Character page for It Follows.
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Jay
Jamie "Jay" Height
Played By: Maika Monroe
The main character and the one who It spends the bulk of the film pursuing.
- Break the Cutie: By all appearances, Jay is a normal teenage girl who enjoys dating and has a perfectly fine night out with a guy she likes enough to go all the way with. Then the choloroform comes out, and the whole movie is one long downward spiral for her from there.
- Cassandra Truth: Naturally, her predicament is a bit difficult to believe on premise alone, and even she implicitly doesn't believe it at first until she first notices It closing in on her.
- Dark and Troubled Past: Jay's father is no longer in her life, and even when facing potential death at the hands of the curse, she does not want to tell her own sister that It has taken on his appearance. Given the director's commentaries and Its habits with its shapeshifting, it can be inferred that he was abusive, possibly sexually so.
- Informed Attractiveness: Kelly and Yara claim that Jay is so pretty that it's annoying. This is certainly possible, albeit the cast as a whole are much less unrealistically attractive than the typical cast of a horror movie, particularly one with a focus on sex, so while she might not look as perfect as the average Final Girl, she's still noticeably very pretty.
- Promiscuity After Rape: "It" is a metaphor for STDs, Jay's infection is meant to evoke various forms of Questionable Consent, and while it's never explicitly shown, it's strongly implied that she's having sex with random men in order to kick the curse down the road.
- Slashers Prefer Blondes: Very noticeably blonde and the whole movie is about a murderous stalker that wants her dead.
- Tomboyish Name: "Jamie" is more on the Gender-Blender Name side as it can be either masculine or feminine, however the name she goes by most often is "Jay" which is much more easy to mistake for a man's name.
- Trauma Conga Line: Let's see, her date with Hugh takes a nightmarish turn, she's informed she's being stalked by an entity that wants to kill her, and she can't stay in one place too long or even sleep or it'll catch up with her. She gets injured multiple times just trying to evade contact with her would-be killer, and even her friends aren't safe if they get too close. By the end of the movie, the only thing certain is that it's targeting her friend-slash-lover now and will beeline for her if it manages to kill him first.
Kelly
Kelly Height
Played By: Lili Sepe
- The Generic Girl: Noticeably doesn't share any of Jay's subtle subplots with the other castmates, and even the implicit Dark and Troubled Past her father is related to seems to affect just her sister.
- My Sister Is Off-Limits: She can see Paul's attraction to Jay from a mile away and tries to deter him from sleeping in their home.
Paul
Paul Bolduan
Played By: Keir Gilchrist
- Ironic Name: "Bolduan" is a name that sounds like "bold one", with Paul contrastingly being very low-key, quiet, and shy in his approach to his affection for Jay.
- Dogged Nice Guy: While he's much better about it than Greg, Paul's attraction to Jay still noticeably gets in the way of his properly assessing the gravity of the situation, and the danger they're in.
- Green-Eyed Monster: When Greg is close to Jay, he seethes.
- Reckless Gun Usage: The very short amounts of time practicing with Greg's gun is evident from the encounter at the beach, but at least Jay could see what she was aiming at. Paul, aiming for the entity (which he can't see) manages to shoot Yara (who he can see).
Yara
Yara Davis
Played By: Olivia Luccardi
- Beneath Suspicion: The audience knows at the same time Hugh tells her that the entity may take the form of someone Jay knows. Thus, they're probably expecting it to, at some point, take on the form of one of the boys that's showing noticeable interest in Jay. Rather, the friend whose appearance it adopts is Yara, who has been so unassuming that it's unlikely anyone realized she was the monster until the real version was shown playing in the water.
- The Generic Girl: She essentially has no real role to play besides being Jay's friend and reacting to the horrors she goes through.
Greg
Greg Hannigan
Played By: Daniel Zovatto
- Agent Scully: He does not believe in the curse, and even when he says he does later on, it's pretty clear he's trying to appease a sleep-deprived and paranoid Jay. According to his own words, he believes something happened, just not the way she said it did.
- All Girls Want Bad Boys: All girls except Jay. They do sleep together, but it has very little to do with any attraction she feels for him. He's otherwise a complete Chick Magnet.
- Chivalrous Pervert: He's quite the Chick Magnet and is noticeably broader, better-dressed, and more attractive than Paul, and jumps at the chance to have sex with Jay. None of this keeps him from being a pretty decent guy and even allowing her to train with his gun, doing what he can to help her.
"Hugh"
Jeff Redmond, aka Hugh
Played By: Jake Weary
- Crazy Survivalist: His hideouts, when located by Jay and friends, makes it clear this is what a person turns into when trying to survive being the entity's target for extended periods of time.
- Hunk: Played by Jake Weary and, during his date with Jay, it's made abundantly clear he's a very enviable date.
- Nice Guy: Subverted. He puts up a facade as a downright charming date when wooing Jay, purely so he can get into her pants and foist the curse off on her. However, there's nothing to suggest he's as much of an asshole on a regular day.
- Pragmatic Villainy: He lies to Jay about the circumstances of their sex, not to mention his identity, and then drugs her and holds her against her will after inflicting what is essentially a supernatural STD on her. All of this is done less because he's a villainous guy than because he wants to pass on the curse and emphatically needs Jay alive as long as possible to preserve his own life.
- Sympathy for the Devil: Even after learning the extent of the curse, it's hard to feel sorry for him after having watched how traumatic Jay's experience with him was. It isn't until they see Jeff's temporary home that the protagonists realize his life has been completely upended by It, having to constantly be on the run. It's implied by the presence of sound-signaling traps around his encampments that he's had to deal with being stalked by the creature for much longer than Jay has and finally got desperate.
Annie
Annie Marshall
Played By: Bailey Spry
- Cruel and Unusual Death: Whatever means the creature took to kill her, it was violent enough with her to snap her leg backward over her torso, and if its treatment of Greg is any indication, it likely sexually assaulted her—possibly postmortem.
- Face Death with Despair: She finally gives up running from It in the movie's intro, waiting on the beach for It to take her. If she has any regrets about doing this, she never got to voice them, but it's clear she's in absolute despair when she takes this option.
"It"
The Entity, aka "It"
Played By: Various
- Evil Is Bigger: Its tallest formnote towers over everyone else in the cast of the movie and would be terrifying even if its eyes hadn't been seemingly gouged out.
- Feel No Pain: It doesn't seem capable of feeling pain, not reacting to anything done to it.
- Humanoid Abomination: While it always looks human to those who can see it, its behavior and abilities are utterly unnatural, and its origins are a complete mystery.
- Human Shifting: Its appearance is always that of a human, and that's the only thing consistent about it.
- I Love the Dead: A possible interpretation of its motive. It's seen humping Greg, but he had already been freshly killed at that point, so it’s unknown if sex is actually how it kills or not.
- Implacable Man: Played for all the horror the trope can contain. A monster that can only walk is easy to get away from, but a monster that always walks is difficult to stay away from. Jay has several alarmingly close calls in the short timespan the film encompasses, and Hugh's hideout precautions suggest that they were routine.
- Invincible Boogeyman: It will not stop, ever, and damage that would kill a human only stalls it for seconds before it gets back up. The director outright calls the protagonists' plan to try and kill it in the film's climax a dumb idea.
- It Can Think: Spelled out by Hugh, whose arguably best advice to Jay is that it's slow, but not dumb. This turns out to be alarmingly true, as although its basic behaviors seem to be that of a robotic threat pursuing the most immediate path to a victim, it demonstrates multiple times that it is aware of its surroundings and can counter-act plans.
- Logical Weakness: Calling it a "weakness" is a stretch, but undoubtedly the only reason Jay survives It as long as she does is because she has friends she can rely on, so despite the Cassandra Truth tendencies the curse engenders, she has help where other victims might suffer alone.
- While it is invisible to everyone not on its list, which induces paranoia in its victims and isolates them from loved ones. it is still physically real and present. This means that even people who cannot see it are still able to verify its existence by observing the effects of its actions or touching it, and they can even fight it if they can find some way to locate it. Consequently, Jay’s friends quickly realize what’s happening when it attacks her in front of them and are later able to help her try to kill it.
- The Nameless: It is only ever referred to as "it", capitalized here for convenience's sake. Rather than the titular It from the Stephen King works, this is less to emphasize the sheer horror of its nature and more to capitalize on how mysterious and unknown it is.
- The Needless: It doesn't need to sleep, eat, shower or change its clothes which is part of what makes it so terrifying. It is always moving and chasing its victims.
- Noiseless Walker: Though not a specific power, Its lack of any vocalizations throughout 99% of Its pursuit is made worse in tandem with the fact that, since It's so slow, Its footsteps make very little noise. When it comes strolling down the beach as Yara, nobody hears it coming and Jay nearly dies.
- Ominous Walk: Its modus operandi. Noticeably, it doesn't have to walk perpetually, and can stop, climb, crawl, or use other means of locomotion. Its top speed never rises above the briskest of walks, however.
- Parental Incest: There are two consistent lines its Human Shifting tends to run along, one being horrifically injured people and the other being people the victim knows—most often their parents. In order, it takes the form of Hugh's (naked) mother, a grandmother of Jay's that she doesn't know, Greg's mother, Jay's (naked) grandfather, and finally Jay's father.
- Perpetual-Motion Monster: The logical extreme of this trope, in that it is always moving closer to its target and nothing seems to be able to stop it by force, let alone by starvation or exhaustion.
- Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: Passed on through sex, the nature of the curse that causes the monster to target an individual compels those wishing for even temporary freedom from it to take measures they probably otherwise wouldn't in their sex lives. Moreover, its attacks on its victims both implicitly and explicitly involve sex.
- Riddle for the Ages: What is It? Where did it come from? How do its powers work? Nobody has the slightest clue.
- Rule of Scary: Director commentary has indicated that the only answers worth considering when it comes to questions regarding this creature are the ones that are scariest.
- Sadist: One theory posited by Hugh is that some of the shapes it takes on are assumed in order to hurt its victim emotionally. This is likely also why It only walks at a normal pace, to let its victims know that no matter how far and fast they run, there is still nothing they can do to get away.
- Silent Antagonist: It makes exactly one noise throughout the movie when screaming at Jay through the mouth of her young neighbor. Beyond this, it is entirely silent, never making any noise even when badly hurt. Although it is obviously aware of things said to it, it makes no response, ever.
- Super-Strength: Even if it isn't taking forms that possess greater muscle mass, it is fearsomely and deceptively strong. The way Paul goes flying when he tries to attack it is startling.
- Virgin in a White Dress: The one consistent thing about its appearance is that, when it's wearing clothing, some or all of it is always white, even if it's taken on the appearance of someone who is present and not wearing white. Given the incredibly unsubtle sexual overtones of the film, the color's association with chastity is almost certainly intentional.
