It Follows – Filming Locations

It Follows (one of my top 10 favorite flicks of all time) was shot across metro Detroit between September 30 and October 31, 2013, which is a filming window so perfect it feels like a bit. David Robert Mitchell is a Michigan native, and he wrote the script specifically for southeast Michigan rather than writing something generic and then hunting for a cheap place to shoot it. That distinction matters, because the geography of this movie is doing real work. The suburbs are pristine and the city is hollowed out, and the kids drift back and forth between them like the line isn’t there.

The film also refuses to tell you what year it is. There are box televisions and rotary phones and a clamshell e-reader that doesn’t exist, and none of it lines up. Mitchell built that ambiguity into the locations too, choosing places that could plausibly be 1985 or 2013 depending on how you squint. It cost under two million dollars and made more than twenty. Here’s where all of it is.

A note before the list: a lot of these are private homes on ordinary residential streets where actual people live. Shoot from the sidewalk, don’t linger in driveways, and don’t knock on doors. I have photos included if it’s a place I’ve visited myself.

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Annie’s House

1492 Yorkshire Road, Birmingham, MI 48009

The cold open. A girl in heels runs out of this house, circles the street in a panic while a neighbor asks if she’s okay, and drives off to a beach to die. It’s one of the best opening scenes of the last twenty years and it happens on a quiet block in Birmingham, one of the wealthier suburbs north of Detroit.

The house had already been substantially renovated by the mid-2010s, so it doesn’t match the movie as cleanly as the others. The street still does.

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Jay’s House

38721 Trafalgar Way, Sterling Heights, MI 48312

The center of the film. This is where Jay floats in the above-ground pool, where the sisters watch television in the front room, and where the entity keeps turning up at the edge of the frame. The house sits on the corner where Trafalgar meets Tinkler Road, which is why so many shots have that deep view down the block behind the actors.

Sterling Heights is Macomb County, roughly twenty-five miles north of downtown Detroit, and it’s exactly the kind of postwar subdivision that reads as anywhere in America. That’s the point.

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Greg’s House

38748 Trafalgar Way, Sterling Heights, MI 48312

Directly across the street from Jay’s. This is the house the girls look at from the sidewalk, and it’s where one of the film’s cruelest sequences plays out when the thing walks in wearing his mother’s body.

Standing on Trafalgar Way, you can see both houses at once, which makes the whole neighborhood feel a lot smaller than it does on screen.

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The Redford Theatre

17360 Lahser Road, Detroit, MI 48219

The movie theater where Jay and Hugh go on their date, and where Hugh sees someone standing in the lobby that Jay can’t see. Both the interior and exterior are the real thing.

The Redford opened on January 27, 1928 in Old Redford, billed as America’s most unique suburban playhouse, and it has been running continuously ever since. The interior is done in a Japanese motif, and it still has its original three-manual, ten-rank Barton pipe organ from 1928, complete with dragons on the console. The nonprofit Motor City Theatre Organ Society bought the place in 1977 and runs it with volunteers to this day. If you visit one location on this list, make it this one, and go on a night when they’re actually showing something.

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Nick’s Country Oven

511 West 14 Mile Road, Clawson, MI 48017

The restaurant Jay and Hugh go to after the theater, where they play the game of picking a stranger in the room and Hugh loses it because he sees a girl in a yellow dress who isn’t there.

It’s a family diner and it’s still open, still serving breakfast all day. You can sit in the same room, same booth. And we did! It has also turned up in other productions shot in Michigan during the state’s film incentive years, so the staff are used to people wandering in with cameras. I can’t say I’d recommend the food though…

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The Packard Automotive Plant

1580 East Grand Boulevard, Detroit, MI 48211

The abandoned building where Hugh ties Jay to a wheelchair and explains the rules. He drives her out to a derelict industrial shell, straps her down, and waits for the thing to walk in so she’ll believe him. It’s the scene the whole movie turns on, and it was shot inside the Packard plant on Detroit’s east side.

The Packard was an Albert Kahn-designed auto factory that opened in 1911, closed in 1958, and spent the next six decades becoming the most photographed ruin in America. By the time the crew got in there in 2013 it was condemned, unsecured, and actively falling apart, which is precisely why it looks the way it does on screen. Nobody dressed that set.

Demolition began in October 2022 and the city declared it complete in December 2024, taking down almost the entire three-and-a-half-million-square-foot complex. Two structures were spared, and 1580 East Grand Boulevard is one of them. A redevelopment plan announced in December 2025 collapsed the following March when the incoming mayor let the letter of intent expire, so what’s left is sitting in limbo. The site is fenced and going inside is both illegal and genuinely dangerous, but the surviving building is visible from the boulevard.

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University of Detroit Mercy

4001 West McNichols Road, Detroit, MI 48221

The school where Jay looks out the classroom window and sees an old woman in a hospital gown walking straight toward the building. It’s the McNichols campus of University of Detroit Mercy, the largest Catholic university in the state.

It’s a working campus, so keep to the public walkways and don’t wander into buildings.

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Clark’s Ice Cream & Yogurt

3312 West 12 Mile Road, Berkley, MI 48072

The ice cream shop, and one of the easiest and most pleasant stops on the whole tour. It’s a small neighborhood parlor in downtown Berkley that has been there for decades, and it’s still open and still busy.

Order the Michigan pothole. You’re welcome.

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Parkland Park

469 Parkland Street, Clawson, MI 48017

The park Jay rides her bike to, filmed in Clawson. She approaches it along Bellevue Avenue near Walper Avenue, which is worth walking if you want the full approach shot.

It’s a small municipal park and it looks almost exactly the same.

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Seven Mile Road

West Seven Mile Road at Charleston Street and at Irvington Street, Detroit, MI 48203

The drive into the city, where Yara reads aloud and Jay says her mother never let them go south of Eight Mile. It’s the most quietly loaded scene in the movie, and it was shot on the real road, along West Seven Mile between roughly Andover and Irvington.

Several buildings visible in that sequence have since been demolished, including the abandoned house near West Hollywood Avenue. Others are still there, and the same block shows up more than once in the sequence from opposite angles, which is a nice bit of editing sleight of hand.

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Clawson High School

101 John M Avenue, Clawson, MI 48017

The location of the inside of the pool scene. The whole doomed electrical-appliance plan, Jay floating in the water waiting, the thing arriving wearing her father’s face. All of it was shot inside in the natatorium at Clawson High School.

This is an active public high school, so the interior is not somewhere you can casually visit. The exterior of the pool building is a Water Works Plant.

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The High Lift Building, Water Works Park

10100 East Jefferson Avenue, Detroit, MI 48214

Here’s the trick of that climax. The pool interior is in Clawson, but the building the kids walk up to on the outside is somewhere else entirely, and it’s twenty-five miles away.

The exterior is the High Lift Building, a 1910 pumping station at Detroit’s Water Works Park on the river. The park was once 110 acres of public grounds with picnic areas, ball diamonds, a lagoon, and a library, but it was closed and reopened repeatedly through the twentieth century and is now sealed off for security reasons. You can see the building from East Jefferson and you can visit the restored Hurlbut Memorial Gate at Cadillac Boulevard, which is the ornate 1894 entrance to a park nobody can enter anymore.

The walk up to the building was filmed along Marquette Drive, around 1206 Marquette Drive.

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Hugh’s House

5222 Allison Drive, Troy, MI 48085

The house where the group tracks Hugh down and learns his name is actually Jeff. The drive to get there starts at the corner of Newton Drive and Bridge Park Drive in Troy.

The back of the house and the open field behind it can be seen from where Lila Drive meets Allison Drive, which is the better vantage point if you want the shot without standing in someone’s front yard.

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Jaycee Park

1755 East Long Lake Road, Troy, MI 48085

The wooded ground behind Hugh’s house, where the conversation happens outside. It’s a real public park in Troy, so this one you can actually walk into.

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Bellevue and Frederick

Bellevue Street at Frederick Street, Detroit, MI 48211

The street corner scene in Detroit, shot near the Packard site on the east side.

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The Final Walk

Dill Drive at Arcola Drive, Sterling Heights, MI 48312

The last shot. Jay and Paul walking down the sidewalk holding hands while a figure follows a block behind them, or maybe doesn’t. Mitchell has never confirmed it either way and I hope he never does.

It was filmed a few streets over from Jay’s house, near 38532 Arcola Drive. Standing there is the strangest part of the whole trip, because the sidewalk is completely ordinary and your brain will not accept that.

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If you’re doing this as a day trip, the practical route is Oakland County first, because Birmingham, Berkley, Clawson, and Troy are all within about fifteen minutes of each other. Then run east into Sterling Heights for the Trafalgar Way houses, and finish in Detroit with the Redford Theatre, the university, Seven Mile, the Packard building, and Water Works Park. Give yourself a full day, and don’t skip the ice cream.