Inventive, scrupulous and at times, bone chilling, It Follows is yet another nail in the coffin of gore porn and a heck of a scary move to boot. The set-up is simple (stop reading if you don’t want to know even this much): a “thing” that can take many forms follows its target, and you become a target through having sex with someone the thing is following. If you have sex with someone else, it throws the follower off, until it gets that someone, and then it is back on your trail.  No one can see the thing except its targets.

It Follows adroitly handles the revelation of the curse, and what ensues is a terrifying spook story in which Kelly (Lili Sepe) must run from what follows, with the assistance of her sister, friends and neighbor, while weighing the moral implications of buying herself more time.

Writer-director David Robert Mitchell knows his stuff; the film is a near homage to John Carpenter’s Halloween, with its dreamy sense of suburbia and techno-synthesized score. His actors approach the material in a studied, restrained manner, further emphasizing the hazy unreality of the entire endeavor. He also incorporates Detroit and its desolate environs, as near an urban haunted ruin as this country has.  Finally, the film trusts your intelligence rather than being explicit, no mean feat in this genre.  It gets a tad ragged in the end, but closes smart.

One of the charms of The Blair Witch Project was a nostalgic authenticity, which transported you back to a younger time and made the actions of the hikers seem like exactly the kind of hubristic, stupid thing you would do at that age. It Follows has the same trait: this feels like your childhood neighborhood, and evokes the times you looked out the window and saw something that seemed off, or something you were not supposed to see, or even something your fevered mind conjured after watching too many Kolchak The Night Stalkers.

I watched this flick with my son and 5 of his high school friends; they all agreed it would be significantly more effective as a sex-ed tool than what they were currently enduring.

Never let your child select his own book to read at bedtime, for he might select “Mr. Babadook.” This is a terrifically scary psychological thriller/haunted house yarn about a single mother (Essie Davis) pushed to the breaking point. Widowed seven years prior when a car accident took her husband’s life en route to the hospital to deliver her son, she’s not in a good place. The boy (Noah Wiseman) is uncontrollable during the day and plagued by monsters underneath his bed at night. He is, in short, a spoiled handful and a weird one at that. His peculiarity is driving his mother to the brink, and in the midst of this turmoil comes Mr. Babadook, a terrifying bogeyman.

Davis is sympathetic as she tries to resist the evil force that has taken advantage of her torment, and as has been proven time and again in scary films, from The Shining to The Sixth Sense to The Devil’s Backbone, the contribution of a gifted child actor greatly enhances the terror, as you see what unfolds through the child’s eyes. Wiseman is a brilliant mix of charming and brutally annoying, and while he evokes both compassion, you resent him, making the viewer complicit in unleashing Mr. Babadook.

This is writer/director Jennifer Kent’s first feature and it is assured and often iconic. There are images that stick hard with you, they are not solely the scary ones, and she doesn’t resort to gore (late night Australian television, which is playing a good portion of the film, is quite horrifying enough). While Kent owes a little to James Wan’s Insidious, she avoids his slickness and has a way of capturing what frightens even in the most mundane of settings. She merits a Hollywood project.

The good: the clever set-up of the origins of the beast incorporated into the opening credits; Bryan Cranston, as the obsessed Area 51 type who devotes his life to revealing those origins and the threat; the avoidance of the evil military-industrial tropes that often infect disaster movies; the destructions of cities other than NYC and LA; an ominous, moody score; and the monster battles, which are realistic, haunting and classic instead of computer-dizzying, antiseptic and deadening. And at just over 2 hours, it is the perfect length.

The bad: the script is banal. Anything the scientists (a barely intelligible Ken Watanabe and an absolutely pointless Sally Hawkins) contribute is mush, and when they object to the military’s plan to lure other monsters from the Godzilla family with nuclear weapons (which the eat like Chicklets), Hawkins merely shakes her head, like, you know, come on . . . that’s soooooo crazy, and Watanabe produces the pocket watch his father carried . . . in Hiroshima.  Heavy.

Military commander David Staitharn is merely low grade concerned throughout, with an almost “Well, thank God this ain’t no 9-11” air about him.  Aaron Taylor Johnson (Kick Ass), in a role made for Channing Tatum, is as evocative as a hot dog bun sopped in tap water (The Atlantic’s Christopher Orr said it better: “As for Taylor-Johnson’s performance as Ford, the movie’s central human protagonist, it was so dutifully generic that I forgot it even as I was watching it. I have no lasting impression of him whatsoever”). There is also a child actor who is child actory, better utilized to sell Underoos than terror at the loss of his mother and/or father. Finally, this is Godzilla. I don’t need Seth Rogen toking on a bong and yukking it up, but this film has almost zero sense of humor, depicting a world that perhaps deserves a good stomping.

The trend away from gore porn and toward chilling, moody scary movies remains welcome.  Oculus is a worthy fingers-over-the-eyes addition, in the mold of The Conjuring, and sporting a clever storyline that tracks, and intersects, the childhood trauma of two kids whose house was haunted by a spooky mirror and their attempts as adults to destroy it.  The execution is crisp and even ingenious, and the child actors (Annalise Basso and Garret Ryan) are superb.  As to the flaws, there is one, and it is a rather big one, but I can’t reveal it without telling too much.  Suffice it to say that it falls under the “Well, if X, then why the hell would they do Y?” variety.  It’s a testament to the skill of writer/director Mike Flanagan (born, I shi** you not, in Salem, Massachusetts) that I was able to shelve the issue and just sit back and enjoy the film.

The premise is about as plausible as Escape from New York. If crime can increase so much that Manhattan must be cordoned off as a separate, lawless prison, than the nation could establish a 12 hour period annually where its citizens can “purge” and commit any crime without punishment. The purge is a mix of a social reform (by allowing one night of consequence free crime, we have no other crime the rest of the year) and patriotic-religious act. But it occurs in 2020, and as bad as either Bush or Obama has been, I can’t see that kind of institution gaining traction so quickly. Frankly, it is unlikely the government could get the website for The Purge up and running in 6 years. In the end, the filmmakers don’t really invest much in the concept, and as my son remarked, “the problem with the movie is that you didn’t need The Purge to make it.” He’s right. When the killers looking to take advantage of their wild night surround the well fortified home of Ethan Hawke and his really stupid family (note to self; on Purge night, make sure your foolish son doesn’t get all Good Samaritan and lift the security gates), they may as we’ll be zombies or Manson family members or the bad guys in The Strangers or You’re Next. There is no reason to go high concept if you have no intention of exploring that concept.

Or maybe not. On a budget of $3 million, it made $64 million.