Slow Burn: Dreadful Kinship and the Weirdness of Heteronormativity in It Follows

Inspired by Mark Fisher's understanding of the weird as "that which does not belong," this essay asks what weird fiction makes perceptible about contemporary forms of intimate belonging. To do so, it turns to narratives of "dreadful kinship" in contemporary horror, which use weirdness to explore the violence of heteropatriarchal kinship. Popular commentary often describes contemporary horror as a stylish update of Freud's unheimlich. By contrast, I argue that dreadful kinship positions the normative family as a fragile social form unraveled by weird forces that exceed its comprehension and control. Thus, dreadful kinship draws on the weird to glimpse the family from the outside, to see it as contingent on certain material relations of power. I focus on Robert David Mitchell's It Follows (2014), which narrates the weird temporality unleashed by neoliberalism's erosion of heteronormative kinship. While It Follows rewrites the nuclear family as a residual social form, it does not anticipate an easy exit from heteronormative kinship, which is dreadfully persistent even in death.