It Follows' sexually transmitted Terminator may be the best weapon ever devised for teen abstinence

It's rare when a modern-day movie locates a premise that's not only novel but resonant — especially a horror movie. So hats off to It Follows, a bright indie thriller that works its central conceit with the relentless stealth of its marauding phantom.

Ideally, you'd see this without knowing what that premise is, but the movie's astonishing limited-release take and subsequent viral media have made that all but impossible. (Stop reading if you've somehow stayed immune.) Let's just say that it starts with Jay (Maika Monroe, the teenage daughter from Adam Wingard's The Guest) talking to her friends about the cute guy she's been seeing. They have a movie date whose sole sour note (what girl in the yellow dress?) quickly passes in the flush of young love/lust. They hook up — and afterward Jay learns she's contracted something best described as a kind of paranormal STD.

The writer-director, David Robert Mitchell, sets a few admirably simple ground rules: The ghoul can appear as anyone; it won't stop until it kills you, but it can only walk; and the only way to get it off your trail is to pass it on sexually to someone else. (The elevation of sex from horror-movie subtext to text is one of Mitchell's freshest elements.) Jay considers the moral implications as terror mounts, while the guys in her circle — pining Paul (Keir Gilchrist), horndog Greg (Daniel Zovatto) — weigh the possible cost against their own raging hormones.

There's a useful metaphor here for the way your sexual history — your history, period — vapor-trails you in the age of social media and search engines. Yet there's not an iPhone to be found in the movie's hodgepodge of obsolete gadgets: electric typewriters, bulky TVs from the age when color was a selling point. Scrambling the period is just one way Mitchell keeps viewers off-balance: Another is the movie's eccentric rhythm — where most contemporary horror films are goosed along by beats, it invests a lot of time early on in the dawdling camaraderie of Jay and her friends.

But the methodical pace — the stealth — turns out to be Mitchell's masterstroke. If the eerie prologue's sleepy suburban street suggests John Carpenter's Halloween, so does Mitchell's canny use of the wide screen as a visual minefield we're constantly scanning for unpleasant surprises. The drifting creep of every camera shift and pan gives us time to seek (and sweat): The horror lies not in the threat of something jumping out, but in the knowledge that whatever's there will only keep coming. Movies about budding sexuality hardly ever acknowledge fear as well as desire. If Mitchell's sexually transmitted Terminator becomes the next big-screen bogeyman, this scary, satisfying shocker may prove the most effective weapon ever devised for abstinence.

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