It Follows: precarity, thanatopolitics, and the ambient horror film

Abstract

In the 2014 horror film It Follows, a teenage woman is terrorized by a fatal curse that passes from victim to victim via sexual intercourse. The subject of the curse is relentlessly pursued by vacantminded assassins that take the form of friends, loved ones, and strangers. The film is set near the infamous dividing line of Detroit's 8 Mile Road, between what remains of the suburban workingclass and the sacrifice zone of post-industrial urban triage. I argue that It Follows confronts audiences with the spectral manifestation of precarity: the deliberate and unequal redistribution of human fragility to populations who are the most socially and economically vulnerable. First, the generic shift from a specific monster to an anonymous and relentless force redeploys horror convention to draw attention to the conditions that induce horror within the prevailing socioeconomic order. Second, the film renders such precarity visible by contrasting the mise-en-scène of the suburban enclave with zones of postindustrial ruin, the relative comfort of the former predicated on the vulnerability of the latter. The film maps a landscape of postindustrial ruin, enacting a visual and narrative critique of thanatopolitics, the biopolitical organization of death under late capitalism.

COVID-19 and ‘crisis as ordinary’: pathological whiteness, popular pessimism, and pre-apocalyptic cultural studies

“…Expressed this way, pathological whiteness under COVID-19 functions as a particular racist formation that shapes a 'political organization of death' premised on the direct valorization of infection, transmission, illness, and death by COVID of vulnerable others (especially racial others), and if necessary one's self, in the service of broader white conservative goals (Mbembe 2019). While these proximate goals are often pandemic-related (rolling back public health regulations more rapidly, not wearing face masks or engaging in any other individual risk mitigation, not admitting any mistakes have been made by the Trump regime) they are more generally about preserving and expanding white supremacy, preferably through inflicting 'ambient horror,' excess suffering, and death on socio-political Others (Kelly 2017). It is a (patho)logic of selfdestruction that is meant to cause harm specifically to non-white communities, an affective attitude and politics where, as Adam Serwer ( 2018) has concisely noted 'the cruelty is the point,' a cruelty that at this juncture has its own infectious qualities since 'once malice is embraced as a virtue, it is impossible to contain.'…”