise of It Follows is relatively straightforward. David Robert Mitchell’s horror movie is about a sexually-transmitted curse. Those afflicted with this curse are then stalked and killed by a mysterious entity — the “I t” creature in “It Follows” — unless they can pass it forward to the next victim through sexual intercourse. It Follows opens with a young woman named Annie (Baily Spry) fleeing from her home and an unseen threat. She is later shown dead on the beach with her body horribly mutilated.

The story then focuses on Jay (Maika Monroe), a young woman who goes on a date with a young man named Hugh (Jake Weary), later revealed to actually be named Jeff Redmond. After having sex with him for the first time, Hugh drugs Jay then ties her to a chair and explains to her that he has passed on a curse to her which he contracted through a previous sexual encounter.

The slow way of the entity stalking its victims is based on a recurring nightmare of writer-director David Robert Mitchell.

The curse means Jay is stalked by the deadly It Follows entity that can take the form of anyone but is only visible to her. The entity is relentless and will not stop stalking Jay until it kills her or until she passes the curse on to someone else. However, once the entity claims a victim, the curse will then revert to the previous host. Jay is then faced with the choice of running for the rest of her life, passing the curse to someone else to help better her chances, or finding a way to stop the entity for good.

What Happens In It Follows’ Ending?

The Entity Outsmarts Jay’s Swimming Pool Electrocution Plan

The ending of It Follows sees Jay trying to defeat the entity once and for all, though her plan doesn’t go as well as she hopes — with tragic results. Jay spends most of the movie reluctant to pass the curse along, but Greg (Daniel Zovatto), her neighbor and close friend, convinces her to let him receive it. However, Greg underestimates the curse, and following his death, the entity goes right back to stalking Jay.

Upon realizing that the It Follows monster has a physical body and is not just a specter, Jay and her friends come up with a plan to lure the entity to a swimming pool and kill it by throwing electronic devices into the water. This idea isn’t as simple as it seems, however. Throughout the story, It Follows shows that the entity is intelligent and can’t be easily tricked.

When the entity arrives at the swimming pool, it surprises Jay and her friends by taking the form of Jay’s father. It then throws the electronic devices at her, trying to force Jay to get out of the pool. One of Jay’s friends is forced to get near it, shooting the movie’s paranormal villain with a gun and causing it to fall into the pool.

As Jay tries to get out, the creature grabs her ankle and almost drags her into the water again, but Paul (Keir Gilchrist) shoots it in the head, and Jay escapes. The entity leaves no physical body or remains in the water, however, only an overwhelming amount of blood. It Follows ends with a few sequences of Jay and her friends in the aftermath. It’s open to interpretation whether they killed the entity or not, but in the movie’s final shot, Jay and Paul hold hands as a shadowy figure slowly walks toward them in the background.

Did Jay Get Rid Of The Entity?

The It Follows Monster Didn’t Die In The Swimming Pool

Several days pass between the day the entity kills Greg and when it returns to Jay, which means the monster vanishing at the end of It Follows doesn’t mean she’s safe. The entity takes some time to reappear once a victim passes it along to someone else, and vice versa. They don’t know exactly what the entity in It Follows is, and Jay and Paul are seen having casual sex and passing the curse to each other over and over, taking advantage of the time intervals — though this isn’t an exact science.

Just like everything they learn about the curse in It Follows, the intervals between the entity appearing to recipients of the curse are just assumptions. Director David Robert Mitchell said in an interview with Yahoo! that every “rule” about the creature is explained by Jay’s date from the opening, Hugh, who just like Jay had access to limited information apart from his own experiences. The entity may or may not have died at the pool, and Jay and Paul’s casual sex routine may or may not work.

Jay’s real name (Jamie) is a nod to “scream queen” Jamie Lee Curtis.

After the pool incident, the creature isn’t explicitly shown, and the ending dangles the possibility that Jay and her friends succeeded in defeating it — though the emergence of the shadowy figure creates doubt. It Follows uses the benefit of this doubt, building up an endless cycle of paranoia that lingers even after the credits begin to roll.

How The Ambiguous Moments In It Follows Shape The Conclusion

The Different Ways To Interpret The It Follows Ending Explained

The It Follows ending is open to interpretation. There are various ambiguous moments throughout the movie which, depending on how they’re read, attach different meanings to various aspects of the ending. For example, one possible conclusion to It Follows is that Jay passed the curse along to the people on the boat, which reshapes her arc entirely.

After Greg’s traumatizing death, Jay runs away to the beach and spots a boat with three men. She then takes her clothes off and swims toward it. The movie cuts to her driving home soaked, leaving it open to interpret whether she passed the curse along to the men. If she did, her shock at seeing the entity on her roof is partly because she now has to live with the burden of not only Greg’s death but also those of three innocent men.

Of all the outcomes the ambiguous ending of
It Follows
allows for, the entity dying at the swimming pool is the most unlikely.

Additionally, Paul is seen driving through town and inspecting a pair of sex workers. This could suggest that he got the curse from Jay and passed it along to the women, expecting that they would transmit it to others, buying him and Jay some time, but the characters can’t escape their fate. Nothing stops the entity from killing all the new unsuspecting victims and returning to Paul a few weeks later.

As with Jay and the men in the boat, if it’s believed that Paul passed on the curse and the new victims died, it paints his character in a much less sympathetic light by the ending. Of all the outcomes the ambiguous ending of It Follows allows for, the entity dying at the swimming pool is the most unlikely.

Its body disappears after Paul shoots it in the head, but since the entity was shot before in the movie and didn’t seem to feel anything, it seems unlikely a bullet in the head would end the supernatural being. This means the entity could also still be after Paul and Jay, and their safety is perhaps the most ambiguous question left by the time the credits roll.

Is It Possible To Beat It Follows’ Entity?

Killing The It Follows Monster May Be Impossible

The little that’s revealed about the curse is what makes it so scary — especially whether the It Follows entity can be beaten. What the characters assume about the curse is their best guess, as there are no origins revealed or weaknesses to exploit.

It Follows‘ trump card isn’t introducing a seemingly invincible curse, but rather introducing an entity so mysterious it doesn’t even need to be seen to terrorize its victims. The recipients could’ve buried it, pushed it into a meat grinder, or simply moved to the other side of the world, and yet they still wouldn’t be sure, always expecting it to return somehow.

The Terrifying Truth About It Follows’ Ending

The Deeper Meaning Of It Follows Explained

It Follows‘ weird curse is one of the most inventive allegories to STDs, but it goes beyond that and has many deeper themes. One of these is successfully addressing the importance of sexual education and exposing toxic masculinity: “It should be easier for her; she’s a girl,” Hugh says after passing the curse to Jay. The entity in the movie also represents the loss of innocence and fears of the stigma surrounding sexuality for women. The curse is, for Jay, a literal punishment for being sexually active, and the allegory here is clear.

There’s also, of course, the clear symbolism and link between intercourse (and by extension, procreation) and death. Apart from the social commentary, It Follows knows how to use the unknown in its favor better than most horror movies. Since the victims never know when the curse might return, they spend the rest of their lives in a constant state of suspicion. It might go away, but it never truly leaves them — a perfect example of unavoidable fate.

How The It Follows Ending Sets Up The Sequel

They Follow Was Announced In 2023

The announcement of an It Follows sequel, titled They Follow, has been met with a lot of excitement by fans of the first movie as well as a lot of questions about what it means for the original’s ending. The idea of the story continuing on would suggest that Jay and her friends were unsuccessful in stopping the Entity and that it is still hunting her. Maika Monroe is confirmed to be returning for the sequel, so the movie will likely not focus on a new victim of the curse.

The continuation of the story also gives credence to the idea that the final image of someone slowly walking behind Jay and Paul is the entity. However, this would only really work if the sequel took place right after the original movie, as it wouldn’t take long for Jay to discover that she is still being targeted. This also suggests that Paul might not last long in the sequel as he and Jay had sex after they seemingly defeated the entity, meaning that he will likely be the next victim to let Jay know the threat is still out there.

Filming for
They Follow
is set to begin in 2025.

The sequel title They Follow might also suggest that there is more than one entity out there, but it is unclear how that would play into the mythology. While there are concerns about a sequel feeling unnecessary and undoing the effective ambiguity of the original movie’s ending, the fact that original writer-director David Robert Mitchell is returning suggests he has some worthwhile ideas for expanding on the rules and concepts he laid out in It Follows.

How The It Follows Ending Was Received

Critics Were Mostly Positive

It Follows as a whole received mostly positive reviews from critics. On Rotten Tomatoes, it still holds a 95% from aggregated review scores. Critics overwhelmingly praised how beautifully shot the film was and how it provided commentary on sex, trauma, and the consequences of both. Despite that, general audience scores tend to differ widely from most professional critical scores.

For example, there’s a nearly 30% difference between critical and audience (now called Popcornmeter) scores on Rotten Tomatoes. Even IMDb ratings, where any registered user can contribute a starred rating, are closer to the Popcornmeter. There’s a clear divide between how the audience saw the movie and how critics saw the movie, and some of that is likely down to how fans interpreted the ending. There are Reddit threads in which the ambiguity of the movie is still being dissected.

Leaving the idea of whether the main characters are being followed by the entity or a regular person is meant to allow discussion among the audience and to allow them to make their own interpretations of what the entity really is or where it comes from. Audiences, however, want a more definitive answer. Director David Robert Mitchell didn’t want to give that definitive answer when the movie was made, as he explained to Digital Spy:

I’m not personally that interested in where ‘it’ comes from. To me, it’s dream logic in the sense that they’re in a nightmare, and when you’re in a nightmare there’s no solving the nightmare. Even if you try to solve it… [Jay] opens herself up to danger through sex, the one way in which she can free herself from that danger… We’re all here for a limited amount of time and we can’t escape our mortality… but love and sex are two ways in which we can at least temporarily push death away.

Of course, audiences might get a more definitive answer in the It Follows sequel, which might ultimately change how they view the original movie.

What The Director Said About The Controversial It Follows Ending

Quentin Tarantino Criticized The Movie’s Ending

The final shot of It Follows is a perfect way to end the dark and terrifying story with the foreboding sense of doom and the idea that Jay cannot escape the entity that follows her. However, as much as It Follows was met with a lot of acclaim, there are aspects of its ending that have been somewhat controversial among fans and critics. Most notably, the way Jay and her friends plan to take on the entity has been criticized by some as being a sudden outlandish inclusion in an otherwise clever and serious movie.

The entity seemed like this unstoppable and relentless force of evil for so much of the movie so the plan to lure it to a pool, attempt to electrocute it, and end up simply shooting it felt like an anticlimax. Even renowned filmmaker Quentin Tarantino, who praised the movie overall, voiced his criticism of how the ending seems to break many of the rules of its mythology (via Vulture):

The movie keeps on doing things like that, not holding on to the rules that it sets up. Like, okay, you can shoot the bad guys in the head, but that just works for ten seconds? Well, that doesn’t make any f**king sense. What’s up with that? And then, all of a sudden, the things are aggressive and they’re picking up appliances and throwing them at people? Now they’re strategizing? That’s never been part of it before.

However, filmmaker David Robert Mitchell addressed some of these criticisms by acknowledging that the heroes’ plan is not a very good one but suggesting that is kind of the point (via Vulture):

“It’s the stupidest plan ever! [
Laughs
.] It’s a kid-movie plan, it’s something that Scooby-Doo and the gang might think of, and that was sort of the point. What would you do if you were confronted by a monster and found yourself trapped within a nightmare? Ultimately, you have to resort to some way of fighting it that’s accessible to you in the physical world, and that’s not really going to cut it. We kind of avoid any kind of traditional setup for that sequence, because in more traditional horror films, there might be a clue that would lead them to figure out a way to destroy this monster. I intentionally avoided placing those. Instead, they do their best to accomplish something, and we witness its failure. It’s probably a very non-conventional way of approaching the third-act confrontation, but we thought it was a fun way to deal with it.”

In Mitchell’s explanation, he seems to confirm that the entity was not killed in the end and that it is still stalking Jay. While he makes an interesting point about the movie avoiding the cliche horror movie ending with a more flawed and failed attempt to stop the monster, that doesn’t necessarily make up for the anticlimactic feel of the ending. Nevertheless, Jay’s failure to defeat the entity in It Follows sets the stage for They Follow.