Suburban Horror

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

During the 1800s and the 1900s, as railroads developed enough to provide dependable, relatively inexpensive travel for many, suburbs began to appear. In England, members of the nascent middle class, having improved their fortunes through industrialization, purchased homes in the environs of densely populated, polluted cities in which the factories and other industries that had, ironically, made them rich were located. The development of subways and bus routes accelerated this exodus from urban to suburban communities. Following World War I, such suburban developments as those at Kingsbury Garden Village, Wembley Park, Cecil Park and Grange Estate, and the Cedars Estate were built by the Metropolitan Railway Country Estates Limited, located in London.

In the United States, suburbs appeared in Boston and New York. In the latter state, on Long Island, the planned community Levittown was constructed after the end of World War II, becoming a model for other such developments. Its five styles of the ranch house were replicated thousands of times. By the twentieth century, there were suburbs in most of America's big cites. Their existence encouraged the construction of shopping malls, the development of roadways, and the spread of chain stores.

Although, in time, commentators began to criticize these planned communities for their architectural conformity and the “bland” lifestyles they promoted, many residents of suburbia found their environments to be pleasant, serene, safe, and comfortable. These qualities, of course, make suburbs ideal settings for horror, for, in novels and movies in this genre, terror and disgust often follow a period of calm or happy existence which, until the horror begins, was the standard, everyday ambiance and milieu.

In Ginger Snaps (2001), horror comes to Bailey Downs, a suburbs in Alberta, Canada, in the form of a beast that's more lupine than canine. Attracted by the scent of redhead Ginger Fitzgerald's menstrual blood, the animal attacks, but it's beaten back by Ginger's brunette sister, Brigitte, before being struck by a van as it crosses a road through the forest upon resuming its pursuit of the sisters. 

Although she's been scratched by the predator, Ginger decides not to seek medical attention, since her wounds close quickly. Ginger's subsequent transformations, both physical and mental, make it clear that the animal that had clawed her was a werewolf, which is what Ginger herself has become.

As might be expected, violence, sex, and death ensue. In the process, Bailey Downs is changed forever, its residents suffering tremendously at the jaws and paws of Ginger, who pummels Trina Sinclair, the school bully; kills a neighbor's dog; turns boyfriend Jason McCardy into a werewolf by having unprotected sex with him; murders her high school's guidance counselor and janitor; and breaks drug dealer Sam Miller's arm before killing him. The suburbs proves to be anything but the sanctuary it seems at the movie's start.

It might seem as though a new house in the suburbs would be a safe place, but appearances, of course, can be deceiving. As Travis Newton observes in an article on his blog, “The wonderful thing about living in a new suburban house is that there are no ghosts in it. Right? Wrong. Paranormal Activity took the security and safety of a new, modern home and tossed it right out the window.”

As Newton further points out, one of the scariest things about Paranormal Activity (2007) is the fact that the paranormal phenomena occur not “in some old castle or space station or haunted forest. It takes place in the kind of house your neighbors could live in. The kind of house that maybe you live in.”

Katie Featherstone and Micah Sloat have just bought a new home in San Diego, California. Afraid of the demon that has been harassing her for as long as she can remember, Katie prompts Micah to set up a camera to record any paranormal activity that may occur in the house while they're asleep or away from home.

The camera does record some disturbing incidents: flickering lights, doors moving by themselves, a planchette moving under its own power over a Ouija board, and strange creaking sounds. When the activity intensifies, the couple asks Dr. Fredrichs, a demonologist, to investigate, but, too, afraid to remain in the house, he deserts them.

The demon bites Katie, transforming her into a fiend, and the camera records her, in her demonic aspect, grinning as she crawls toward Micah's body after he's been hurled across the bedroom. At the end of the film, on-screen text informs the audience that police discovered Micah's corpse, but Katie is nowhere to be found.

Some time ago in a suburban community, Nancy Thompson and her friends battled a nightmarish dream figure, Freddy Krueger, who attacked them in their sleep. His motive for doing so—and his supernatural nature—are explained on the Fandom site devoted to the movie franchise, A Nightmare on Elm Street, of which he is the central antagonist:

A family man on the surface, Krueger was actually the serial killer known as the “Springwood Slasher.” When he was caught and subsequently released on a technicality, the parents of his victims chased him to a shack out back of the power plant he once worked at and burned him alive. Rather than succumb to death, Krueger was offered the chance to continue his killing spree after death, becoming a Dream Demon that could enter his victims' dreams and kill them in the dream world, which would thus cause their death in the physical world and absorb their souls afterwards.

The murders he commits take place in two worlds: that of the dream in which he appears and the actual, “physical world.” The Fandom site does a good job of comparing and contrasting the two as it summarizes the details of the respective incidents. Here, for example, is the account of the death—or deaths—of Tina Gray, which occurs in the franchise's original, 1984 film:

Dream World description

Physical World description

Tina awakens to the sound of a stone, tapping on her window, breaking the contact area. Puzzled, Tina goes outside to hear Freddy Krueger calling her name. She walks out further. Just then, a trash can lid rolls in front of her making a startling noise. Then, Freddy's shadow appears around the corner, Freddy emerges. Tina says "Please God" and Freddy moves his claws threateningly saying "This... is God." He chases her down the alley. Tina turns back, he is gone. Just then he jumps from behind a tree and makes her watch as her cuts off his finger and it squirts green ooze. She runs, he chases her up the stairs, knocking her off and rolling around on the floor with her. She grabs his face which proceeds to tear off, he laughs.

Tina rolls all over her bed, her chest is slit with his claws, she floats up to the ceiling after being spun around in mid-air. Cutting continues until her bloody, lifeless body falls to the floor.

As a demon, Freddy is able to shift shape, and he has adopted a variety of forms, some human, others inanimate, including those of a hall guard; a telephone; a snake; a marionette; television talk show host Dick Cavett; a television set; a nurse named Marcie; Nancy Thompson's father, Donald; a model inside a water bed; a motorcycle; a video game character; a medical doctor, Christine Heffner; camp counselors; Jason Vorhees's mother, Pamela; and a caterpillar. Anything can happen in a dream, right?

The suburbs are no safer in Elm Street than they are in Ginger Snaps, Paranormal Activity, or several other horror movies with such settings. The franchise plays upon parents' concerns for their children's welfare, crimes against minors, physical and emotional abuse, psychological trauma, object permanence, the sometimes-fine line between fantasy and reality, the potential dangers of isolation and of in loco parentis, the effects of vigilantism and vengeance, and other unsettling themes. Apparently, if we are to believe horror movie directors, suburban life is far more dangerous and lawless than many might have imagined.

But it's not just moviemakers who suggest the suburbs may be the deaths of suburbanites. A number of novelists have also implied that such communities, in themselves neither urban nor rural, might well be the deaths of us: Stephen King in The Regulators, Bentley Little in The Association, and Ira Levin in The Stepford Wives venture forth into the forbidden lanes and cul-de-sacs of American suburbia, each offering a cautionary tale about the supposedly good life that's lived there.

Several of my own Sinister Stories (available at Amazon Books) also contain tales of terror associated with the suburbs.

Small-Town, Rural, and Urban Horrors, or There Goes the Neighborhood!

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

Among other topics in his generous introduction, “Contemporary Horror Fiction, 1950-1998,” to Fantasy and Horror: A Critical and Historical Guide to Literature, Illustration, Film, TV, Radio, and the Internet, Stefan Dziemianowicz describes several subgenres of the genre, including dark fantasy, or “quiet horror”; small-town horror; urban horror; and various modern monsters (the child, the mad scientist, ghosts, the werewolf, the vampire, psychopaths and serial killers), giving insightful overviews of the use of each in the horror of the day.

The topic of this post is Dziemianowicz’s perceptions concerning “small-town horror,” “the tale of rural horror,” and “the tale of urban horror.” All quotations are directly from Dziemianowicz’s introductory essay:

The small-town horror story--which encompasses. . . suburban. . . and. . . rural horror--. . . characterized life in postwar America. . . . In the typical suburban horror story, a small community serves as a microcosm of the world.

People of the community live in harmony, or at least a tentatively peaceful coexistence, until an external threat causes social disintegration along the lines of smoldering prejudice or social preferment. . . . Although in a small number of these stories. . . the values that tie the members of a community together prove instrumental to defeating the external threat, the basic small-town horror story offers a paranoid vision of something gone rancid at the core of small-town American life (213).

As examples of such horror stories, Dziemianowicz cites Joan Samson’s The Auctioneer, Ramsey Campbell’s The Hungry Moon, Stephen King’s Needful Things, Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, Charles L. Grant’s The Hour of the Oxrun Dead, Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives, King’s The Regulators, and Robert McCammon’s Stinger (213). These stories follow the storyline of the invasion, which I outlined in an earlier post, the prototypical one of which is Satan’s invasion of the Garden of Eden.

According to Dziemianowicz,

The tale of rural horror takes a more traditional tack, evoking a world of savagery outside the boundaries of the civilized city and suburb. . . . In the modern rural horror story, visitors or new residents find a heart of darkness beneath the quaint and charming darkness of rustic life. The milieu is either home to legendary monsters that terrorize old and new townsfolk alike. . . or hostage to primitive customs and rituals that have preserved its unique character. Frequently, . . . the rural menace embodies the hostility of the community to outsiders, and of the country to the city (213).

Among stories of this type, Dziemianowicz includes in his list of examples “H. P. Lovecraft’s tales of Arkham, Dunwich, and other insular New England communities whose degenerate inhabitants are linked to ancient primal forces”; Owen Brookes’ The Gatherer, Alan Ryan’s The Kill, Thomas Tryon’s Harvest Home, Rob Hardy and Anthony Schaffer’s The Wicker Man, Jack Ketcham’s The Off Season, T. E. D. Klein’s The Ceremonies, and Phil Rickman’s Crybbe (213).

Concerning “the tale of urban horror,” Dziemianowicz observes,

The small-town horror story’s counterpart, the tale of urban horror, tends to make much of the incongruity of primitive horrors taking root in a symbol of modern civilization [i. e., the city]. . . . Even more innovative are those stories that present the city itself as a monstrous incarnation of moral decay, human indifference, and brutal violence. . . . Horrors grow out of the grime, crime, and squalor of the urban landscape. Characters in these stories find themselves in danger of engulfment or absorption by their surroundings (213-214).

This type of horror story, Dziemianowicz says, is exemplified by Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby, Ken Eulo’s The Brownstone, Jeffrey Konvitz’s The Sentinel, Fritz Leiber’s Our Lady of Darkness, Whitney Strieber’s The Wolfen, Ray Garton’s Live Girls, Thomas Monteleone’s Night Train, and Klein’s “Children of the Gods” in the Dark Gods anthology (213-214).

Much contemporary horror fiction is set in small towns, rural communities or locations, and urban centers because these are the places that contemporary people live, and each is a source of horrors characteristic, if not always unique, to itself. One of the sources of enjoyment in such fiction is its insertion of the reader into a world that is familiar, but one in which strange and bizarre incidents occur, seemingly at random, either drawing the folk together or driving them apart or, conversely, allowing the reader a glimpse into life as the other half (or third) lives it.

The country bumpkin can get a peek at the lives of city slickers, or vice versa, or the suburbanite can see how things go among his or her city or country counterparts. It may be reassuring to know that others, elsewhere, live problematic lives in which horror and terror are omnipresent possibilities. Maybe the place where one lives is not all that bad, after all, readers, whether urban, rural, or suburban, may conclude after reading about the lives of their counterparts who have chosen or who are forced to live elsewhere instead of next door. Life may not always be better in the pasture on the other side of the fence, after all.

A well-written story in one of these subgenres, if such subtypes they be, also offers a bit of solace to the reader who does occupy the real-life counterparts to one of these fictional settings. The city resident may face serial killers, rats in the sewer, and the inhumanity of man (and woman) to man (and woman) up close, as it were, and personal, but so does everyone else who lives in New York City, Los Angeles, or Detroit. Misery loves company, and, in cities, large, medium, and small, there are anywhere from several thousand to several million other people in the same boat, as it were (to mix a couple of metaphors).

The same is true, of course, of the city residents’ rural or suburban counterpart; the farmer who tends a hundred-acre farm is isolated, to a degree, perhaps, but there are others of his kind across the country and, indeed, around the world; even a far-flung community, the members of which are separated by acres and miles, is still a community, similar or identical values and practices, concerns and hopes, fears and dreams holding them together. The suburbanite has neighbors--sometimes, one too many (and usually the one next door).

In the “What’s My Line” episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the protagonist, Buffy Summers, having encountered Kendra Young, a second vampire slayer, like herself, as the result of a once-in-a-million-years’ accident of sorts, tells Kendra, “I’m a freak,” to which declaration, Kendra replies, “Not the only freak.”

These two teenage girls, saddled with the responsibility to keep humanity safe from demons, vampires, and other monsters, natural, paranormal, and supernatural, take comfort in the knowledge that they are no longer alone, that they are “not the only freak” any longer. The same is true of the reader of horror stories set in cities, in rural areas, and in suburban housing tracts across the country and around the world, thanks, in large measure, to the sort of fiction that Dziemianowicz cites, “the small-town horror story,” “the tale of rural horror ,” and “the tale of urban horror.”