Town With A Dark Secret - Television Tropes & Idioms

alt title(s): Small Towns Are Evil

Everybody in a small town is in on a secret. A terrible secret that nobody outside the town must know. The visiting protagonist slowly begins to suspect that something is wrong.

Such towns are often located in Lovecraft Country. If the terrible secret is covered up with a sweet veneer, see Stepford Suburbia and Uncanny Village.

Contrast Arcadia.

Examples:

Anime and Manga

Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni: Hinamizawa's Curse of the Cotton Drifting Festival.
Many of the towns that Kino visits in Kino's Jouney have a dark secret somewhere along the line. Sometimes it isn't an actual secret, but just something that casual travellers won't notice at the first sight, while at other times it's played dead straight.
The town that Kirika wanders into in Noir was founded for the sole purpose of guarding the entrance to Altena's manor, and the villagers will kill anyone who interferes with their instructions.
Kurôzu-cho from Uzumaki seems normal enough... for about five minutes. Then people start going insane, turning into giant snails, whirlpools start sinking any boats that come near... you know, all the normal risks of building your town on top of some kind of crazy Cosmic Horror spiral shrine that is both alive and seems to just really, really hate people. All people. A lot.
Mr. John Smith's town of actors in the Read Or Die TV series.

Comic Books

Wildstorm's comic book sequel to the 2003 Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake reveals that the residents of the town are completely aware of Leatherface and his family’s murderous and cannibalistic tendencies, but don't do anything out of fear of retribution. At one point, after the heroine escapes from the Hewitt family lair and makes it into a bar in town the patrons stop her from calling for help and bring her to the pursuing Leatherface.
Bar Patron: "We don't want no Hewitt trouble."

Film

The classic 1955 film Bad Day at Black Rock which inspired many of the other examples on this list.
The Stepford Wives
Children of the Corn
High Plains Drifter
Hollowed Ground is about a small farming town who kills visiting families and tries to make one visitor give birth to their messiah.
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.
- It's never explicitly stated, but Specter is supposed to be heaven. No-one leaves, everything is perfect, and there's the talk and surprise of people stumbling in before their time.
Population 436.
And then there's, you know, Summerisle. From The Wicker Man.
The movie The Village.
In the movie Hot Fuzz, all the members of the town of Sandford'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.
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.
The John Carpenter film In the Mouth of Madness features the surreal, warped town of Hobb's End, which may or may not be the fictional creation of horror writer Sutter Cane. Features of the town change and rearrange themselves, the residents are monsters in disguise, and the Last Sane Man ends up taking shelter in a movie theater where the events of the film are playing out on the screen, as the world burns down around him.
The quaint fishing village in Dagon, a film loosely based on H.P Lovecraft's The Shadow Over Innsmouth
Implicated in the Friday the 13th remake, where at least one resident was shown to be aware of Jason living and killing in the old campgrounds.
- Likewise, in Freddy vs. Jason, many adults in Springwood know of Freddy's dream-killings, but have conspired to conceal this from the town's youth to starve him of the fear that gives him power over dreams. Jason comes to Elm Street at Freddy's instigation, so his killings will revive old stories about the Springwood Slasher and restore Freddy's powers.
In John Landis's An American Werewolf In London, the small English town of East Proctor's Dark Secret is, unsurprisingly, a werewolf. Eventually it's not much of a secret anymore. (Especially after an American guy gets bitten and goes on a lycanthropic killing spree.)
Herschell Gordon Lewis' splatter epic Two Thousand Maniacs! is a down-home, yee-haw! take on the trope.
Cragwich from Lesbian Vampire Killers where the villagers ensure a continuing steam of sacrifices for the lesbian vampires in exchange for sparing their lives.
Rivermouth in Cthulhu (2007).
The 2009 German thriller, The White Ribbon, about strange events occurring in a small German village in the years before World War I, certainly counts.

Literature

The Shirley Jackson short story The Lottery (published in 1948). The Lottery was adapted for a made-for-TV movie in 1996.
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.
  - In the end, both of these towns are destroyed, which is probably for the best. Derry dies when IT dies, since it's all but stated outright that IT made Derry prosper in exchange for providing IT with victims. Oddly enough, Castle Rock is destroyed by a visiting evil that took advantage of the secrets and flaws of many of the townspeople so that it could take their souls.
  - Derry isn't really destroyed: it's also the setting for Insomnia, which takes place after the events of IT—or it's an example of the author ignoring later-inconvenient canon so he can keep writing stories about the place.
  - Either that or it's just an alternate universe version of Derry.
- Haven—which is near Derry—also becomes this trope in The Tommyknockers. Am I wrong, or did part of that novel actually take place in Derry as well?
  - Yes, in fact Pennywise made a small cameo. Seemingly interested in the title creatures.
- Don't forget the town Jerusalem's Lot from Salem's Lot. It's had a family that worships demons and consorts with vampires. One of these vampires comes to town and then it really has a dark secret. By the end, the whole town is undead except for the protagonists who burn the town down and leave.
The eponymous town in H. P. Lovecraft's short story The Shadow over Innsmouth.
Hyde River in The Oath, by Frank Peretti.
In Watership Down, the bucks arrive at a warren where everything seems abundant, though the residents act rather strange. Later they discover that the warren is, in fact, a rabbit farm, and it's common and widely accepted knowledge that rabbits are dying in snares.
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.
The town of Shadyside in R.L. Stine's Fear Street series. Teens dying horribly, being possessed by evil—and it's all going on for centuries.
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.
The company town of Despair, CO. in Lee Child's Nothing To Lose. It's dark secret isn't (really) that the giant metal recycling plant is recycling munitions ("the government's dirty laundry"), bombed-out cars from Iraq, or even that they're helping deserting soldiers flee to Canada but its religious fanatic owner is stockpiling the salvaged uranium to set off a dirty bomb and jumpstart Armageddon by causing (even more) fighting in the Middle East. Their mistake is trying to run the Determinator protagonist out of town and leaving a deserter-turned-informer to die in the desert to be found by said protagonist.
Scrote in Terry Pratchett's Soul Music, probably. We never actually get it confirmed that there's anything sinister about their traditional barbeque near the rockery, because The Power Of Rock protects our heroes.
In Brotherhood of the Rose by David Morrell, the intelligence services of the world have set up several luxury "retirement" communities, each regarded as neutral ground where no-one is allowed to be harmed. Only the men running them know that the residents (ambitious men who've fallen from grace, cooped up in a gilded cage which eventually palls) are frequently Driven To Suicide.
Tower Valley in Magnus is revealed to be the testing ground for the Mark Of The Beast.
The town of Omelas, from Those Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula LeGuin, must always keep a small child tortured to preserve its Utopian society.
Killing Floor, by Lee Child.
Harvest Home by Thomas Tryon features a quaint little New England town called Cornwall Coombe that is hiding a very dark secret. The ending, which is a truly horrifying version of And I Must Scream, is High Octane Nightmare Fuel at its finest.
Silverdale, Colorado in John Saul's Creature is a quaint company town where the school has a high-tech sports clinic...which seems to be turning the kids in the town into 'roid raged monsters...
Dashiell Hammett's short story Nightmare Town (in a collection of the same name) features a town run by, and for, murderers and thieves. Only a handful of people don't know the secret.
- Also true of Poison—er, Personville in the novel Red Harvest.
Inverted in Good Omens. Lower Tadfield has a secret, but it's hardly dark. Superficially it's a quaint little Quirky Town complete with pristine cottages, white picket fences and apple trees, but it hasn't changed for ten years: Urban development bypasses it completely, the weather is always perfect, and the area is rich in ley lines. This is because it's the home of the ten-year-old Antichrist, who wants to keep it intact for his childhood amusement.
The Survivalist series by Jerry Ahern. In a post-World War III American the title character finds an apparently peaceful village where no-one even mentions the war. It turns out that everyone made an agreement to use up all available the resources to keep things going as before; when the supplies run out they plan to commit mass suicide by blowing up the town. Unfortunately by the time he finds out a woman whose husband has died has tied him up so they can die together.

Live Action TV

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.
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.)
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.
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...
- Trinity, SC is a real place, as is Trinity, NC. The devil doesn't live there, so far as I know.
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.
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.
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.
The village in the Brecon Beacons in the Torchwood episode "Countrycide".
In the Roswell episode "Harvest" (2nd season) the main characters travel to the suspicious town of Copper Summit, Arizona — which turns out to be filled with their alien enemies.
The suburbs in Chuck vs. the Suburbs.
The Criminal Minds episode "House On Fire", has an entire town flip out on an orphaned boy due to rumors of Brother Sister Incest. His Roaring Rampage Of Revenge takes the form of Kill It With Fire.
In "Murdersville", an episode of The Avengers, an entire town conspires to offer outsiders the opportunity to stage a murder. The townsfolk will serve as alibis and help dispose of the remains afterwards, in return for a sizable sum of money. (The villagers who refuse to participate are kept locked up in ancient torture devices in the town museum.)
Royston Vasey has enough secrets to go around. The main one would probably be the "special stuff" sold by town butcher Hilary Briss.
The Mission Impossible episode "The Town" features a town full of Soviet spies.

Tabletop Games

Warhammer 40000 favors the Planet With A Dark Secret approach instead, with roughly even odds of Chaos, Eldar, or Necrons being said secret.
- In Dan Abnett's Warhammer40000 novel The Brothers of the Snake, Space Marines go to sort out which farmships have a Khorne cult. Some do, some don't, and one manages to pretend it doesn't for some time. They kidnapped and nearly managed to sacrifice one of the Marines, by torturing him to death.
- This also occurs in Mitchell Scanlon's Horus Heresy Novel Descent of Angels. A planet has been delaying their full compliance with the Imperium for years now, all the while hiding the presence of their xenos overlords. Ultimately, they've been buying time to summon an Eldritch Abomination to defeat the Imperial forces.
The new World Of Darkness core rulebook features a story about a town where every year, several people die without any explanation, and they encourage the new-in-town priest to quietly accept it. he doesn't get the hint until Death himself shows up to tell him to shut up and sit down.
- The Boston Unveiled supplement has the fishing community of Howard's End (probably inspired by or in homage to H.P. Lovecraft), where all of the residents are cannibals who are members of the Red Word cult, a group who worship an alternate history so abhorrent that it was aborted from reality into the Abyss, where it became sentient. A wharf along the coast of the town contains a portal into the Spirit World, wherein lies the cult's sacred temple, which the cult devours people in for the purpose of wiping them from history.
The quevari in Ravenloft appear as normal, pacifistic human beings most of the time, seemingly untouched by the evil that surrounds them. Until the three nights of the full moon that is, when every man, woman and child turns into a bloodthirsty killer. They've learned to block out what they do when they change, and never speak of it (even to travelers).

Theater

The musical Brigadoon (first produced in 1947).
- Arguably, Brigadoon is more of a Lotus Eater Machine that happens to be real, depending on how one looks at it.

Video Games

Silent Hill, a small town founded by cultists and harboring a very twisted Dark World.
- Homecoming introduces another TWADS, Shepherd's Glen, this time with extra child sacrifices.
Final Fantasy VII's Nibelheim. The entire town has been UnPersoned thanks to big brother Shinra.
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.
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.
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.
- The second game had a town with a secret too: the village of Folsense (and maybe the townspeople) is one giant hallucination.
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.
Fallout 3's Andale. Best town in the (destroyed) US, fresh baked pie every morning, and cannibalism.
The quaint little village of Hanuda in Siren.
Eversion. And how.
It looks like Charwood is one of these in Neverwinter Nights. It's actually only the noblemen who have the secret, and the townspeople have just been screwed over by it.
In Microprose's RPG Darklands, the events take place in medieval Germany. The protagonists begin the main quest by finding out, which of the many villages has a Dark Secret of being populated by devil worshippers. Attending the mass there is particularly creepy...
The small New England town of ~~Innsmouth~~ Illsmouth in the Call Of Cthulu pc adventure Shadow of the Comet.
Early in Final Fantasy IX, the characters enter the town of Dali, where they're secretly making Black Mage constructs for Queen Brahne that bear a strong resemblance to one of your characters.
Around the start of Chapter 3 in Terranigma, you go to Louran, a nice little desert town with nice people and a lot of ambitions. Until you find out that Louran's been destroyed for quite a few years now and all its inhabitants are actually zombies. The nice town you saw was an illusion by a girl who used to live there.
- All of the zombies themselves are also illusions by the girl (who can somehow hurt and even kill you) that disappear forever once you find her, and nobody actually lives there at all.
- There's also Crysta, which is a copy of Storkholm in the Light World complete with copies of its original inhabitants. Near the end of the game, the villagers and chickens turn into spirits and attack you if you talk to them (doing no damage). You can kill them by throwing things at them, but they regenerate. They also drop massive amounts of gold which is completely useless by this point of the game, as there's nobody to buy anything from (Crysta's shopkeepers aren't exactly eager to help).
The First Town of The Witcher, the outskirts village of Vizima, apparently plagued by beastlike ghosts possessing dogs. Though they blame the local witch, she simply sold them the implements the corrupt people demanded to curse themselves with. The town elders are collaborating with and selling their children to a vicious mob who casually murder the citizens.
The town of Haven in Dragon Age, so obvious it's even lampshaded by whichever NP Cs are in your party.

Webcomics

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.
- Also Mechanicsburg, Not only is it populated entirely by [[minions The Igor waiting for their masters to return, but it's a Genus Loci built on top of a holy spring known for causing insanity and death.]]
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.
The citizen's of Richard's village in Looking For Group are all ravenous undead capable of slaughtering common mortals with ease. Even the little girls can rip out a man's heart.
Subverted in The Order of the Stick, where pre-occupation Azure City is a Town With A Bright Secret: its ruler is also the leader of a covert order of paladins, the Sapphire Guard. (Granted, not everyone in town is supposedly aware of their presence, but given that they walk around the city in their identical blue livery all the time, it's not much of a secret to the locals.)
- Not entirely. The citizens know that the paladins live within the city, but are under the impression that they're more of a police force that protect the city, rather than an elite order of warriors sworn to guard a gate to the prison of an Eldritch Abomination that's capable of killing an entire pantheon of gods and then ending the world, all in half an hour.

Western Animation

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 Face Full Of Alien Wing Wong or simple Body Horror is up to the viewer to decide.

Web Original

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.
In The Terrible Secret Of Animal Crossing, the protagonist finds himself on a bus to a camp under strange circumstances, and bit by bit, the secrets of the camp's much-too-happy exterior finally come to light. Even the final chapter is aptly named, "All's Well That Ends."
SCP-599. Exactly what the Dark Secret is is never directly stated, but it's implied that the town is a malevolent Genius Loci that lures people in, then kills them and integrates them into itself as citizens.

Real Life

Setauket, NY was a headquarters of the Continental Armies intelligence operations during the American Revolution and the home of several agents, including Benjamen Tallmedge, The Spymaster.
In The Altruistic Personality by Samuel P Olinger, the author says that there were a few small hamlets during World War II where rescuing hapless fugitives was almost the town's chief industry.