Watch a Scene From 'It Follows,' the Horror Movie That's Freaking Out Critics

In the opening moments of the horror film It Follows, a scantily clad teenage girl bolts from a suburban house, freezes with sheer terror in the middle of the street, then runs back into the same house. What unspeakable monster is she running from, or to? That’s the question at the heart of the new indie fright flick, which Vox is calling “the scariest American horror movie in years.”

Directed by David Robert Mitchell, It Follows tells the story of a group of teenage friends who are stalked by a murderous supernatural presence. In the video above (via the New York Times), Mitchell breaks down that opening sequence, which uses a single continuous shot to set up the mystery and terror to come. “It’s playing on this idea of us being colder observers of this terrible thing happening, and that we’re on the outside of it,” says Mitchell. He also acknowledges that the scene is a deliberate nod to the “women in peril” cliché of horror movies, right down to the character’s incongruous high heels. It Follows is currently the highest-rated film on Metacritic, though some critics have actually found it too scary. “It wasn’t a fun kind of scare. It was the so-upset-I-feel-sick kind of amorphous dread,” writes Vulture’s David Edelstein.

The film opens in limited release today.

Watch the trailer below:

This post has been edited since publication.