Basic Trope: Noisy neighbors ... Especially in the bedroom.
- Straight: Alice and Bob are trying to get to sleep, but they can hear Insatiable Newlyweds Claire and Dan having sex in the next apartment over.
- Exaggerated: Claire and Dan can be heard going at it from several streets away, attracting an angry mob of pajama-clad city-dwellers to their door.
- Downplayed: All Alice and Bob hear at night is a soft grunting and shoving through the walls, mainly coming from Claire and Dan going at it full force.
- Justified: The walls are wafer-thin, and Claire (and/or possibly Dan) is very prone to the Immodest Orgasm.
- Inverted: While Claire and Dan are having sex, they hear Alice and/or Bob doing something innocuous, yet highly distracting like watching a loud movie or Singing in the Shower. This completely ruins the love-making mood.
- Subverted:
- Alice and Bob can hear Claire and Dan making suggestive sounds next door, but they're not having sex. (May or may not be a case of Not What It Sounds Like.) For example, the camera would pan through the wall to reveal that they are instead in the middle of an intense game of Twister.
- Claire and Dan are worried that Alice and Bob might hear them having sex, but these worries turn out to be wrong.
- Alice and Bob call on Claire and Dan to ask them to stop having sex under their conditions ... but they're both hard of hearing.
- Double Subverted:
- But they have sex later ... which Alice and Bob can hear.
- Alice and Bob could hear Claire and Dan, but were too embarrassed to tell them to quiet down.
- ...However, they could in fact see them having sex all along.
- Parodied:
- Claire and Dan aren't even home, and Alice and Bob can still hear them.
- Claire has a job as a live news announcer, broadcasting reports across the city she lives in via a microphone in her apartment that is set up to a loudspeaker system. However, she forgets to turn it off once Dan arrives for some action. She ends up accidentally broadcasting loud moaning, the sound of a bed creaking and slapping for the whole city to hear
- A burglar is doing a number on Alice and Bob's place, hears Claire and Dan next door, and leaves immediately.
- Claire and Dan can be heard having sex on another planet.
- Zig-Zagged:
- Alice and Bob hear grunting all the time at night through their walls, though Claire and Dan alternate between sex and fixing the pipes nightly.
- When Dan and Claire have sex, they vary in the amount of noise they make, and even the same amount of noise disturbs Bob and Alice more on some nights than others depending on their moods.
- Averted: Alice and Bob are somewhere where this would be expected, like a hotel or dorm, but only hear a loud TV.
- Enforced: Claire and Dan are a Foil to Alice and Bob in a Dom Com.
- Lampshaded: "Keep it down over there! This is an apartment block, not a showing of ''Magic Mike"!
- Invoked: Claire and Dan decide they don't like Alice and Bob, and decide to be as loud and obnoxious as possible to annoy them and/or make them want to move away.
- Exploited: Claire and Dan deliberately do everything as loud as possible, especially sex, to drive Bob and Alice away.
- Defied:
- Claire and Dan don't want the neighbors to hear, so they do one or more of the following: have sex very quietly, get the place soundproofed, or buy a house with no immediate neighbors.
- While checking into a hotel, Claire and Dan rent three rooms, all of which are next to each other, and then reside in the middle one to distance themselves from others and lessen the chances of being heard.
- Discussed: "What's this? I don't remember there being warnings of an earthquake on TV today..." "Our neighbors just got married, remember?"
- Conversed: "Oh! Remember when we used to be just like them?"
- Deconstructed: All this could traumatize Alice and Bob, make them jealous, and/or lower Claire and Dan's standing in the community. (If it's an apartment, they could be evicted.)
- Reconstructed: Claire and Dan learn some consideration for their neighbors, and resolve to quiet things down, get their place soundproofed, move elsewhere, et cetera.
- Played for Laughs: Alice and Bob decide to go at it so noisily that all the dividing walls in the apartment collapses, revealing all the couples that are active within their tenth-floor rental unit. They all join in a big orgy that wakes up the landlord on the ground floor, who joins them.
- Played for Drama: The sound keeps up Alice and Bob, resulting in Bob getting into a car accident while driving to work in a sleep-deprived state the next day.
- Implied:
- We cut from Claire and Dan having sex to Alice and Bob looking grouchy and tired.
- Claire and Dan rent three rooms at the No-Tell Motel.
[Knock, knock] Keep it down! Your noise went Right Through the Wall!
