Line #53 Main/SuburbanGothic


1	[[quoteright:350:[[Film/Halloween1978 https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/halloween_5.jpg]]]]
2	[[caption-width-right:350:Howdy, neighbor...]]
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4	A peaceful town, in the heartland of America (or any old place you please). Husbands kiss their wives goodbye in the morning on the front porch of their cookie-cutter homes. Children laugh and ride their bikes down the street without a care in the world. A cop chats with a barista at the local cafe, in no rush to get back on patrol. [[TemptingFate I mean, nothing bad could ever happen here... right?]]
5
6	Suburban Gothic is a subgenre within [[GothicHorror American Gothic]] media characterized by its focus on the anxieties associated with the widescale creation of suburban communities in the post-World War II United States and the rapid lifestyle changes that took place in the financial boom of the 1950s and 1960s.
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8	The classic Suburban Gothic setting is a [[CrapsaccharineWorld seemingly idyllic neighborhood]] filled with [[ObsessivelyNormal picturesque]] [[NuclearFamily nuclear families]] who [[TownWithADarkSecret are hiding a dark secret]]. These towns usually feature [[TokenMinority a maximum of one]] family of color, and the protagonist rarely comes from this family. Frequent themes include the presence of imposters, the dangers of groupthink, and the conflict between individuality and conformity. Works may also focus on consumerism and the ecological damage caused by suburban development.
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10	Characteristic of this trope, like other American Gothic traditions, is that utopian ideals meet a dark reality. The pristine appearance conceals a deep rot, and neither can exist without the other. Suburban Gothic seeks to turn the American Dream upside down. An idyllic town where the [[CloseKnitCommunity neighbors are friendly]] and [[FreeRangeChildren children safely roam the streets]] that provides a hiding place from the outside world becomes a place where the protagonist is trapped and unhappy, where the neighbors have deadly secrets, the children are hunted, and [[FauxAffablyEvil the monsters]] are already inside the community. For every white picket fence, there's a [[CreepyBasement dark basement]] or a crawl space.
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12	[[KidHero Children and teenagers]] often feature as protagonists, and antagonists are often neighbors, family members, and even [[EnfantTerrible other children]]. Characters are generally preoccupied with the [[TeenDrama average]] [[GrowingUpSucks day-to-day]] problems of suburban life and these works sometimes have incredibly mundane subplots. The genre often, but not always, relies on supernatural or sci-fi elements typical of Gothic literature in general. The emergence of Suburban Gothic as a subgenre is partially responsible for the resurgence of the HauntedHouse as a setting in the mid-twentieth century.
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14	Creator/ShirleyJackson's ''The Road Through the Wall'', published in 1948 is often considered a foundational text in the development of the subgenre, as is [[{{Creator/Richard Matheson}} Richard Matheson's]] ''Literature/IAmLegend'', published in 1954. Other notable early Suburban Gothic authors include {{Creator/Ira Levin}} and {{Creator/Vladimir Nabokov}}. Today, this trope is most noticeable in horror movies, especially those of the 1970s and 1980s.
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16	Suburban Gothic shares some history with WeirdWest, both drawing on the idea of the meeting place between civilization -- in Suburban Gothic, the city -- and the unknown -- the undeveloped countryside. Interestingly, the rhetoric of suburbanization in the 1950s often paralleled the "Manifest Destiny" rhetoric of nineteenth century expansion in the American West (and turn-of-the-20th-century overseas colonial expansion into places like the Philippines, Hawaii and other Pacific islands), with those who left the cities for the unknown world of suburbia being referred to as "settlers" or "pioneers."
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18	Often overlaps with MundaneHorror and may contain some incongruously {{Abandoned Area}}s. Compare also to SouthernGothic, another subgenre in the American Gothic tradition, and LovecraftCountry. However, unlike those tropes, Suburban Gothic is not regionally defined, and the fact that the suburbs are so interchangeable through the country arguably adds to the creepiness. Films that take place in StepfordSuburbia can be this trope, but unlike Stepford Suburbia, Suburban Gothic media does not ''require'' the town to be so perfect it's creepy.
19	----
20	!!Examples:
21	[[foldercontrol]]
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23	[[folder:Comic Books]]
24	* The TrueCrime graphic novel ''ComicBook/DidYouHearWhatEddieGeinDone'' juxtaposes the folksy small-town setting of Plainfield, Wisconsin, with the psychological abuse and loneliness endured by - and then the [[GraveRobbing horrific]], [[ILoveTheDead stomach-churning]] [[GenuineHumanHide crimes]] committed by - the title character.
25	[[/folder]]
26
27	[[folder:Film -- Animated]]
28	* ''WesternAnimation/MonsterHouse'': A boy and his friends are terrorized by the house across the street, which is alive and malevolent but inactive when adults are around.
29	* ''WesternAnimation/ParaNorman'': the quiet New English suburb of Blithe Hollow is filled to the brim with ghosts, who can only be seen by the protagonist, Norman. When the town is invaded by zombies, the human residents quickly prove to be more AxCrazy than the undead, showing that not much has changed since the [[BurnTheWitch historic witch-burning]] that figures so prominently in the town's history.
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32	[[folder:Film -- Live Action]]
33	* In ''Film/AmericanBeauty'', despite their idyllic public facing aspects of their lives, Lester Burnham's suburbia is already rotten. His marriage is unhappy, his daughter resents him, and he's trapped in a dead-end job that he hates. Also, all of his family and several of his neighbours are planning to kill him.
34	* ''Film/AssassinationNation'' uses the revelation of the dark secrets of a sleepy suburban town ([[{{Anvilicious}} subtly named]] Salem) to explore mob mentality.
35	* In ''Film/BlueVelvet'', a college student returns to his suburban hometown of Lumberton, North Carolina, where he uncovers a drug dealing/human trafficking operation. The film opens with a montage of almost unnatural suburban wholesomeness, set to [[TitledAfterTheSong the eponymous song]] by Music/BobbyVinton. ''Blue Velvet'' codified the Surburban Gothic trope as one of director Creator/DavidLynch's {{characteristic trope}}s, and the term "lynchian" is often used to describe that which seems mundane, wholesome, and often nostalgic, but on second glance, [[MundaneHorror is intensely disturbing or macabre]].
36	* ''Film/TheBurbs'': Gossipy neighbors in a very middle-America cul de sac deal with the very real possibility that the new neighbors might be a family of serial killers... Or they themselves might be going nuts.
37	* ''Film/DisappearanceAtCliftonHill'' is a FilmNoir set in Niagara Falls, Ontario, which explores the dissonance between NeonCity around the falls themselves with the rundown suburbs further out, where the main character manages a dilapidated motel.
38	* ''Film/{{Disturbia}}'' is about a teenage boy under house arrest who, after having his cable and internet access cut, takes advantage of his ample free time to spy on the rest of the neighborhood and discovers that his nextdoor neighbor is a serial killer.
39	* ''Film/DonnieDarko'', set in the suburban town of Middlesex, Virginia, features many teen movie archetypes, like the outcast teenager and the high school romance, and posits that all of them are disguises. Donnie unveils some of the town's dark secrets but [[spoiler:when he dies, all of this is undone and]] life carries on as it always has.
40	* ''Film/EdwardScissorhands'' marries Suburban Gothic with traditional Gothic tropes to explore the themes of suburban conformity and mistrust of anything different.
41	* The ''Film/FearStreet'' trilogy focuses on the uneven relationship between the idyllic StepfordSuburbia of Sunnyvale and its squalid, lower-income sister community, Shadyside, and the ancient witch's curse at the heart of the inequality. The first film in particular, ''Fear Street: 1994'', emphasizes the small-town suburban setting.
42	* ''Film/FrightNight1985'' and its [[Film/FrightNight2011 2011 remake]] are about a teenage boy living in the suburbs who realizes that his next-door neighbor is a vampire. The 2011 remake specifies that it's the suburbs of UsefulNotes/LasVegas, showing the protagonist's neighborhood as being surrounded by empty desert as if to highlight how unnatural its existence is.
43	* ''Film/GetOut2017'': In the opening scene, Andre lampshades this trope and says that he feels deeply uncomfortable in the suburbs, where everything looks identical and he can't figure out how to get home. He's then kidnapped off the white-picketed fenced lawns, which is also where Chris and Rose go for their supposedly peaceful vacation. [[spoiler:Only for Chris to learn that Rose and her family kidnap, brainwash, and torture black people as part of a cult obsessed with {{immortality}}.]] The movie exists largely to explore the [[IntimidatingWhitePresence subtle unease and sense of unwelcome a lot of black Americans feel in affluent white suburbs]].
44	* In ''Film/{{Heathers}}'', a deconstruction of 1980s teen dramas, a teenage girl and her boyfriend kill several popular students at their suburban Ohio high school and stage them to look like suicides, prompting other classmates to attempt suicide as well.
45	* ''Franchise/{{Halloween}}'':
46	** The original film and most of its sequels take place in sleepy Haddonfield, Illinois where kids walk to school by themselves and the biggest problem on our protagonist's mind is asking out a boy she likes. The only murder in the town's history is treated almost like an urban legend, it's so abstracted from day-to-day life. Until, that is, the murderer himself comes back to town.
47	** In [[AlternateContinuity one version]] of ''Halloween'' canon, Haddonfield is also home to a Druidic cult that's responsible for Michael Myers' killing spree.
48	** In ''Film/HalloweenIIISeasonOfTheWitch'', the town of Santa Mira is a CompanyTown version of this, an impeccably clean place where everyone works for the sinister local toy factory.
49	** In the [[Film/Halloween2018 2018 Continuity]], Michael Myer's second killing spree has a ripple-effect that slowly corrupts Haddonfield from the inside-out. In ''Film/HalloweenKills'', various citizens and survivors form a lynch mob to try and kill Michael themselves, resulting in an innocent mentally ill man who gets mistaken for Michael to fall to his death. In ''Film/HalloweenEnds'', various other crimes start to escalate caused by the kind of paranoia Michael brings out, people UsefulNotes/VictimBlaming Laurie Strode for "provoking" Michael and [[spoiler:a man responsible for a child's death in a genuine accident is provoked and harassed into madness, aspiring to become Michael's successor]].
50	* ''Film/InvasionOfTheBodySnatchers1956'' is an early example with a strong focus of loss of individuality. Residents of a peaceful suburb in California are gradually replaced by emotionless "pod people" who look identical to them, causing the protagonists' friends and loved ones [[spoiler:and even some of the protagonists themselves]] to become villains.
51	** Averted in [[Film/InvasionOfTheBodySnatchers1978 the 1978 remake]], which moves the setting to downtown UsefulNotes/SanFrancisco and turns the story into a metaphor for urban alienation, and the 2007 version, titled simply ''Film/TheInvasion'', which moves it to UsefulNotes/WashingtonDC. However, the 1993 version, titled simply ''Film/BodySnatchers'', keeps the suburban setting, in this case making it the housing at an Army base and juxtaposing the conformity of suburbia with that of the military.
52	* In ''Film/ItFollows'', the danger lies in a curse that's passed from one person to another by sex and is traveling invisibly between teenagers and young adults in suburban Detroit. The protagonists enter the city itself during the climax and comment on the UrbanSegregation between the city and the suburbs.
53	* In ''Film/JennifersBody'', the titular character, a teenage cheerleader, is sacrificed to Satan in the woods behind a local bar and then becomes a succubus, eating her way through the boys at her suburban Minnesota high school.
54	* ''Film/KidDetective2020'' is set in a quaint town which has ample drug & gang activity and it still haunted by the disappearance of a young girl nearly 20 years ago.
55	* ''Film/MissMeadows'': An apparently "nice neighborhood" is the haunt of kidnappers, killers, and child molesters, and the only person who can help is the eponymous (and almost equally disturbed) heroine.
56	* ''Film/TheMonsterSquad'' is a [[DefangedHorrors kid-friendly]] instance of this trope, with a GothicHorror MonsterMash invading a small town, and a gang of {{Kid Hero}}es raised on old horror films rising up to save the day.
57	* In ''Film/ANightmareOnElmStreet1984'', the teenagers of Springwood, Ohio are haunted one by one in their sleep by the ghost of Freddy Krueger, a child murderer who was burned alive by their parents after being let OffOnATechnicality. In the original script and [[Film/ANightmareOnElmStreet2010 the remake]], he was a pedophile instead.
58	* Another early example in the 1955 horror [[FilmNoir noir]] ''Film/TheNightOfTheHunter''. Creator/RobertMitchum plays a folksy preacher who insinuates himself into a small-town community in Depression-era West Virginia, but, unbeknownst to his neighbours and his new wife, is a SerialKiller.
59	* Though not an American film, ''Film/Parasite2019'' has a suburbia-adjacent setting, lots of commentary on consumerism and the nuclear family, and a strong Gothic influence, particularly the part where [[spoiler: a man lives in a secret passage under the house, totally unbeknownst to the other residents]].
60	* ''Film/{{Poltergeist\|1982}}'' follows a family living in a new planned community in California being terrorized by a poltergeist. It turns out that the community [[spoiler:was built on top of an old cemetery and only the headstones were moved prior to construction.]]
61	* ''Film/{{Society}}'' is about a disaffected young man from a wealthy, suburban family who becomes disillusioned with the affluent insularity of everyone around him and begins to suspect that the rest of his family are engaging in VillainousIncest. The truth is [[BodyHorror much, much weirder]].
62	* ''Film/Scream1996'' falls into this trope, since most of the movies it pays {{homage}} to fall into this trope. High school students in an upper class suburban town begin turning up dead and the [[spoiler:killers are two of their classmates, born and raised in town, who have been planning this murder spree for the past year since they killed the protagonist's mother.]]
63	* ''Film/SummerOf84'' actually takes its existence as its central thesis. During the '80s, in the supposedly nice suburbs, a boy becomes convinced that his seemingly-ordinary, very polite cop neighbor is actually preying on and murdering teenage boys. [[spoiler:And he is. In his ordinary suburban home, he even has a horrific TortureCellar set up to look like a wholesome 1950s bedroom. At the end, Mackay specifically leaves Davey alive because he wants him to never feel safe - not even in the suburbs - ever again.]]
64	* ''Film/TrickRTreat'' takes place in the suburban town of Warren Valley, Ohio, which has many dark secrets to hide including a high school principle who is a SerialKiller, [[spoiler: a pack of werewolves visiting from out of town]], and the ghosts of a group of disabled children whose parents arranged their murder.
65	** Its SpiritualSequel, ''Film/{{Krampus}}'', tightens the focus from the entire community to a single extended family celebrating Christmas in an unnamed American suburb, but their underlying resentments and divisions of politics and social class summon the [[TheKrampus eponymous spirit of vengeance]]. From what we see of the rest of the neighbourhood, they are not the only ones around who have attracted his attention.
66	* ''Film/{{Vivarium}}'' is this trope crossed with SurrealHorror. The suburban development of Yonder is a very nice neighborhood, even if all the houses look the same. However, a couple is trapped inside when Yonder turns out to be built with AlienGeometry, impossible to escape from. No matter how far they drive, they keep returning to the same house, and begin going mad from the experience.
67	* ''Film/WeNeedToTalkAboutKevin'' and the book it is based on follow a mother's memories of raising her son in the wake of a massacre he committed at his high school, [[spoiler:after killing his father and sister.]] The book and film explore the dynamic between Kevin, his mother (who didn't want children and was abusive toward him when he was young), and his father (who is unfailingly optimistic about the prospect of having a happy family, causing him to overlook Kevin's behavioral warning signs).
68	[[/folder]]
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70	[[folder:Literature]]
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72	* ''Literature/BennyRoseTheCannibalKing'': The book is set in a seemingly peaceful town, in a an area that seems to just be a normal and quiet suburb filled with senior citizens. This, though belies the fact that the senior citizens have made a deal with a monstrous SerialKiller named Benny Rose, who they're allowing to stalk kids in the suburb.
73	* ''Literature/GoneGirl'' focuses on a married couple, Amy and Nick, who were forced to move from New York City to the suburbs of Missouri when Nick's mother got sick. Much of the narrative focuses on how their formerly-happy marriage became troubled and downright cruel over the course of five years, culminating in Amy's disappearance on their anniversary, and the subsequent murder investigation. Secrets, betrayals, and [[TheReveal shocking twists]] abound, especially around part two, which is when the book becomes a pure psychological thriller. Emphasized in this quote from Amy's diary, just after they move:
74	-->''Nick promised to take care of me, and yet I feel afraid. I feel like something is going wrong, very wrong, and that it will get even worse. I don't feel like Nick's wife. I don't feel like a person at all: I am something to be loaded and unloaded, like a sofa or a cuckoo clock. I am something to be tossed into a junkyard, thrown into the river, if necessary. I don't feel real anymore. I feel like I could disappear.''
75	* ''Literature/TheHouseNextDoor'' is a classic of suburban Gothic, taking place in a wealthy Atlanta suburb and involving a snazzy house that does nasty things to its inhabitants.
76	* ''Literature/{{It}}'' begins with a boy being murdered by a MonsterClown living in the sewers under his suburban Maine town and continues with his brother and a group of friends investigating the mystery behind his death while being stalked by the [[BarbaricBully town bully]].
77	* ''Literature/TheLovelyBones'' is told from the point of view of a teenage girl watching her family from the afterlife after she is raped and murdered by a neighbor on her way home from school. The novel follows Susie as she learns that her neighbor is a serial killer and her family as her father loses himself in trying to find her killer and her mother has an affair and eventually leaves the family.
78	* ''{{Literature/Mass}}'' has the super-elite suburb (or rather, gated subdivision) of [[NoCommunitiesWereHarmed Pobres Park]] play setting to [[spoiler:TheNarrator's murder of oligarch Juan Puneta, though as said narrator, Pepe Samson, is a working-class activist, this isn't necessarily portrayed as an out-and-out ''bad'' thing—but it's also triggered by a pretty Gothic trope: Pepe's discovering the terrible secret that Puneta was involved in a FalseFlagOperation to violently suppress and kill many street protesters]].
79	* ''Literature/ScenesFromOuterSuburbia'' is based entirely around this concept, consisting of a series of short stories and snippets depicting supernatural or simply surreal events all set in or based around the suburban sprawl of American cities, with even the most absurd events [[UnusuallyUninterestingSight being treated as just regular features of suburbia]].
80	* ''Literature/ToKillAMockingbird'' is a non-horror example, with strong elements of SouthernGothic as well, being a ComingOfAgeStory in a small southern town where the local boogieman is actually a MisunderstoodLonerWithAHeartOfGold and the real danger is the racism and hypocrisy that divides everyone.
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83	[[folder:Live-Action TV]]
84	* PlayedForLaughs in ''Series/TheAddamsFamily''. Like ''Series/TheMunsters'', this suburban family is eccentric and macabre in the extreme -- they blow up model trains, own a lion and a meat-eating plant, enjoy sleeping on nail beds, snip the buds off roses while keeping just the thorny stems, and inadvertently make their more staid guests extremely uncomfortable, among other things -- but they're a loving, tightly-knit family and ultimately a good-hearted bunch.
85	* ''Series/{{Angel}}'': In Season Five, first Lyndsey and then Gunn are trapped in a hell-dimension where they apparently have an idyllic suburban life with a perfect wife and children, except that after breakfast every day they are dragged down into the TortureCellar and tortured to death by a demon. The scenes include direct visual references to ''Film/EdwardScissorhands''.
86	* ''Series/Dark2017'' is set in Winden, a small German town surrounded by dense forests, vaguely eerie and yet unremarkable except for hosting a nuclear power plant … [[spoiler:and beneath it, a series of caves and tunnels concealing a time portal that opens into other specific eras, always at 33-year intervals away from the present]]. Many reviewers have described the series as a NordicNoir (or in this case, Germanic Noir) version of ''Series/StrangerThings''.
87	* ''Series/DesperateHousewives'' often discussed the trope and kept it central to every single season. In the apparently perfect suburb. of Wisteria Lane, neighbors committed suicide, kept the [[spoiler:dismembered body parts of a former drug addict]] under their pool for ''years'' so that they could [[spoiler:raise her kidnapped son as their own]], raised an EnfantTerrible, kept a [[spoiler:falsely accused]] murderous son chained up in the basement, and [[spoiler:murder Gaby's abusive stepfather and cover up the crime.]]
88	* ''Series/EerieIndiana'': Teenager Marshall Teller and his family move to the title suburbia-style town, which hides all manner of sinister, nightmarish doings beneath its white-bread surface. Haunted places, creepy clubs, weirdly menacing townsfolk, extraterrestrials, sentient killer tornadoes, and dogs that want to take over the world populate this ominous place. Even {{Bigfoot}}, a werewolf, and a still-living Music/ElvisPresley are encountered.
89	* ''Series/HemlockGrove'': The series takes place in the fictional Pennsylvanian town of Hemlock Grove which is a mixture of working class people from the former steel factories and the wealthy Godfrey family who runs a biotech company. The towns darker secrets are revealed after a young girl is found brutally murdered which is being investigated by Peter Rumancek (a werewolf) and Roman Godfrey (a vampire/upir).
90	* PlayedForLaughs in ''Series/TheMunsters''. Everything written about the main characters of ''Series/TheAddamsFamily'' applies equally here, minus some of the finer details -- they are all (except for Marilyn) dead-ringers for [[Franchise/UniversalHorror classic Universal Studios horror monsters]], they own a fire-breathing dragon and a bat and a roaring cat as pets, they have a MadScientist grandfather who whips up all manner of weird potions, they drive a souped-up hearse around the neighborhood, and they often inadvertently frighten off visitors, among other things. Also, while the Addamses were portrayed as {{Blue Blood}}s, the Munsters are presented as a multigenerational [[{{Ruritania}} Eastern European]] immigrant family.
91	* ''Series/SixFeetUnder'' has elements of this. The show takes place mainly in a funeral home which doubles as the Fisher family's house, and often features appearances by the "ghosts" of the people whose bodies are being held there.
92	* ''Series/StrangerThings'' focuses on a group of teenagers living in Hawkins, Indiana, where a number of destructive supernatural events stemming from research at a local laboratory begin to occur.
93	* The secret occult horror lurking beneath America's small towns and suburbs is one of the main recurring themes of ''Series/{{Supernatural}}''. (In fact, there's been a [[https://www.amazon.com/Gothic-Tradition-Supernatural-Essays-Television/dp/0786499761 whole book]] published about the show's relationship to the Gothic tradition.)
94	* ''Series/TwinPeaks'': The bulk of the series is set in mundane suburbs of a small Washington town (season 3 widens the scope to a few other cities, but still maintains a largely suburban setting), and all of them are a front for either criminal activity or the extradimensional horror from the Black Lodge.
95	[[/folder]]
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97	[[folder:Music]]
98	* Music/PearlJam thrives on this genre; the band's debut album ''Ten'' features songs about a mass shooting ("Once"), homelessness and mental illness ("Even Flow"), child sexual abuse ("Alive"), child abandonment and institutionalization ("Why Go"), and school bullying and suicide ("Jeremy"). Later albums had songs about mistreatement of children with learning disabilities ("Daughter"), police racism ("W.M.A") and abusive marriages ("Better Man"), to name a few.
99	* Music/TomWaits' spoken word piece "What's He Building?" (off the ''Music/MuleVariations'' album) details a suburban community's paranoia, with the narrator recounting a variety of rumors and increasingly weird details about a reclusive neighbor, who is apparently building... something in his basement. The implication is that that the narrator, and possibly the rest of the community, are losing their minds over someone who is, at worst, a [[MisunderstoodLonerWithAHeartOfGold harmless eccentric]].
100	-->What's he building in there?\
101	What the hell is he building in there?\
102	He has subscriptions to those magazines\
103	He never waves when he goes by\
104	He's hiding something from the rest of us\
105	He's all to himself\
106	I think I know why
107	[[/folder]]
108
109	[[folder:Tabletop Games]]
110	* ''TabletopGame/KidsOnBikes'' is designed to tell this sort of story, usually in a retro-'80s setting. How dark it gets is ultimately up to the GameMaster, though.
111	[[/folder]]
112
113	[[folder:Video Games]]
114	* ''Franchise/{{Hitman}}'':
115	** In ''VideoGame/HitmanBloodMoney'', you are sent to kill a former Cuban Crime Lord and his Wife in his suburban home.
116	** ''VideoGame/Hitman2'', as a {{Callback}} to ''Blood Money'', has you invade yet another suburban town, to kill a former KGB Agent, and his bodyguard. This level also features a muffin baking granny, who spikes her muffins with addictive drugs, and has what the game literally refers to as a "Murder Basement".
117	[[/folder]]

Context Main / SuburbanGothic