How would Hugh have known "the rules" of the creature in It Follows?

Question

So the movie revolves around this girl Jay who has a new boyfriend named Hugh. They hook up, he chloroforms her and ties her up, tells her she will now be stalked by a creature who will try to kill her, gives a short explanation of how this creature works (basically works like a hot potato STD, will stalk you until you pass it on through having sex with someone else).

He seems to know some very specific things about it:

"Just sleep with someone as soon as you can. Just pass it along"

"It could look like someone you know. Or it could be a stranger in a crowd."

"But there is only one of it."

Then he lets her go and disappears from her life. They find him later and he adds more details:

"Wherever you are? Is someone walking straight towards you. But it is walking. If you try falling off. You could buy yourself some time, I think."

So like... how would he know any of this?! It really sounds like he barely knew the one he got it from, and he doesn't even know if it was her, so it is unlikely she told him anything (if she even knew):

"I met a girl at the bar. Its a one night stand. I don't even remember her name. I think that's where it came from."

Basically, how does he have so many precise details about this bizarre thing that was thrust into his life and he hasn't talked to anyone about?! Even if he has been managing it for months I find it difficult to think of scenarios where he would gain all of this complex knowledge about it...

Answer 1

The girl it murdered at the beginning of the film is Hugh's girlfriend. The protagonists find a photograph of Hugh and his girlfriend. Both of them, Hugh and his girlfriend, are persecuted by It. Hugh knowns “the rules” of the creature in It Follows because he learns them from surviving.

In a new interview with Yahoo!:

You’ve said in other interviews that you didn’t set down concrete rules in terms of what the monster can or can’t do. But we do hear some rules in the film.

The only rules that we hear are rules that we’re told by a character within the film, who has access to limited information. If you look at the film enough, you can start to understand how he may be figuring these things out and how he has gotten the information that he has. But you also have to understand that they’re not rules on a stone’s tablet; they’re a character’s best guess about what’s happening to them. So, you know, they seem mostly right. But for me, that’s kind of fun, in that there might be some gaps in information, some things that he doesn’t understand and neither do we.

He really gets into the thick of it during a reddit AMA. One reader asked how Hugh’s character in It Follows knows so much about the origin of the infection curse.

Hiphopsanta: "I'm sorry but I need to ask this spoiler question: in It Follows, how does Hugh know how to beat the monster or even discover that at all, if no one ever explained it to him? He said he "thinks" he got it from a girl a bar, but wouldn't he know for sure? How would he even know it came from sex?"

David Robert Mitchell: "This suggests a much larger backstory within Hugh's life. We can only imagine the circumstances that led to Hugh discovering this. The film offers a few clues".

Mitchell then continues in revealing more on his perception of “It”:

“For one, looking like normal people, it has the ability to approach the character without them being aware that it’s the monster. Also, it’s the way that the monster uses the human figure to hurt or disturb the characters.”

“I think most of the time It’s always walking,” “But It can choose to move in ways that might hurt or affect the person it’s
following.”

“It could certainly cross the ocean. I imagine that it could get on a boat or a plane. Or it could move through the water, if it chose to.”

Yahoo! / reddit / bloody-disgusting