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alt title(s): Small Towns Are Evil Everybody in a small town is in on a secret. The protagonist slowly begins to suspect something is wrong.
Such towns are often located in Lovecraft Country.
See also Corrupt Hick, A Fete Worse Than Death.
Also known as Small Towns Are Evil. Usually appears because Most Writers Are From Big Cities.
Examples:
- The made-for-TV-movie The Disappearances has, among other things, a ghost-town with a secret. The sheer volume of red herrings presented eliminates the ability to accurately figure out what that secret is, mind you, but it's most assuredly there.
- This trope may have been first used on television in The Twilight Zone episode "Walking Distance" (1959).
- If it wasn't, it certainly was made famous by The Twilight Zone. In the original series, this troper can think of at least four more episodes dealing with towns with dark secrets. Twilight Zone was practically married to it.
- Carried on in numerous episodes of The X Files.
- Remington Steele used this trope in "Small Town Steele," which cited the 1955 movie Bad Day at Black Rock.
- As did Knight Rider in the tellingly named "A Good Day at White Rock".
- And The A Team in the likewise tellingly named, "A Black Day At Bad Rock".
- In the early 1990s, Twin Peaks pretty much embodied this trope. Well, everybody had a secret. There were plenty to go around.
- Film: The Stepford Wives, Children of the Corn, High Plains Drifter, many others.
- Early examples are the musical Brigadoon (first produced in 1947) and the Shirley Jackson short story "The Lottery" (published in 1948). "The Lottery" was adapted for a made-for-TV movie in 1996.
- Arguably, Brigadoon is more of a Lotus Eater Machine that happens to be real, depending on how one looks at it.
- Author Stephen King calls this "The Peculiar Little Town" and has confessed that he has a weakness for writing stories of this type (among them "Children of the Corn," "Rainy Season" and "You Know They Got A Hell Of A Band").
- His best known peculiar little towns are Derry (IT) and Castle Rock (good number of stories), both in Maine, which tend to redline the weird-shit-o-meter on a regular basis.
- The reality show Murder In Small Town X used this to interesting effect.
- This is the essential plot of Eureka, where the eponymous town is the site of a top-secret government research facility. The tagline for the first season was "Small town. Big Secrets." (Though it's portrayed as more of a Quirky Town despite the Death Ray, runaway Nanomachines and other Phlebotinum Overload that happens on a regular basis.)
- Literary example: The eponymous town in H. P. Lovecraft's short story "The Shadow over Innsmouth".
- Modern Literature example: The old-fashioned Americana-esque town seen in American Gods.
- Hyde River in The Oath, by Frank Peretti.
- In Watership Down, the bucks arrive at a warren where everything is good and abundant, but they act rather strange. Later on they find out that the warren is, in fact, a harvest ground of a rabbit farm, and it's common and widely accepted that rabbits are dying by falling on snares set on the fields around it.
- In Stargate SG-1 episode "Nightwalkers", the team arrives in a mysterious town to investigate the disappearance of a scientist. The townspeople are alternatively friendly and hostile towards the protagonists and it is revealed that the whole town was taken as a host by Goa'uld symbiotes, including the scientist who had originally given the alarm. However, the townspeople themselves were not aware of this as the symbiotes take control only at night.
- Silent Hill. 'Nuff said.
- Arguably, Silent Hill is somewhat different. The vast majority of people in Silent Hill have no clue what is going on, and even the ones who do don't seem to understand all of it. The movie version is an example, though.
- Homecoming introduces another TWADS, Shepherd's Glen, this time with extra child sacrifices.
- Hinamizawa from Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni. If you don't have a dark secret when you move there, you'll soon get one, or get caught up in one of the ones the village has laid on. And just when you think you're getting a handle on what's going on in this town, it all gets far stranger.
- Beautifully subverted/averted in the movie Big Fish with the mysterious town of Specter: the idyllic small town exuding a weird feeling of wrongness appears to be a textbook version of this trope (complete with hints that no one ever leaves, a woman with a Stepford Smiler-esque grin, and all its residents inexplicably going barefoot all the time), but The Reveal never comes; it's simply a Quirky Town.
- Movie: Population 436.
- Webcomic example: Sturmhalten, in Girl Genius. Everyone may not be in on it, but except for the ruling family, and apparently a few nobles, the town's entire population is made up of revenants. And the Prince is trying to resurrect the Big Bad. By abducting every female Spark he can get his hands on to try to give her a new body. Including his own daughter. Who has her own plans to wrest control of said revenants and the Big Bad's other minions. It may be easier to just list the things that weren't Dark and Secret about the place.
- The Goosebumps novel Welcome to Dead House, about a teenage girl who discovers her new house is "The Dead House" to which a new victim is invited every year and devoured by the undead residents of the town.
- In The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, there's a minor town you have to visit after a merchant's daughter disappears there. The Church has a book dedicated to "the Deep Ones", and people say things like "the Brethren don't take kindly to strangers. I'd leave before they find out you're here." The quest was one of the few parts of the game this troper found genuinely creepy.
- That was a reference to "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", mentioned above, and was indeed just as creepy as the story...minus the Tomato Surprise.
- Though depending on how well armed or spell savvy your character is at that point the effect is a little spoiled. The townsfolk aren't nearly as creepy when you're able to effortlessly murder the hell out of all of them.
- For a fairly cheap, poorer quality sequel, Atlantis II: Milo's Return has an effectively creepy and chilling version of this which could come straight out of Lovecraft Country: the first tale in the arc consists of a constantly foggy, frigid Norwegian town where all the townsfolk seem to be hypnotized, brainwashed, or under a spell. If the constantly bulging eyes, monotonous voices, and deathly pale skin doesn't scare you enough, the so-called leader of the town is secretly in league with a Kraken, linked to it through some form of telepathic connection which grants him eternal life and power, as long as he continues to sacrifice hapless travelers to his master/slave. (The...relationship is never quite pinned down as to who really controls whom. And in what this editor considers a clear homage to, or at least an echo, of "Shadow over Innsmouth," after the villain and the Kraken are eliminated and peace, sunshine, and happiness return to the townsfolk, a deleted alternate ending shows the innkeeper with her baby...which extends a Chthulu-like tentacle out of its blanket to caress her cheek, while she lovingly coos and starts talking about it 'growing up big and strong'. Whether this implies FaceFullOfAlienWingWong or simple BodyHorror is up to the viewer to decide.
- And then there's, you know, Summerisle. From The Wicker Man.
- The movie The Village.
- The first town you come to in the video game Shadow Hearts is mostly abandoned except for demons and tormented souls.
- The town fits this trope all the better considering that they, you know, are the bitter souls of abused domestic animals who want to eat you. That certainly puts a damper on things.
- In the movie Hot Fuzz, all the members of the town of Stanford's Neighborhood Watch secretly murder everyone in the town that is "unpleasant", so that nothing stands in their way of winning "Village of the Year". All murders are disguised (sometimes poorly) as accidents.
- The eponymous village of Professor Layton and the Curious Village has a secret, though it isn't dark - nearly all the inhabitants are robots, and the village itself is designed to keep Baron Reinhold's daughter Flora safe until a suitable caretaker appears for her.
- In the horror film Dead And Buried, the town of Potter's Bluff offers another riff on the "double-hidden" secret: The town's entire population, including the sheriff protagonist, is unknowingly reanimated corpses, brought back to life in some unexplained fashion by the local coroner. Who may very well be dead himself.
- Jon Stewart on The Daily Show mocked the "this town holds a Dark Secret" advertising for Wolf Lake by saying "Let's ask the werewolves! Maybe they know what the Dark Secret is."
- Subversion: American Gothic has Trinity, SC, a town whose dark secret is that its sheriff is the Devil Incarnate. But no one knows this fact at all (except Merlyn, it seems), while only the few who run afoul of Buck's wrath, dare to cross him, or refuse to obey him ever even discover what a Magnificent Bastard he truly is. On the other hand, there are quite a lot of people in town keeping their own secrets: Dr. Crower, Gail, the coroner, the priest, Ben, Selena...
- Podunkton from the Sluggy Freelance arc "Phoenix Rising
 " is secretive to the point of parody about its past as a mafia controlled town, or the current state of its vigilante based peacekeeping.
- In the Whateley Universe, Whateley Academy is literally in Lovecraft Country, since the closest town is the Dunwich. Only maybe half of Dunwich is in on the dark secrets, since the town has been gentrified.
- Subverted in the case of Sunnydale. It's a sizable city instead of a small town. Instead of everyone being in on the dark secrets (the portal to Hell and the various demons and vampires that treat the place like a buffet), most of Sunnydale's citizens are hilariously oblivious/in denial about the many, many mysterious deaths that occur there. The only humans in on it are various characters who tap into the dark powers of the place for their own ends, such as the Big Bad of Season Three.
- Doolin in Folklore.npcs
- The town of Pyrewood in World Of Warcraft. It's home to alliance-friendly NP Cs during the day, who turn into bloodlusty Worgen that attack anyone on sight at night.
- Lesser Malling in the first book of The Power Of Five series. The secret is that all the villagers are working to open a gate which will let the Old Ones, and the protagonist is one of the five tasked with making sure that such things don't happen.
- Pretty much every small town the Winchesters visit in Supernatural. For some reason, it seems that you can't become a person of respect in your town without having committed some horrific act in the past.
- Video Game Example: Fallout 3's Andale. Best town in the (destroyed) US, fresh baked pie every morning, and cannibalism.
- Warhammer 40000 favors the Planet With A Dark Secret approach instead, with roughly even odds of Chaos, Eldar, or Necrons being said secret.
- Whenever any Latin American network decides to do a Soap Opera placed in a specially built little town as the only location, this trope eventually appears if the soapie last long enough. Rarely the secrets are supernatural, but that the people in the town is in something wrong is always confirmed.
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