Queer Ethics, Urban Spaces, and the Horrors of Monogamy in It Follows

Abstract

Through its ironic critique of monogamy as a monstrous force, the horror film It Follows (David Robert Mitchell, 2014) advances, by way of negative example, a queer ethics of open, responsible sexuality—albeit an ethics constrained by the film’s setting in a present-day, neoliberal Detroit increasingly stripped of public services. By examining the film’s ambivalent nostalgia for both a generic and an urban past, this article argues that the queer aesthetic of It Follows achieves its emotional tenor through imaging Detroit’s decrepit (sub)urban spaces as haunted by polyvalent sexualities and socioeconomic inequalities.

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