Money Crimes with Nicole Lapin - The Horror That Never Stops Walking

Episode Date: May 17, 2026

What if something was following you……and it never stopped? It doesn’t run. It doesn’t rush. It just keeps walking. This episode explores the real-world fears behind one of the most unsettling horror concepts in modern film, from the AIDS epidemic to economic collapse to the psychological terror of invisible threats. Because sometimes the scariest thing isn’t what you can see. It’s what you can’t escape. For more follow Twisted Tales wherever you listen to podcasts: https://pod.link/1839058226 For Ad-free listening to episodes, subscribe to Crime House+ on Apple Podcasts.  🎧 Need More to Binge?  Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of…, Crime House 24/7, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Murder True Crime Stories, and more wherever you get your podcasts! Follow me on Social Instagram: @Crimehouse TikTok: @Crimehouse Facebook: @crimehousestudios X: @crimehousemedia YouTube: @crimehousestudios To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi listeners, it's Vanessa. Before we get into today's episode, I want to tell you about another show I think you'll love, Hidden History with Dr. Harini Bott. Every Monday, Dr. Bot goes where history gets mysterious, vanished civilizations, doomsday prophecies, paranormal phenomena, and events that science still can't fully explain. Dr. Bot treats these moments like open case files, not myths, not superstition, just incomplete explanations. waiting for a closer look. Hidden history drops every Monday. Follow now on Apple Podcasts,

Spotify, or wherever you listen, so you never miss a mystery. This is Crime House. Okay, I want you to imagine something for me. What if you were being chased, but the thing coming after you never stopped? If you ask me, the scariest kind of horror is the kind that you can't escape. The kind that doesn't bother running because it knows. it'll outlast you. It's slow, steady, always getting closer. It knows you'll have to stop. You'll have to sleep. And when you do, it'll still be coming. Welcome to Twisted Tales, a crimehouse original. I'm Heidi Wong. Every week I'll take you deep into humanity's darkest stories and how they influence some of the world's biggest horror movies. If you've ever had a haunted moment or a

twisted tale of your own, I want to hear about it. Drop it in the comments, the creepier the better. And for early access and ad-free listening, subscribe to our Crimehouse Plus community on Apple Podcasts. We're also on YouTube with full videos that bring each story to life. Just search for twisted tales and be sure to like and subscribe. Today we're talking about invisible threats that have haunted entire generations. The AIDS epidemic that taught millions of people that intimacy could kill, economic collapse that left young people inheriting a broken world, and the deep primal fear that your own body could.

could become a weapon. These are real horrors that real people live through, and in 2014, one film captured all of it. On the surface, it looks like a dreamy teen slasher, but underneath it tells the story of what happens when pleasure becomes punishment, when connection becomes contagion, when you inherit consequences that you never ask for. Instacart knows that some people go bananas about getting the perfect, well, banana. Some want them green. Some want them ripe. Some want them ready right when they hit their doorstep. But with Instacart's preference picker, available at most retailers, you can choose to get your groceries just the way you like. That means perfectly ripe bananas. Deli meat sliced just the way you want

and avocados that aren't still hard as a puck in the third period. So don't cross your fingers and hope for the best. Download the app and get groceries just how you like with Instacart. Great news. The federal EV rebate is back. eligible customers get up to $5,000 with the federal EVAP rebate on select 2027-volt and 26 Equinox EV models. Visit your local Chevrolet dealer today for more details. So let's get into it, starting with a nightmare that millions of people actually had to live through.

In the 1980s, there was a real horror story playing out across the country. An invisible killer was spreading through intimacy, through sex, through blood, through the most basic human need for connection. And at that time, it was essentially a death sentence. I'm talking about the AIDS epidemic. The first cases showed up in 1981. By 1982, the disease had a name. By 1987, over 40,000 Americans had been diagnosed, and more than half of them were already dead. There was no cure, no treatment that really worked, and the government response was basically nothing. President Ronald Reagan didn't publicly. mention AIDS until 1985, which was four years into the epidemic, four years of silence while

people were dying. Meanwhile, gay men were dying by the thousands. Entire communities were being decimated. People were losing their partners, their friends, their chosen families, and nobody in power really seemed to care. And for the most part, the cultural response wasn't sympathy. It was fear and blame. People in charge practically ignored it. Religious leaders called it divine punishment for sin. The media sensationalized it. AIDS was framed as a gay disease and punishment for immoral behavior. People with HIV were getting fired from their jobs, evicted from their homes, and abandoned by their families. Almost overnight, sex became dangerous. Touch became suspect. Intimacy became potentially fatal. And this is the world that an entire generation grew up in.

Kids in the 80s and 90s absorbed these messages every single day. Sex can kill you. Your body can betray you. The thing that's supposed to bring you pleasure and connection, it can bring death instead. Even public health campaigns didn't help much either. They were designed to scare people into being careful. The ads showed grim reapers and tombstones. Messages like AIDS, everyone is at risk, were plastered on billboards and TV screens across the country.

The goal was awareness, sure, but the result, it was panic. Young people watched their friends disappear. Beloved celebrities died. Rock Hudson, Freddie Mercury, so many artists and actors and musicians. Entire communities were devastated. And even though effective treatments finally arrived by the 2000s, even though HIV eventually became a manageable chronic condition instead of a death sentence, that cultural memory stuck around.

An entire generation had learned deepened their bones that intimacy has consequences, that pleasure comes with risk, that your own body is never full your own. And it didn't stop with HIV either. STDs were generally associated with moral failure. Public health messaging reinforced the idea that your sexual history was a permanent record, and one wrong choice could mark you forever. So you can probably see where I'm going with this, right? you can see how this real-life horror can inspire a terrifying film,

a movie about a curse that spreads through sex, about an invisible threat that never stops coming, about the fear that your own body, your own desires, could destroy you. That's exactly what director David Robert Mitchell created with It Follows. Before we get into the movie itself, I wanted to talk about what makes this particular kind of horror so deeply disturbing. because it follows isn't just scary because there's a monster chasing people. It's scary because of what the monster represents.

There's this French philosopher named Julia Christava, and she has a concept called the abject. Basically, it's the idea that certain things make us deeply uncomfortable because they blur the boundaries we rely on to feel safe. Things like blood and corpses and bodily fluids. They remind us that our bodies are fragile, that the line between alive and dead, between clean and dirty, is a lot thinner than any of us want to believe.

The abject is what we reject in order to define ourselves as human. We push it away, call it disgusting, and refuse to acknowledge it. But it's always there, isn't it? Lurking right at the edges of our consciousness. That's exactly what makes body horror so effective as a genre. It forces us to confront the uncomfortable truth about our bodies, that they leak, that they decay, that they can turn against us without warning. In the context of the AIDS crisis, this fear became very, very literal.

Your body could harbor an invisible killer. The most intimate act two people can share could transmit death. Sex, which is supposed to be about connection and pleasure and bringing two people together, suddenly became something you had to calculate, something dangerous. Now here's the thing. Horror has always been obsessed with punishing people for having sex. If you've watched any slasher movie, you know the formula. Have sex and you die. It's practically a rule. This goes all the way back to the 70s and 80s.

Halloween, Friday the 13s, A Nightmare on Elm Street. These films establish a clear pattern. The version lives, the sexually active girls die. Film scholars actually have a name for this. It's called The Final Girl Trobe, and the term was coined by Carol J. Clover in 1987. The idea is that the last person standing in a slasher film, is usually a young woman who's presented as pure, resourceful, and here's the crucial part,

usually not sexually active. She survives because she's good. Everyone else dies because they're bad. Think about it. In Halloween, Lori Strode survives while her sexually active friends are killed. In Friday 13th, the Virgin counselor makes it to the end. In Nightmare on Elm Street, Nancy is the responsible non-partying girl who defeats Freddie. I think we can all agree that that line of thinking is deeply problematic.

It's rooted in the idea that female sexuality is inherently dangerous, that women who have sex deserve to be punished for it. But here's where things get really interesting. Director David Robert Mitchell took all of this, the fear and anxiety around AIDS, all of the puritanical baggage about sex and punishment, and he flipped the whole framework on its head. He used it to craft something truly tamas. terrifying and genuinely original. So here's the setup.

The year is 2014, and it follows premieres at the 67th Cannes Film Festival. No big stars, no massive budget. The whole thing was made for less than $2 million. Just a simple, terrifying premise. What if something was always walking towards you, and you could never, ever make it stop? It starts with a teenage girl named Jay Hight going on a date with a guy she's been seeing. They end up having sex in his car.

Pretty normal stuff, right? Wrong. Very wrong. Immediately after, the guy chloroforms her. Jay wakes up tied to a wheelchair in some abandoned building, and that's when her partner tells her something that changes everything. He's passed a curse to her. From now on, something will follow Jay wherever she goes.

It can look like anyone. A stranger, a loved one, even someone who's already dead. It walks slowly, but it never, ever stops. And if it catches her, she dies. The only way to get rid of it is to pass it on to someone else, through sex. Just like that, Jay's entire life becomes a waking nightmare. She sees people walking towards her, people that no one else can see. An old woman in a hospital gown shuffling across a college campus,

a half-naked man standing on a rooftop. At one point, she sees her own dead father. They're always walking, never running, never stopping. Jay and her friends try everything they can think of to survive. Her sister Kelly, her neighbor Greg, her childhood friend Paul, they all rally around her. They drive to the beach. They barricade themselves in a house. They even try to trap the entity in a swimming pool and electrocute it.

None of it works. Because here's the thing. You can't fight time. You can't negotiate with death. All you can do is keep running until you can't. can't run anymore. On Carter Roy, host of murder true crime stories. If you listen to true crime because you want more than just what happened, this show is for you.

On murder, true crime stories, we take deep dives into history's most notorious murders, but we don't stop at the crime scene. We look beyond the headlines to understand the real story and the people who are impacted the most, because these cases aren't just mysteries. their lives, families, communities that were changed forever. Whether a case is solved or unsolved, my goal is for you to walk away understanding why these stories still matter and why they deserve to be told with care.

Each episode explores the darkest corners of true crime while keeping the focus where it belongs on the human cost. New episodes drop every Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Follow murder true crime stories on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen. Think about some of the cases that defined true crime in America. Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, the kidnapping of Elizabeth Smart, the Karen retrial. Some crime cases are so shocking. They don't just make headlines they forever change a country.

I'm Katie Ring, host of America's most infamous crimes. Each week, I take on one of the most notorious criminal cases, whether it's unfolding now or etched into American history, revealing not just what happened, but how it forever changed our society. Serial killers who terrorized cities, unsolved mysteries that kept detectives up at night, and investigations that change the way we think about justice.

Each case unfolds across multiple episodes, released every Tuesday through Thursday, from the first sign that something was wrong to the moment the truth came out or didn't. These are the stories behind the headlines. Listen to and follow America's most infamous crimes available now wherever you get your podcast. Now I want to talk about what makes the entity from it follows so deeply, uniquely unsettling. Because it's not just a monster, it's something worse.

It can look like anyone, your mom, your best friend, a total stranger, even someone who's been dead for years. Sigmund Freud actually had a word for this feeling. He called it the uncanny. It's what happens when something familiar suddenly becomes strange. When people you trust becomes threats, when homes stop feeling safe. You know that feeling when you're somewhere totally familiar, your childhood home, your neighborhood, and suddenly it just feels wrong, off somehow? Like you're seeing it for the first time and realizing it was always a little bit dangerous?

That's the uncanny. And it's the driving force behind the entity and it follows. At one point, it looks like Jay's father who's been dead for years. At another, it looks like her friend's mom. standing completely naked in a doorway. And these aren't random choices. The entity is purposely targeting the things that Jay should feel safest with, her family, her childhood, her home, and turning them into threats.

Nothing is safe. No one can be trusted. Familiarity itself becomes the monster. It's honestly terrifying, especially because the setting itself takes this idea and takes it even further. All right, so here's something really important about, about it follows that a lot of people miss on the first watch. David Mitchell didn't just set the movie in a random suburb. He specifically chose to film it in Detroit's the King outskirts.

We're talking abandoned houses, empty swimming pools, streets that look like they've been frozen in time. And there's a reason that he made that choice. Let me give you some context. In 1950, Detroit was America's fourth largest city, with a population of about 1.8 million people. The car industry was absolutely booming, General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, they all called Detroit home.

If you've lived there, you could graduate high school, walk into a factory job, buy a house, and support a family on a single income. That was the American dream. And Detroit was the American dream. But by 2010, the city's population had dropped to about 700,000. More than a million people had packed up and left. Entire neighborhoods were completely empty. Houses were literally selling for a single dollar.

And during the worst of the recession, unemployment in the city hit 28%. So what happened? Honestly, everything. White flight, de-industrialization, systemic racism, terrible policy decisions, corporate greed, all of it piled up over the years. Car companies started shipping jobs overseas. Factories shut down one after another. Tax revenue dried up, which meant the city couldn't maintain basic services.

Crime went up, more people left, and it just became this vicious cycle that kept feeding on itself. And the people who stayed behind, mostly impoverished, mostly black people, were the ones who were left to deal with the wreckage. By the time David Mitchell started filming, it follows in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Detroit had become a symbol, a symbol of decline of broken promises, of what happens when an economic system uses a place up and then just moves on. And here's the part that really matters for understanding this movie. The people living through Detroit's collapse weren't the ones who caused it. They didn't decide to shift the jobs overseas. They didn't engineer the financial crisis.

They just inherited the consequences. Sound familiar? That's the core theme running through everything in it follows. It's about inheriting something toxic, something you didn't create, didn't ask for, and can't get rid of. But now you have to live with it anyways. Mitchell himself grew up in the Detroit area, and he watched the city decline in slow motion over the course of his life.

The collapse didn't happen overnight. It was gradual, block by block, house by house, year by year. And he poured all of that into the film's visual language. The locations in it follows are chosen to make you feel just slightly off balance. Jay's house looked perfectly normal from the outside, but inside it feels stuck in time. panels from the 70s, furniture that looked like it hadn't been moved in decades, windows that let in plenty of light but somehow never make the room feel bright. The neighborhood pool where the film's climax takes place, it's this beautiful mid-century structure that's clearly been left to rot.

The water is murky, the tiles are cracked, it's basically a monument to better times that are never coming back. Even the high school the characters go to feels wrong. It's too empty, too quiet, like a building that's just waiting to be abandoned. And the characters themselves are teenagers, but they're definitely not living typical teenager lives. They're not going to parties or hang out at the mall. Instead, they're drifting through abandoned houses and hanging out in empty pools,

floating through a landscape that doesn't seem to have anything left to offer them. No jobs, no college plans, no future that feels real or attainable. They're basically ghosts haunting their own lives. In Detroit wasn't the only thing falling apart during this period. An entire generation was inheriting a world that was already broken. They graduated straight into a recession. They took on enormous student debt. They watched their parents lose their homes, their jobs, and their retirement savings.

And the decisions that actually crass the economy, those were made by bankers and CEOs who mostly face zero consequences. But the kids graduating in 2008, 2009, 2010, they're the ones who were the ones who were paid the price. They couldn't find jobs. They moved back in with their parents. They had to put off marriage, buying homes, having kids, all the traditional markers of adulthood kept getting pushed further and further out of reach. Studies from that era showed that millennials were actually the first generation in American history expected to be worse off than their parents. Think about that for a second. The first generation to inherit less, to have fewer opportunities to face a genuinely

bleak her future. Student loan debt ballooned to absurd levels. Entry-level jobs suddenly required years of experience. Housing prices kept climbing while wages basically stayed flat. The latter to the middle class, the one that their parents and grandparents had to climb, had been pulled up behind them. But what were they told? That it was their fault, that they were lazy and entitled, that they spent too much money on avocado toast and fancy coffees. But the data told a completely different story. Millennials were working longer hours for less pay than their parents did at the same age. They were more educated but earning less in real terms. They were doing everything right but still falling behind.

The truth is they inherited a broken system, just like Jay inherits the curse. Detroit is haunted, not by ghost, but by its own history, by the millions of people who left, by the promises that got broken, by an economic system that's scorned. squeezed everything it could out of the city and then tossed it aside. And Jay is haunted in the same exact way, not by her own sins, but by something that was passed down to her, a curse she didn't ask for, a consequence of someone else's choices. Here's the thing about inherited trauma, though. You can't just decide that you're done with it.

You can't just will it away or power through it. It follows you. It shapes how you see the world, how you trust people, how you plan for the future. The entity in the movie works exactly the same way. It doesn't care about your plans. It doesn't care that you're exhausted from running. It doesn't care that you did absolutely nothing wrong. It just keeps walking.

Hi, Crime House community. It's Vanessa. Are you interested in the mysterious parts of history, like when in 1518, an entire European city couldn't stop dancing? Or in 1908, when something flattened over 800 square miles of Siberian forest, in an instant. I'm excited to tell you about a new show, Hidden History with Dr. Harini Bott.

Dr. Bott has spent her entire career demanding evidence and asking why. Now every Monday on Hidden History, she goes where history touches the unknown, vanished civilizations, doomsday prophecies, paranormal phenomena, and events that science still can't fully explain. Dr. Bot treats these moments like open case files,

not myths, not superstition, just incomplete explanations, waiting for a closer look. At the end of every episode, she'll tell you exactly what she thinks happen and ask, what if it happened today? Hidden History drops every Monday. Follow now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen, so you never miss a mystery. Okay, so this is where it follows does something really, really clever, something that completely shifts the framework from those old slasher films that we talked about earlier. Jay isn't punished for having sex.

She's haunted by it. There's a huge difference between those two things. Punishment implies guilt. It implies that you did something wrong and now you're paying the price for it. But Jay didn't do anything wrong. She had sex with someone that she was dating. That's normal.

And that's human. She couldn't have known about the curse and she didn't consent to it. It was passed to her without her knowledge or her permission. So she wasn't guilty of anything. She was just unlucky. She was a victim of something.

something completely beyond her control. And that shifts everything, because it follows isn't saying, don't have sex or you'll die. It's saying something much more unsettling. Sometimes terrible things happen for no reason. Sometimes you inherit consequences that aren't your fault, and there's nothing that you can do about it. And as much as I love classic slasher movies,

I feel like that's a much, much more nuanced take on sexuality and consequences that we're used to getting. And it's also much scarier. Jay is still a final girl in some ways. She's smart, she feists to survive, and she's absolutely the emotional center of the film. But she's not rewarded for being pure. She's haunted regardless of which way she makes. And here's what I find really interesting.

As the film goes on, Jay starts trying to use her sexuality strategically. She sleeps with someone specifically to pass the curse along. She weighs whether sleeping with other people could keep her safe. Her body becomes currency, a tool for survival. And honestly, that is its own kind of horror. Because it means her sexuality isn't about pleasure or connection anymore. It's become purely transactional, a survival mechanism in a system that's completely rigged against her. And isn't that kind of familiar?

Women's bodies have been treated as currency throughout history as objects to be controlled, regulated, and passed between men. It follows, takes that idea, and makes it leave. The curse gets passed through sex and women become carriers of transmission. But the film never blames Jay for any of this. It shows her doing the best she can with an impossible hand that she's been dealt. She's not punished, she's just stuck in a world that treats her body like a problem to be managed. Now here's something else that I love about this film.

The movie deliberately mixes up its time periods. The characters watch old TVs and drive vintage cars, but then someone pulls out a modern eerie. There's 70s wood paneling on the walls and 80s since score on the soundtrack, and the characters are wearing 2010's fashion. It's all blended together in a way that shouldn't work, but totally does. David Mitchell said he did this on purpose. He wanted the film to feel like it exists in a dream space where the past and present blur together and you can't quite pin down when anything is happening.

And it works because the film isn't really about any specific time. It's about a feeling. the feeling of being stuck, of living in a world that's slowly decaying around you, of inheriting a future that someone already used up before you got there. That's the world millennials grew up in, and that's the world that Jay is trapped in. Mitchell's direction reinforces all of this dreamlike dread. He shoots with wide-angle lenses that make spaces feel both vast and claustrophobic at the same time. The camera does these slow, deliberate pans across rooms and streets,

always searching for a figure lurking somewhere in the background. And as a viewer, you find yourself doing the same thing. You're scanning every face, every person walking on the sidewalk, every figure in the distance. Mitchell fills the frame with people, and you end up watching every single one of them trying to figure out which one is the entity. Sometimes it's pretty obvious. A naked woman in a hospital gown doesn't exactly blend in at a high school. But other times, not so much.

That person walking slowly towards the camera? is that just some random extra or is that it? This technique makes you genuinely paranoid. It turns every single person in the film into a potential threat. And the longer that you watch, the more the paranoia seeps into your real life too. In the chaos of trying to survive, Greg, one of Jay's friends, decides to sleep with her and take the curse off of her hands. He figures that he can handle it. He's confident and maybe a little cocky about it.

He's very, very wrong. The entity kills him that same night. It shows up looking like Greg's own mom, half-naked, standing in his bedroom doorway, and attacks him while he's asleep. He dies alone in his own bed, completely unable to explain or fight what's killing him. And then, of course, the curse bounces right back to Jay.

In desperation, Paul, Jay's childhood friend who's been quietly in love with her this whole time, offers to take the curse himself. They sleep together, and afterwards Paul drives to a part of town where he passes it along to a sex worker. The film ends with Jay and Paul walking together down a suburban sidewalk holding hands. They look happy, almost normal, like two kids who might just be okay. But in the background, barely visible, someone is walking towards them, slowly, steadily. Is it the entity?

Or just some random person out for a walk? The movie never tells us. And that ambiguity is absolutely the point, because the curse isn't something you can defeat. It's something that you learn to live with. You can pass it along, you can run, you can try to forget about it for a while, but it's always there, somewhere in the background, walking towards you. And that's what makes it follow so different from just about every other horror movie out there. There's no big victory at the end, no catharsis, no moment where the hero kills the monster

and everything just goes back to normal. Because some things just don't go away. No matter how much you want them to, trauma doesn't disappear. Consequences don't vanish. Inheritance, whether it's genetic, economic, or cultural, doesn't just stop because you're tired of dealing with it. And that's exactly why it follows

connected so deeply with the audiences when it came out. The film arrived at a very specific moment in horror history. Around 2014, a wave of films started getting labeled, elevated horror or post-horror. We're talking about movies like the Babadook, the Witch, and a little later, Hereditaria Midsamar. These weren't your traditional horror films. They didn't lean on jump scares or buckets of gore.

Instead, they used the horror genre as a way to explore grief, trauma, family dysfunction, and social anxiety. Critics absolutely love them. Some longtime horror fans, not so much. They said these films were slow, boring, and not scary. enough. But that's kind of the point. These films weren't trying to scare you with monsters or mass killers. I've always said some of the best horror movies ever made aren't scary. These movies were trying to scare you with ideas, with feelings, and the kind of thoughts that keep you

staring into the ceiling at three in the morning when you can't sleep. And it follows is a perfect example of this approach. Yes, there's a monster, but the real horror is everything the monster represents, time, mortality, consequence, and inheritance. The entity itself works as a metaphor, but it's also completely real within the world of the film. And that tension between the literal and the symbolic is what makes it work so well. You can watch it follows as a straightforward horror film about a supernatural curse. Or you can watch it as an allegory about growing up in a world that's already been broken by the people who came before you. Both interpretations work, and that's what makes the film

so smart. It helped establish a whole new language in horror, one that values mood and theme just as much as actual scares. And most importantly, it's a film that stays with you. Long after the credits roll, you'll find yourself scanning crowds, glancing over your shoulder on the sidewalk, wondering if that person walking a little too steadily behind you is just a stranger going about their day or something else entirely. That's the mark of a truly effective horror, by the way. Not the jump scares you've forgotten about five minutes later. It's the dread that burrows quietly into your brain and just decides to live there. All you can do is keep going and hope you stay ahead of it. But here's what makes it follows even scarier in hindsight. In 2020, something happened that

made the film feel almost prophetic, the 2020 pandemic. Suddenly, every single person on the planet was living in a world where other people could be dangerous. We're getting too close to someone could literally kill you, where an invisible threat could be hiding in anyone, anywhere. We were all being followed. Think about it for a second. The core experience of the pandemic was the state of constant grinding alertness. Is that person wearing a mask? Are they standing too close?

Did I wash my hands long enough? When was the last time I touched my face? Every person around you became a potential carrier of something deadly. Every interaction, no matter how small, carried a real wrist. You couldn't see the virus. There was no way of knowing who was infected. All you could do was try to maintain distance and hope for the best. And that's exactly what Jay goes through and it follows. She can't see the entity until it's already dangerously close. She is no way of knowing who to trust. She has to maintain this exhausting, constant awareness of her surroundings just to stay alive.

During the pandemic, people talked about how going to the grocery store felt like navigating a zombie movie, how they'd walk across the street to avoid anyone walking towards them on the sidewalk, how they'd hold their breath while squeezing past someone in a narrow hallway. We all became paranoid, hyper-vigilant, and totally exhausted by it. That's the experience that it follows captured so perfectly. Not any specific virus, but the psychological horror of living under constant threat, of never being able to fully let your guard down, not even for a moment. And here's what's particularly wild about the timing.

It follows came out in 2014, a full six years before the 2020 pandemic. But somehow it managed to tap into an anxiety that was already simmering just beneath the surface. This ambient, hard-to-name fear of disease, of invisible threats, of the terrifying fragility of our bodies and our social connections. The AIDS crisis had taught us that sex could kill. The recession taught us that economic security was an illusion, and it follows took both of those lessons and made them horrifyingly literal. Then the pandemic came along and proved the movie right. Contagion really could be anywhere. Safety really was temporary.

The threat doesn't ever fully go away. It just keeps walking towards you slowly and steadily whether or not you're paying attention. That's the real power of it follows. It doesn't just capture one specific anxiety. It captures something much more fundamental about what it feels like to live in the modern world. This quiet, persistent knowledge that invisible threats are all around us. And there may not be any real escape. And by the way, it looks like we haven't seen the last of this particular nightmare.

A sequel called They Follow was announced back in 2023 with David Robert Mitchell returning to write and direct and Michael Monroe coming back as Jay. As of this recording, filming is set to begin in the summer of 2020. with the story picking up a full decade after the events of the original. The tagline, it's everywhere, which means the curse is still out there, still walking, still spreading. And this time around, it might just be coming for us all. Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of Twisted Tales,

a crimehouse original. I'd love to hear from you. What did you think about today's story? Anything you're dying for me to cover? Leave a comment or review wherever you're tuning in. And be sure to follow Twisted Tales so we can keep building this community together. I'll be back next week with another unbelievable true story. Until then, stay curious. And remember, there's no reason to fear the dark unless you try to hide from it.

I'm Katie Ring, host of America's Most Infamous Crimes. Each week, I take on one of the most notorious criminal cases in American history. Listen to and follow America's Most Infamous Crimes, available now wherever you get your podcast. Looking for your next listen, check out Hidden History with Dr. Herini Bot. Every Monday, Dr. Bot goes where history gets mysterious, vanished civilizations, doomsday prophecies, and events that science still can't fully explain. Follow Hidden History now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.