Just to get away: It Follows (2014).

It Follows isn't just the best horror movie of 2014; it's the best horror movie of the last 20 years. It's a love letter to the genre, bursting with subtle and overt nods to the classics, but it's no postmodern pastiche. Elements feel familiar, but the parts that count—the scary parts—feel startlingly fresh. It's a gorgeous, vivid, wide-angle nightmare.

Believe the hype.

At times, you could be forgiven for thinking It Follows was the work of John Carpenter, come screaming out of retirement to deliver one last opus. Although Halloween was shot in Pasadena, the leafy Michigan suburbs where It Follows takes place could double for Laurie Strode's hometown of Haddonfield, and the whole film is laced with a wonderfully ominous, throbbing synthesizer soundtrack in the style of Carpenter's own sawtooth symphonies.

It Follows also suggests the golden age of end-of-the-century Japanese horror. Its central conceit—a lethal, unyielding supernatural contagion that operates according to a strange and unsettling set of rules—fits squarely in the tradition of Ringu and Ju-on, and the film's tableaux of crumbling Michigan houses and vacant public spaces recalls Kiyoshi Kurosawa's unique genius for finding the perfect abandoned Japanese buildings to get murdered in.

But It Follows is also a coming-of-age story, and it's every bit as aching and poignant as Let The Right One In. The standard horror template would see heroine Jay struggling to convince those around her that she's not crazy, but one of writer/director David Robert Mitchell's smartest decisions in It Follows is that her best friends—stalwart sister Kelly, boy-next-door Paul, and snarky bookworm Yara—believe her almost immediately, as we would hope our own friends would.

As frightening as It Follows is, it effortlessly evokes the weightlessness of drifting between adolescence and adulthood. Parents are little more than blurry background figures, but they loom large for the characters, who reference them often: "Won't your mom be mad?" Rather than the obvious readings some viewers have offered for It Follows (e.g. as AIDS allegory), the film often feels like a parable about a generation of young people adjusting to radically diminished expectations.

It helps that the whole young cast is sublime, from Daniel Zovatto's Damone-with-a-heart-of-gold to Jake Weary's anxious, apologetic Hugh, who sets the whole horrible drama in motion. The characters feel lived in, with unspoken histories between every line of dialogue.

One of the film's core themes (driven home by Yara's periodic quotations from Dostoevsky's The Idiot) is fatalism, a familiar mood for all of us marking time in a post-industrial cul-de-sac of downward mobility and paycheck-to-paycheck living. Jay's nightmare dramatizes a familiar contemporary predicament: feeling trapped in the place where you grew up, with all hopes for the future put on hold while you try and figure out how you're going to make it through another week, or another day.

But make no mistake: It Follows is a horror movie. And once it gets up and running, it ruthlessly and patiently develops its central premise, continually adding new wrinkles and raising the stakes. Like the original Ju-on, there are images in this movie that might haunt you for the rest of your life, and there are moments that will have you white-knuckling the armrest like a kid seeing The Exorcist for the first time.

After you see it, you just might catch yourself looking over your shoulder, checking the doors and the windows of the room you're in, wondering how quickly you could get away. You know, if you had to.

Is there any greater compliment to a horror movie than that?