The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture

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The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture

The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture Bernice M. Murphy

© Bernice M. Murphy 2009 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–21810–9 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents

Acknowledgements

vi

Introduction: Welcome to Disturbia

1

1 The House Down the Street: The Suburban Gothic in Shirley Jackson and Richard Matheson

15

2 Conjure Wife: The Suburban Witch

40

3 Aliens, Androids and Zombies: Dehumanisation and the Suburban Gothic

69

4 ‘You Son of a Bitch! You Only Moved the Headstones!’ Haunted Suburbia

104

5 Don’t Go Down to the Basement! Serial Murder, Family Values and the Suburban Horror Film

136

6 ‘Ah, But Underneath . . . ’ Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Desperate Housewives

166

Conclusion: The End of Suburbia?

193

Notes

201

Bibliography

216

Filmography

222

Index

224

v

Also by Bernice M. Murphy SHIRLEY JACKSON: ESSAYS ON THE LITERARY LEGACY (2005)

Acknowledgements To begin, I offer sincere thanks to my mentor, Professor Stephen Matterson, whose advice and encouragement have been invaluable. I would also like to thank my brave legion of proofreaders, Dr Darryl Jones, Dara Downey, Dr Elizabeth McCarthy and Dr Jenny McDonnell, who optimistically tried to remedy my inability to correctly deploy apostrophes and made countless suggestions and connections which have strengthened this study immeasurably. Housemates past and present have kindly put up with me whilst I talked about suburbs for two years: my thanks go to Edwina Keown, Sheila McCartan, Erwan Atcheson, and the ever cheerful Sinead Murphy. Unlike some of the parents discussed here, John and Majella Murphy have never chained me up in a basement (perhaps because we didn’t have one) or tried to make me eat human ﬂesh, and for that I am grateful. I wouldn’t be where I am today without them. My brother Eóin has watched thousands of horror ﬁlms with me over the years – some good, many less so – and is always happy to provide his own unique commentary on the action on screen. The self-sacriﬁce of my colleagues at The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, who were always willing to go for a pint at short notice, was much appreciated. The Suburban Gothic could not have been written without the support of the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (IRCHSS) who awarded me the postdoctoral research fellowship which allowed me to undertake this study. Finally, I dedicate this book to the memory of my cousin, Áine Clarke, who will always be missed.

vi

Introduction: Welcome to Disturbia

Halfway through Anne Rivers Siddons’ 1978 novel The House Next Door suburbanite Colquitt Kennedy tries to convince her best friend Claire that the titular residence is haunted. Claire is notably unconvinced: Don’t you see that I can believe anything but that? Anything – bad luck, ﬂaky neighbours, magnetic ﬁelds, noxious vapours, what ever god awful accident of natural laws and physical phenomena that might explain some of that stuff over there – yes, I can swallow any of that crap if I have to. But not that there is a malign intelligence working in a house that’s less than a year old, on this street, in this neighbourhood. Colquitt, if I believed that I could not function in this world anymore.1 Though later events make Claire change her mind, the point has been made, and it is one that recurs again and again in suburban-set gothic and horror texts: the ﬁrm belief that things like that (be ‘that’ some kind of supernatural incident, serial murder, family massacre, or the opening of a subterranean hell mouth) simply shouldn’t happen in places like this (‘this’ being a speciﬁcally suburban neighbourhood). And yet, in the 60 years since the mass suburbanisation of the United States began, writers, ﬁlm-makers and the public at large have shown themselves more than willing to engage with narratives in which the niggling suspicion that something dark lurks below suburbia’s peaceful façade is dramatically vindicated. Had Claire thought a little bit more about the way in which suburbs and suburbanites are portrayed in American popular culture, the possibility that a malign supernatural intelligence might inhabit the house across the street may not have come as such a terrible shock. 1

2

The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture

The term ‘Suburban Gothic’ has over the past 60 decades become a kind of hazy critical shorthand, frequently invoked, but seldom satisfactorily deﬁned. Simply put, the Suburban Gothic is a sub-genre of the wider American gothic tradition that often dramatises anxieties arising from the mass suburbanisation of the United States and usually features suburban settings, preoccupations and protagonists. Minorities tend not to feature much, save as exploited outsiders, bit players or dangerous interlopers. Though I do discuss several texts in which race is an important issue, either directly or obliquely – such as Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954), Wes Craven’s The People Under the Stairs (1991) and Andrew Currie’s Fido (2006) – my focus is not really on race as an issue except as it relates to the anxieties and unease of the white middle classes, who are my principal focus here. As we shall see, the Suburban Gothic is a sub-genre concerned, ﬁrst and foremost, with playing upon the lingering suspicion that even the most ordinary-looking neighbourhood, or house, or family, has something to hide, and that no matter how calm and settled a place looks, it is only ever a moment away from dramatic (and generally sinister) incident. The trope of the peaceful-looking suburban house with a TERRIBLE SECRET within is one so familiar as to have passed into cliché. It reﬂects the fear that the rapid change in lifestyles and modes of living which took place in the 1950s and early 1960s caused irreparable damage, not only to the landscape, but to the psychological state of the people who moved into such new developments and broke with the old patterns of existence. It owes much to the spate of, often vitriolic, intellectual commentary that accompanied these changes and predicted that terrible consequences would transpire: tellingly, the language and imagery used by such commentators often owed much to the gothic. In the Suburban Gothic, one is almost always in more danger from the people in the house next door, or one’s own family, than from external threats. Horror here invariably begins at home, or at least very near to it, and in that sense the sub-genre continues the uneasy fascination with the connection between living environment and psychology which helped reinvigorate the haunted house story in the mid-twentieth century. Unlike the small town horror tales of Stephen King, in which the danger invariably comes from a monstrous ‘Other’, here, it is one’s fellow suburbanites, family members and personal decisions which pose the most danger. The child or teenager under threat is a common plot trope of the Suburban Gothic. So too is the destabilising spectre of the suburban youngster turned murderer and the suburban parent(s) turned avenging

Introduction: Welcome to Disturbia

3

vigilante. Property prices, DIY repair costs and the loss of social standing are often just as disturbing to the Suburban Gothic protagonist as more obviously sinister threats. The most characteristic response to uncanny events is to close the curtains and keep quiet about it. As Poltergeist’s Steve Freeling (Craig T. Nelson) announces upon discovering that the kitchen chairs have been rearranging themselves, ‘We’re gonna keep this thing in the family’. (Mind you, Steve immediately contradicts himself when he continues ‘In the morning I’ll call somebody’, as though paranormal activity, like a blocked toilet, is something that can be outsourced to a trained professional.) More than anything else, however, the Suburban Gothic is concerned with exploiting a closely interrelated set of contradictory attitudes, which can most clearly be expressed as a set of binary oppositions: The Suburban Dream: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

Homely The chance to at last have a home of one’s own Nice neighbours The utopian setting for a better life A safe place for children A place in which to make a fresh start A bucolic refuge from the overcrowded and polluted cities Family focused An opportunity to live amongst like-minded people White picket fences and neatly mown lawns A place insulated from the dangers of the outside world.

The Suburban Nightmare: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

Haunted The chance to fall into debt and ﬁnancial entanglement Neighbours with something terrible to hide A place of entrapment and unhappiness An obvious hunting ground for paedophiles and child murderers A place haunted by the familial and communal past Destroyer of the countryside and devourer of natural resources A claustrophobic breeding ground for dysfunctionality and abuse A place of mindless conformity and materialism Basements, crawlspaces and back gardens A place in which the most dangerous threats come from within, not from without.

4

The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture

Perhaps one of the most signiﬁcant factors in explaining why suburbia has long attracted such mixed feelings is the fact that even the very concept of suburban development implies a falling between two geographical stools. The suburb is, after all, an in-between space by definition: located beyond the heart of a town or city, yet still existing within its urban orbit. The geography of the typical suburb has also tended to be intermediate between that of the town centre and of the countryside:2 it is, as Robert Beuka has rightly said, a ‘borderland’ space situated both physically and philosophically between the urban and the rural.3 Given that the gothic so often arises from the gaps between what something is and what it is not, it is perhaps hardly surprising that from the beginnings of mass suburbanisation, the milieu has proven a more than ﬁtting venue for horror and gothic ﬁctions exploring the often malevolent and frequently subversive ﬂipside to the pro-suburban rhetoric espoused by the government, big business, land developers and the advertising industry. Furthermore, as we shall see, the most common preoccupations expressed in the Suburban Gothic have to do with issues of personal identity and the paradoxical comforts and perils of conformity. What if the critics are right, many such texts suggest, and living in the suburbs does make one a mindless, materialistic zombie? Are they a particularly dangerous place for wives and mothers left at home all day? And does the white-collar lifestyle erode masculinity? In recent years, such fears have been joined by another, even more urgent, sense of threat arising from the growing chorus of voices suggesting that the suburban way of life is both horrendously inefﬁcient and a damaging waste of natural resources, condemned by its fatal reliance upon oil, and destined to fall into rot and disrepair when people ﬁnally realise what a terrible mistake it has all been. Indeed, environmental anxieties are a consistent concern of the Suburban Gothic, in texts from The House Next Door (Siddons, 1978) (which begins as bulldozers destroy the last wooded lot in an upscale neighbourhood), to The Stepford Wives (1975) (whose heroines, seeking an explanation for the strangely docile behaviour of the local women, see to it that the groundwater is tested) and most obviously of all, the eco-horror of Todd Haynes’ Safe (1995). As Adam Rome (2001) has outlined in The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism, from the early days of mass suburbanisation, sceptics expressed (understandable) concerns about the destruction of the natural landscape such developments necessitated, their effect on ﬂora and fauna, the waste and pollution they caused and their actual sustainability. It is hardly surprising

Introduction: Welcome to Disturbia

5

then that such concerns would ﬁnd further expression in popular culture. From the moment that the ﬁrst mass housing developments began to spread across the United States, the suburbs were established as an oddly dualistic space for American writers, ﬁlm-makers and cultural commentators, at least partially because the suburbs were seen from the outset to have an innate connection with the very character of the nation itself. On the one hand, the milieu was considered a kind of utopian paradise for the American everyman and his ever-expanding brood, a means of providing cheap, well-appointed housing for returning GIs, and a stepping-stone to the middle classes for millions upon millions of upwardly mobile young families. Yet at the same time there existed a darker, and no less visible, parallel narrative which bore much in common with those which had from the outset shadowed the American dream of progress and optimism: one which perceived suburbia as the physical personiﬁcation of all that was wrong with American society, a deadening assembly of identikit houses and a breeding ground for discontent and mindless conventionality. It is the way in which this nightmarish perception has been dramatised in popular culture which interests me here: for it is my contention that the Suburban Gothic is the gothic mode which has the most to tell us about the myriad social, economic and cultural transformations which shaped American society during the late twentieth century, and the way in which people incorporated these changes into their own lives. Crucially, the Suburban Gothic has always had much more to do with how people chose to perceive suburbia than the reality of such neighbourhoods. While one could certainly make the case for the existence of a signiﬁcant Suburban Gothic tradition in the popular culture of other Western countries (particularly Britain, Australia and Canada), the relationship still differs in intensity from that seen in the American variety of the sub-genre. The prominence of the Suburban Gothic in the US may at least partially be due to geographical and demographic differences. Mark Clapson has noted that ‘American suburbs have spread out enormously, and rapidly, into the surrounding open country. This is partly because of a faster growing population: partly because there was more land to expand in to, and, in consequence, partly because American planning laws are less restrictive’.4 What may be even more signiﬁcant in explaining the higher proﬁle of the Suburban Gothic in the US is the fact that the sub-genre is rooted in the conﬂicted response many Americans had to the numerous transformations that followed the Second World War. After all,

6

The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture

‘rarely has a society experienced such rapid or dramatic changes as those which occurred in the US after 1945’.5 One of the most significant of these changes was the immense housing boom. Millions of soldiers returning from the war in Europe and the Paciﬁc had been promised homes of their own, homes far removed from the crowded, ill-equipped apartments available in the nation’s cities. Each veteran was pledged $2,000 towards housing costs, and construction soon began on a series of vast new housing developments. One of the earliest – and most famous of these – was Levittown, built between New York and Pennsylvania in order to facilitate commuters. Seventeen thousand homes sprang up in the midst of the New Jersey countryside in what seemed an astonishingly short amount of time, all built to a similar basic formula in order to speed up construction, and in many cases already furnished with all the mod cons. In what would prove one of the most astounding migrations in history, Americans ﬂocked to such new communities in ever-increasing numbers.6 Suburbia had arrived in its modern incarnation, and not everyone was entirely happy with it. In the post-war era, the marriage rate doubled and was inevitably followed by an unprecedented baby boom. These developments further fuelled the incredible spread of suburbia – a population growth of 29 million in just ten years meant a lot more families to house. Consequently, between 1948 and 1958, 11 million new suburban homes were established. An astonishing 83 per cent of all population growth during the 1950s took place in the suburbs. By 1970, they would house more people than either cities or farms.7 Behind the dry statistics lay the inescapable reality of the situation: that the basic living pattern of American society was undergoing a seismic shift. Almost overnight, a new community could come into being. Bulldozers and construction crews invaded the countryside: the cities saw their populations drop dramatically. Mass production and prefabrication technologies perfected during wartime meant that developers such as William Levitt were able to apply factory style production techniques to the building of family homes and as a result new communities sprang up more quickly than ever before. In a bid to overcome the substantial housing deﬁcit, the government made it easier than ever before for the ordinary citizen to purchase his own home, providing healthy loan guarantees to builders and subsidising cheap mortgages. As a result, ‘owning a home became cheaper than renting: an ex-G.I. could realize the American dream in Levittown for $56 a month’.8 Those who dreamt of the good life ﬂed to the promised land of suburbia: people unwilling – or unable – to afford

Introduction: Welcome to Disturbia

7

such a move were left in increasingly poverty-stricken and derelict inner cities. Inevitably, there were those who condemned suburbia and all that it was held to represent. The most common complaint was that the suburbs encouraged conformity. To some commentators, the suburbs became symbolic of what they perceived to be the most oppressive aspects of 1950s life – sameness, blandness and materialism. As we shall see in later chapters, suburbanites were frequently portrayed as the ultimate conformists; and suburbia as a very real threat to the ‘individualism’ of the American people.9 What is particularly relevant here is the fact that many of the most vitriolic critical attacks on the suburban lifestyle had a deﬁnite tinge of gothic horror. The Crack in the Picture Window (1956), by John Keats, is a prime example. In this best-selling and bitterly humorous diatribe, Keats described the suburbs as ‘fresh-air slums’ and likened their rapid proliferation to that of ‘identical boxes spreading like gangrene.’10 Not only were the suburbs an aesthetic disaster, Keats stated, but they were also a place of nightmarish ﬁnancial entrapment for the naïve young couples who moved there in their millions. As he put it in his opening remarks, tellingly entitled ‘Welcome to the Inquest’: For literally nothing down – other than a simple two per cent and a promise to pay, and pay, and pay until the end of your life – you too, like a man I’m going to call John Drone, can ﬁnd a box of your own in one of the fresh-air slums we’re building around the edges of America’s cities . . . We offer here for your inspection facts relative to today’s housing developments – developments conceived in error, nurtured by greed, corroding everything they touch. They destroy established cities and trade patterns, pose dangerous problems for the areas they invade, and actually drive mad myriads of housewives shut up in them.11 Suburbia not only ruined the countryside and fatally depleted the cities, critics such as Keats would argue; it was also extremely damaging to the family.12 The long hours and endless commuting of the typical suburban father meant that such neighbourhoods were full of lonely, depressed housewives left in charge of a houseful of unruly children: such a recipe, it was sweepingly stated, was resulting in a massive increase in psychological and emotional problems. In The City in History (1961), Lewis

8

The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture

Mumford characterised suburbia as a bland and unimaginative blot on the landscape. Even more critical of the suburban lifestyle was the 1961 best-seller The Split-Level Trap (written by psychiatrist Richard Gordon, his wife Katharine and journalist Max Gunther), which declared itself ‘an intensive scientiﬁc account of emotional problems in a typical section of American suburbia’ (or ‘disturbia’ as Gordon and his collaborators renamed it). Read today, what is perhaps most interesting about this best-selling tome is the fact that it has much in common with other famous non-ﬁction indictments of the suburban lifestyle, such as The Crack in the Picture Window and, more recently, James Howard Kunstler’s The Long Emergency (2005), all of which evoke the language and tone of the horror and gothic genres. The scene is set in the prologue, which presents us with a panoramic overview of the cast of troubled characters whose neuroses form the basis of the study. It seems that despite the fact that ‘the residents of this town like to think of it as a peaceful country community’, it is not, for there ‘is a restless, dynamic quality in the air. Everywhere new buildings are going up: housing developments, schools, and shopping centres. The town is sweating to make room for more people, and more and ever more.’ The authors go on to elaborate by providing a snapshot of the disturbing case studies that will form the main body of their book, a litany of psychological and physical distress caused by the suburban lifestyle. Each reads like the blurb on the back of a horror novel: One of the young husbands who went to work this morning is feeling ill. His stomach hurts. He doesn’t feel like eating lunch. Early in the afternoon he suddenly starts to vomit blood. He is rushed to the hospital with a haemorrhaging ulcer. In one of the split-level houses, a young mother is crying. She is crouching in a dark closet. Voices in the walls are telling her she is worthless. In the darkness between two houses, a young man creeps to a window and looks in. He is disappointed, for the housewife he sees is fully clothed. He disappears into the darkness to look for another window. The last night’s train from the city pulls in. A prosperous looking middle-aged man gets off. He has spent the evening with his mistress. He walks away from the train hurriedly, for he wants to be as far away as possible when it starts. He is afraid that something in him

Introduction: Welcome to Disturbia

9

wants death, and he thinks this suicidal demon will one day hurl him beneath a train’s wheels. The rest of their book, then, is an attempt to answer the following question: ‘What is missing, what is so terribly wrong, in this pretty green community?’ The Gordons weren’t the only ones using hyperbolic rhetoric to dramatise their concerns about the effect of suburban living patterns. For Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique (1963), suburbia was a ‘comfortable concentration camp’, the prison in which millions of middle-class women found themselves trapped as a result of a conspiracy to reinforce conservative domestic ideology. Commentary on the issue was by no means conﬁned to critics and journalists: it was also a frequent subject for contemporary ﬁction writers. As Scott Donaldson noted in 1969, popular novels such as Peaceable Lane by Keith Wheeler (1960), Leave Me Alone by David Karp (1957), and The Blind Ballots by George Mann (1962),were all negative portrayals of the suburban experience, books in which those who refuse to conform to their communities’ standards are ostracised and a dark underbelly of hypocrisy, prejudice and mindless materialism is exposed.13 John Updike (Couples, Rabbit Run and Rabbit Redux), Richard Yates (Revolutionary Road) and John Cheever also produced less than complimentary portraits of a materialistic, frustrating and ultimately soulless existence. As Herbert J. Gans noted in The Levittowners (1967) ‘in unison the authors [of the time] chanted that individualism was dying, suburbanites were miserable, and the fault lay with the homogenous suburban landscape and its population’.14 As Gans and similarly measured commentators such as Donaldson (1969) and Kenneth Jackson (1985) pointed out, such criticisms tended to ignore the fact that studies indicated that most of the Americans who migrated to suburbia in the post-war era were in fact perfectly happy with their new homes, which were usually a great improvement upon cramped, overcrowded city apartments. After all, as Jackson observed, the ‘young families who joyously moved into new homes were not concerned about the problems of inner cities or the snobbish views of Mumford and other cultural critics’, and whatever the perceived cultural and social failings of the suburbs, they fulﬁlled a very real need for affordable single-family housing.15 In Love and Death in the American Novel, Leslie Fiedler (1960) pinpointed a key factor in the development of the gothic genre in America when he posed this question: ‘In Europe, Gothic was invented to deal

10

The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture

with the past and with history from a typically Protestant and enlightened point of view. But what could one do with the form in a country which (however Protestant and enlightened) had never had a proper past or history?’16 While it seems certain that that the Native Americans would have something interesting to say about the assertion that thousands of years of indigenous civilisation amounted to something less than a ‘proper’ (that is, ‘white’) history, Fiedler had nevertheless highlighted one of the key differences between European and American gothic ﬁction. The imaginative appropriation of Europe’s feudal past had provided many of the most important props, characteristics and settings of the genre. How could it then be adapted to suit a nation in which ‘white’ history went back less than 200 years? A similar question could well be asked of the Suburban Gothic, in which protagonists frequently invoke the ‘newness’ of their surroundings as a kind of guarantee against supernatural incident. The perception is that because the suburbs apparently have no history, they should therefore remain untouched by such events. As Tom Wallace says in Stir of Echoes (Matheson, 1959): ‘It doesn’t make any sense. Why should a place like this be haunted? It’s only a couple of years old.’17 There other parallels between the Suburban Gothic and the early American gothic. Both tend to feed on the suggestive gap between the high-minded, utopian ideals with which a new mode of living was established and the rather darker realities of such an enterprise. It is also worth noting that the rhetoric of the Eisenhower-era suburban expansion often deliberately recalled the phraseology of the colonial era and westward expansion: those willing to leave the cities behind and settle in the brave new world of suburbia were often referred to as ‘settlers’ and ‘pioneers’. Presumably the move was a kind of variation upon ‘Manifest Destiny’: a home for every family, and a car in every driveway. However, the American gothic has traditionally been associated with speciﬁc geographical regions. For Charles Brockden Brown, it was Pennsylvania, and the city of Philadelphia in particular, which provided the usual setting for works such as Wieland (1798), Edgar Huntly (1800) and Arthur Mervyn (1799). For Nathaniel Hawthorne, and later authors such as H.P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, Stephen King and Jack O’Connell, it was New England that would serve as the most common setting, while the importance of the Southern setting to the works of William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, or Carson McCullers can hardly be overstated. By contrast, one of the most interesting things about the Suburban Gothic is that speciﬁc geographical location is so rarely a signiﬁcant factor in such works. The sheer ubiquity of the suburban

Introduction: Welcome to Disturbia

11

landscape is such that it matters little where exactly in the nation the drama is set. Haddonﬁeld, location of John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), is in Illinois; Samantha Stevens, heroine of Bewitched, lives in Connecticut, as do Ira Levin’s (1972) Stepford Wives; Poltergeist (1982) is set in California, as is Buffy the Vampire Slayer; the protagonists of The House Next Door (Siddons, 1978) live in Atlanta. Examples of the Suburban Gothic set on the east coast seldom have regional peculiarities which set them apart from those set in middle America or on the west coast, although that is not to say that such factors never intrude. For instance, the fact that Sunnydale (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) is built over an entrance to hell obviously evokes California’s history of powerful earthquakes, while the sense of almost courtly propriety present in The House Next Door is informed by the narrative’s Southern setting. But in general, the speciﬁc geographical region in which the story is set seldom matters all that much; indeed, as two of the most popular suburbanset television shows of the past decade have grasped, one needn’t even bother employing a real state as setting: Desperate Housewives is set in the ﬁctional Eagle State, while the writers of The Simpsons have made a witty running gag of the fact that Springﬁeld’s precise geographical location is never satisfactorily established. Both locations serve as ﬁctitious suburban every-towns able to represent communities anywhere in the United States. As we have seen, then, the perception that there is a dark and terrifying underside to the suburban experience in the United States is one that has been present from the earliest days of post-Second World War suburban development, and persists, albeit in a slightly reconﬁgured manner, to this day, despite the fact that most Americans choose to live in the suburbs, and have done so for many decades.18 Perhaps because of its sheer ubiquity, however, consideration of the Suburban Gothic as a speciﬁc (and highly signiﬁcant) subsection of the wider American gothic tradition has seldom been attempted. It is a trend paralleled by the relative indifference towards suburban studies: until fairly recently, the ﬁeld has existed as the ‘neglected stepchild of academia and public policy’ as one newspaper article memorably commented, although academic interest in the area is growing (Applebome, 2005). While earlier studies of suburbia tended to discuss the setting from sociological, psychological and architectural perspectives, there has been a move in recent years towards examining the manner in which suburbia has been depicted in literature and ﬁlm, and the current study is a continuation of that trend. One of the most valuable recent studies of the cultural contexts of suburbia is Robert Beuka’s SuburbiaNation: Reading Suburban Landscape

12

The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture

in Twentieth-Century American Fiction and Film (2004), which begins by establishing the importance of the suburban environment to the American mindset. Beuka’s discussion of Suburban Gothic is, however, conﬁned to his chapter on The Stepford Wives. Both Visions of Suburbia (edited by Roger Silverstone, 1997) and The Crabgrass Frontier (Jackson, 1985) discuss the establishment of the suburbs during the post-war era and their cultural and social impact within a purely sociological/historical framework. In Edge City: Life on the New Frontier (1992), Joel Garreau brieﬂy examines the manner in which suburbia was critiqued in the 1950s and 1960s by commentators such as Herbert Gans, Lewis Mumford and John Keats. Again, gothic representations of the environment go unmentioned. Most current studies of suburbia are conducted from a sociological or historical perspective, as in Picture Windows: How the Suburbs Happened by Rosalyn Baxandall and Elizabeth Ewen (2000) or American Dreamscape: The Pursuit of Happiness in Postwar Suburbia by Tom Martinson (2000). Although Expanding Suburbia: Reviewing Suburban Narratives (edited by Roger Webster, 2000) discusses representations of suburban life from the late nineteenth century to the present, including ﬁction, ﬁlm and popular music, horror and the gothic do not feature at all. The Suburban Gothic has also yet to be given more than a cursory mention in the work of critics working within the horror and gothic ﬁelds, and tends to be invoked only in passing, as in Stephen King’s discussion of The House Next Door in Danse Macabre (1981), or when Jerrold Hogle refers to Poltergeist as ‘the epitome of Suburban Gothic’ in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (2002). The sub-genre is discussed in Kim Ian Michasiw’s ambitious and useful essay ‘Some Stations of Suburban Gothic’ in American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative (Martin and Savoy, 1998). However, this is the ﬁrst full-length examination of the sub-genre. In the chapters which follow, I will discuss representative ﬁlms, novels and television shows in order to examine the ways in which traditional gothic motifs have been reconﬁgured in order to ﬁt the seemingly incompatible and yet entirely ﬁtting locale of the modern American suburb. In Chapter 1 I suggest that Shirley Jackson, best known for The Haunting of Hill House (1959), also wrote one of the foundational texts of the Suburban Gothic: The Road Through the Wall (1948). I also argue horror in the suburbs emerges clearly for the ﬁrst time in Richard Matheson’s three most signiﬁcant novels of the 1950s: I am Legend, The Shrinking Man and Stir of Echoes. In Chapter 2, I consider the depiction of suburban women as modern day ‘witches’ in Fritz Leiber’s 1953 novel Conjure

Introduction: Welcome to Disturbia

13

Wife; the 1960s sitcom Bewitched; and George A. Romero’s 1972 ﬁlm Jack’s Wife. Chapter 3 focuses on texts which dramatise fears regarding depersonalisation and the suburbs and opens by discussing the way in which early critics of the milieu (such as Keats and Mumford) characterised suburbanites as mindless consumers, before considering Jack Finney’s 1956 novel Invasion of the Body Snatchers in relation to contemporary anxieties regarding the ‘death’ of small-town America as a result of suburban expansion. This chapter also discusses Ira Levin’s 1972 novel The Stepford Wives and concludes with considerations of the ‘Zombies in 1950s Suburbia’ movie Fido (2006) and Todd Hayne’s Safe (1995). Chapter 4 begins with the economic horror of a ‘real life’ ghost story The Amityville Horror (Jay Anson, 1977), and goes on to consider issues of class and social exclusion in The House Next Door (Siddons, 1978). I also discuss the ﬁlms Poltergeist (1982), and Monster House (2006), as well as the recurring trope of the haunted burial ground, and conclude by examining the recent spate of suburban-set texts narrated from beyond the grave, such as Desperate Housewives (2004 – ), American Beauty (1999), and The Lovely Bones (Sebold, 2002). Chapter 5 discusses terror rooted in a more human context. Here, I look at the relationship between twentieth-century America’s favourite bogeyman – the serial killer – and the suburban milieu, with reference to Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets (1968), John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) and the oeuvre of director Wes Craven, who shows his preoccupation with the horriﬁc possibilities of suburban existence in ﬁlms such as The Last House on the Left (1972), A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and The People Under the Stairs (1991). This chapter will also brieﬂy discuss Parents (1989), The Stepfather (1987) and Serial Mom (1994). Finally, in Chapter 6, I discuss two of the most successful recent television depictions of gothic suburbia: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2004) and Desperate Housewives. I conclude by discussing current concerns about the environmental and ﬁnancial costs of suburbia and ask what impact such predictions regarding ‘The End of Suburbia’ will have upon its depiction in American popular culture. In this study I have elected not to include a speciﬁc chapter on the literary Suburban Gothic as seen in the work of Joyce Carol Oates, Alice Sebold, A.M. Holmes, Jeffrey Eugenidies et al. While such a study would undoubtedly prove to be a very rewarding enterprise its parameters are so broad and its contexts so varied that to do the subject justice would require another book in itself. In addition, because this study is organised on a thematic basis there are also some equally relevant texts,

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The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture

authors and directors discussed only in passing or not at all. As we shall see, the Suburban Gothic is a much more signiﬁcant undercurrent in American popular culture than has previously been acknowledged. It is my hope that this study will go some way towards attracting further critical attention to the most signiﬁcant, yet paradoxically most overlooked, gothic sub-genre of the past 60 years.

1 The House Down the Street: The Suburban Gothic in Shirley Jackson and Richard Matheson

Stephen King once remarked in an interview that ‘My idea of what a horror story should be [is that] the monster shouldn’t be in a graveyard in decadent old Europe, but in the house down the street.’1 Whilst hardly any of his ﬁction has a suburban setting – he much prefers to destroy small town Maine instead – King’s notion of evil as something close to home owes much to the authors I am about to discuss here, Shirley Jackson and Richard Matheson, who helped establish the suburban ‘house down the street’ as a valid gothic site. Existing studies of suburbia and popular culture such as Scott Donaldson’s The Suburban Myth (1969), Robert Beuka’s SuburbiaNation (2004) and Catherine Jurca’s White Diaspora: the Suburb and the Twentieth-Century American Novel (2001), trace the beginnings of suburban literature back to the mid-1950s and to the work of mainstream writers such as John Cheever, John Updike, Richard Ford and Richard Yates. However, the ﬁction of Jackson and Matheson, which falls into the often maligned horror and gothic genres, not only helped establish many of ‘mainstream’ suburban literature’s most salient anxieties and preoccupations but also did so in an insightful and remarkably revealing manner, a manner which helped establish the importance of gothic-themed depictions of suburbia in American popular culture of the mid-twentieth century. In Jackson’s debut novel, The Road Through the Wall (1948), and Matheson’s three great genre novels of the 1950s – I Am Legend (1954), The Incredible Shrinking Man (1956) and Stir of Echoes (1959) – suburbia, its residents, and many of the most pressing anxieties – economic, social, cultural and domestic – of the post-war era are explored in notably gothic terms. 15

16

The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture

The prodigious outpouring of journalism, ﬁction and sociology on the subject during the 1950s was all part of a concerted effort to deﬁne where exactly the suburbs ﬁt into the larger social scheme of things.2 The many negative portrayals of suburbia that appeared at this time were undoubtedly motivated at least in part by fear at the unprecedented pace at which American society was reinventing itself. Suburbia was after all one of the most obvious manifestations of the way in which the traditional family and work patterns of the nation were changing. The accusations of mindless conformity and materialism levelled at the residents of these new neighbourhoods ignored the fact that such symptoms – to the extent that they existed at all – were as much a result of the incredible economic boom and rapid rise in living standards as they were of the suburban environment itself. And yet all too often, suburbia itself was blamed for the sudden and undesirable change in the national character, as though the environment itself had exerted some sort of mysterious force over its unwitting inhabitants. For some cultural commentators during the 1950s (and since) suburban development had become a genuine evil; its inhabitants alienated, mindlessly materialistic zombies, and its cosy, cheap houses as disturbing in their own way as any haunted castle. No wonder then that the post-war era also saw the rebirth of the horror and gothic genres: the time was right for a new variety of ﬁctional unease, and it was ﬁtting – as well as predictable, given the ubiquity of the suburban landscape in post-war America – that suburbia should become a signiﬁcant setting for such narratives. Before the 1950s, the most signiﬁcant twentieth-century American horror writer had been H.P. Lovecraft, whose ﬂorid tales of ‘cosmic’ horror eventually spawned their own inﬂuential cult. Though he has remained a highly signiﬁcant ﬁgure in modern American horror, Lovecraft’s archaic style and old-fashioned preoccupations would soon be superseded by a new mood in horror. The real life terrors of the Second World War had an immense impact upon the genre. As David J. Skal put it, ‘earlier, horror came from the irrational and ungodly encroaching from without – post war stories increasingly show horror arising from aspects of life normally associated with security and stability’.3 The fear that had for generations been aroused by the old bogeymen – Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, the werewolf and the Mummy – had been neutralised by the awareness that no ﬁctional or ﬁlmic ﬁend could ever top the evils perpetrated by humans themselves. The result of this paradigm shift was the trend towards exploring horrors of a more human scale that can be found in most post-war horror ﬁction.4 As one of the most signiﬁcant social developments of the era,

The Suburban Gothic in Jackson and Matheson 17

it is hardly surprising then that suburbia and its residents would soon become a notable genre preoccupation. Richard Matheson’s ﬁrst published story ‘Born of Man and Woman’ (Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 1950) is typical of this trend. Recounted from the perspective of a hideously deformed, horribly abused mutant child who has been conﬁned in the basement of the family home since birth, it manages to be both deeply poignant and quite disturbing. As would happen so often in Matheson’s ﬁction, our sympathies lie ﬁrmly with the persecuted outsider rather than the representative of ‘normality’ – a situation often replicated in Shirley Jackson’s work as well. In setting so much of his ﬁction in the recognisably ‘real’ world he indicated the direction that horror would take in the latter half of the twentieth century. Stephen King has even declared that ‘the author who inﬂuenced me the most as a writer was Richard Matheson’.5 Matheson usually set his novels and stories in an obviously contemporary, often urban, 1950s milieu. He was much more concerned with exploring the speciﬁc anxieties and preoccupations of the present than those of an idealised past (or future): as Jancovich (1996) has noted, ‘while Bradbury’s characters seem to be the products of turn-ofthe-century, rural, middle-American small towns, Matheson’s characters are usually deﬁned in relation to suburban domesticity and corporate employment’.6 As we shall see, Matheson and Jackson both played a key, if sorely overlooked, role in reconﬁguring the tropes and conventions of existing gothic and horror literature in order to skilfully dissect the mores and anxieties of the modern age. In their best-known novels each author takes a basic plot outline which is familiar to anyone even vaguely aware of the genre’s most familiar tropes – the haunted house, the vampire story – and turns the concept inside out, in the process reinvigorating well-worn story templates and demonstrating that genre literature can have a great deal to say about the time in which it was written. Just as signiﬁcantly, their work also displays an early fascination with the social and gothic possibilities presented by suburbia.

Shirley Jackson’s The Road Through the Wall (1948) Jackson was one of the 1950s’ most critically and commercially successful writers, and managed to achieve both critical acclaim and substantial popular success in a range of literary outlets. Although best known for her infamous short story ‘The Lottery’ (1948), Jackson also completed six novels before her death in 1965 amongst them The Haunting of Hill

18

The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture

House (1959) and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962). Of her six completed novels (she was working on a seventh, Come Along With Me, at the time of her death in 1965) three are situated in distinctively gothic mansions as signiﬁcant to their texts as any other (human) character. It is due to more than simple setting that these novels – The Sundial (1956), Hill House, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle – are generally referred to as her ‘house’ novels: for Jackson, ‘houses – at least her ﬁctional houses – were like people. They not only reﬂected the egos and foibles of their original owners, who often had unusual tastes, but they also exerted a mysterious force of their own’.7 It was this ‘mysterious force’ that so enthralled Jackson and shaped her ﬁction: the grip that a house can have over the imagination – or actions – of its inhabitants. I am not going to discuss these three texts in any signiﬁcant detail on this occasion. What interests me here is the remarkably jaundiced (and prescient) depiction of pre-war suburban life found in Jackson’s debut novel The Road Through The Wall (1948).8 Road has until fairly recently been overlooked by critics, with the exception of Lenemaja Friedman’s cursory discussion in the 1975 study Shirley Jackson.9 Since then, only Joan Wylie Hall’s excellent article ‘Fallen Eden in Shirley Jackson’s The Road Through the Wall’ 10 and Darryl Hattenhauer’s discussion of the text in Shirley Jackson’s American Gothic (2003) have given the novel much notice. However this much overlooked and admittedly ﬂawed novel not only serves as the starting point for my study of the American Suburban Gothic, but also proves that Jackson anticipated the 1950s’ and 1960s’ literary and sociological ﬁxation upon suburbia and suburbanites by several years. As we shall see, Jackson’s preoccupation with living spaces went beyond the psychological, and, indeed, the supernatural, although they are both important facets of her work. Her fascination with homes and with the people who live in them was cultural as well, prompted to no small extent by the pervasive anxieties and sociological ﬁxations of post-Second World War American society. There is a very real link between Jackson’s obvious preoccupation with houses and living spaces and the enormous and rapid changes in American living and domestic patterns which took place during the time at which she wrote. Part of the reason for this oversight is the fact that Jackson rarely dealt directly with contemporary social issues. In that respect, Road remains something of an anomaly, the most naturalistic novel she ever wrote, and a notable attempt to comment in ﬁctional form upon the effect that rapid post-war suburbanisation was having upon American society. Jackson’s work here, as elsewhere, has a subtlety and intelligence

The Suburban Gothic in Jackson and Matheson 19

often missing from better known, rather more ‘mainstream’ ﬁctional forays into the suburban milieu. Whilst many of the pop sociologists and novelists who came after her would blame the domestic and social malaise they detected in suburbia upon the living environment itself, as though the very surroundings could somehow have an almost supernaturally damaging effect upon the inhabitants and their quality of life (itself a very gothic notion), in Road, Jackson lays the blame for all that goes wrong directly at the feet of the arrogant, self-obsessed denizens of Pepper Street, her ﬁctional Californian neighbourhood. The suburban lifestyle is not the cause of their selﬁshness, but rather a reﬂection of it: if there is evil here it lies within the human heart, and not within the bricks and mortar of the notably self-contained street in which her characters live. Though it was rarely explicitly stated, most of Jackson’s writing was set in New England, and her experiences as an outsider living in small, insular rural communities would have a huge inﬂuence on her work, particularly on later novels such as The Sundial and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Born in the prosperous San Francisco suburb of Burlingame in 1916, Jackson lived in California until she was 14 years old, at which time her family moved to Rochester, New York. Road is the only Shirley Jackson novel to have a Californian setting. It is also the only Jackson text in which both the location (a suburb of Cabrillo, 30 miles from San Francisco) and the date (the summer of 1936) in which the events described take place are speciﬁcally mentioned. As Joan Wylie Hall, amongst others, has observed, ‘in none of her later books is Jackson as explicit about the time and geographical location as she is here’.11 This exactness is probably due to the fact that Road is her most obviously autobiographical text. Pepper Street, the sheltered middle-class enclave in which all of the text’s action takes place, is modelled on the author’s own childhood residence, the well-to-do San Francisco suburb of Burlingame. Like its ﬁctional counterpart, Burlingame was ‘a clean, secure enclave of wasp homogeneity set far enough away from the city to be safe from any stray urban inﬂuences’.12 Both neighbourhoods, in addition, sit next to, yet separated from, enclaves of even greater wealth and exclusivity – Jackson’s childhood home was situated right next to a vast green that marked the end of their well-off neighbourhood and the beginning of one that was ‘monstrously rich’: Pepper Street has the titular wall marking the boundary between mere afﬂuence and true wealth. The removal of this wall halfway through the text symbolically marks the point at which their self-satisﬁed, materialistic way of life begins to begin to fall apart.

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The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture

Named after a former US ambassador who settled there, Burlingame was originally colonised by wealthy San Franciscans seeking a pleasant climate in which to build their second homes. The path of the neighbourhood’s early establishment and growth neatly replicates the evolution of the ﬁrst wave of suburban developments in the latter half of the nineteenth century. ‘Halfway between a suburban development and a collection of large private estates’, as Jackson puts it, Pepper Street is a borderline space existing at a borderline time. The liminal status of this type of environment – neither one thing, nor another, but something in-between – is part of what helps make American suburbia the perfect breeding ground for ﬁctional expressions of anxiety and unease. Fear breeds in the cracks. Just as Jackson’s writing helped establish a clear progression in gothic literature from classical to modern themes and preoccupations, so too does Pepper Street look both backwards and forwards – in part a reminder of the original function of suburbia as refuge for the privileged few, but also, with the demolition of the wall, marking the point at which such enclaves began to be opened up to the masses as well. For whilst the suburban ﬁctions I will be discussing in this book are in the main situated after the Second World War, the notion of the suburbs was not of course a new development in itself: rather it was the scale and accessibility of the post-war housing boom which was unique. As Lewis Mumford noted in The City in History (1961) ‘From the thirteenth century onwards dread of plague prompted a periodic exodus from the city; and in that sense one may say that the modern suburb began as a sort of rural isolation ward’.13 However, as he also observed, this strategic withdrawal from the crowded, noisy and often dangerous conﬁnes of the city was for many centuries a privilege ‘reserved largely for the upper class; so that the suburb might almost be described as the collective urban form of the country house’. Fittingly enough then, Burlingame only really began to take off as an exclusive suburban colony with the founding of a country club in 1893 and the establishment of a railway station the year after that. It was this development, more than any other, which could really put an early suburb on the map; after all, a suburb was only really viable if one lived within commuting distance of the city, otherwise one was actually living in the countryside. According to Scott Donaldson, ‘the ﬁrst American suburbs emerged in the aftermath of the Civil War, with the development of the railroad network, and were squarely aimed at the middle classes’.14 In 1900, nearly three-quarters of all Americans still lived in rural areas, but ‘the urban industrial revolution . . . had been

The Suburban Gothic in Jackson and Matheson 21

gathering pace in the US since the 1870s, drawing large sections of the internal and immigrant populations into the town and city centers to ﬁnd work’.15 In a pattern that would be replicated on a much grander scale in a few decades, as the poor entered the cities in ever increasing numbers, the rich and well-off often decided to leave, and so the latter half of the nineteenth century saw the establishment of so-called ‘railroad suburbs’ which allowed the wealthy to live in peaceful, relatively pastoral surroundings yet still travel daily to the city for business – an early version of the commuting lifestyle which would become so common in the late twentieth century.16 The Burlingame Jackson grew up in and which provided the model for the insular, self-obsessed enclave in which all the action of Road takes place, was a perfect example of the kind of upscale suburban development which existed in the US prior to the advent of mass suburbanisation in the late 1940s and 1950s. It could be argued then that Road both looks back to the past (in which it is so explicitly set) and yet also points forward, to the future of housing in the United States. In its depiction of suburbanites as selﬁsh, snobbish and obsessively hierarchical, the novel also anticipates many of the criticisms made most frequently about the locale in the years to come. The novel opens with an impeccably detailed map-like prologue in which Jackson methodically describes the layout, homes and residents that inhabit her ﬁctional suburb. We are told of the men of the neighbourhood that: They all lived on Pepper Street because they were able to afford it, and none of them would have lived there if he had been able to afford living elsewhere, although Pepper Street was charming and fairly expensive and even comfortably isolated.17 Jackson’s precise locating of each home along the street, and her descriptions of the make-up, deﬁning characteristics and social status of each of the families and their respective homes, lends authenticity to the narrative, and ‘again testiﬁes to [her] knowledge of and interest in houses.’18 We are soon made aware that there is a well-deﬁned social hierarchy in place on Pepper Street: the Desmonds, who ‘had lived on Pepper Street longer than anyone else,’ are at the apex of this hierarchy, the ‘aristocracy’ of the neighbourhood, and clearly destined to move up in the world.19 Their young daughter, Caroline, introduced casually in the prologue, becomes a key ﬁgure in the novel’s tragic climax. Other families include the Catholic Byrnes; Mrs. Mack, a crazy old woman who reads

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The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture

the Bible to her dog, feeds him at the table, and punctuates the text with her ominous biblical commentary; the Roberts family (comprising the philandering Mike Roberts, his nagging wife and their three children); the Ransom-Jones household, in which the wife and her invalid sister jealously vie for the husband’s attention; the Perlmans, the only Jewish family on the block; the Merriams, whose only child Harriet forms a friendship with the Perlmans’ daughter; the Donalds and their three children (including Todd, another ultimately key ﬁgure in the narrative); and the succession of working-class families who inhabit the run-down house at the end of the street. Before the story proper even begins therefore, we have been introduced to the location and characters that will inform the narrative. During the course of the novel, Jackson exposes the private lives and often twisted relationships between the individuals and amongst the various households on the block. The street functions as a microcosm of afﬂuent, white, middle-class suburban life, just as the settings of later books like William H. Whyte’s The Organisation Man (1957) and the short stories of John Cheever functioned as a commentary upon the effect the massive growth in post-war suburbia had upon the lives of its inhabitants. Jackson soon shows us that the outwardly pleasant, civilised folk who live in her suburb are really anything but. The poorer, working-class families who move in and out of the shabbiest house on the block are treated at best with patronising condescension, and at worst with contemptuous disdain. Similarly, a good-natured high-school girl who brieﬂy works for the Roberts family is ill-treated both by her employers and the rest of the neighbourhood. Racial prejudice is another unspoken feature of Pepper Street: when lonely, overweight teenager Harriet Merriam forms her ﬁrst real friendship with Marilyn Perlman, who is Jewish,20 her mother soon forbids all further contact between the girls. The Perlmans don’t even receive an invitation to the lavish garden party that takes place towards the end of the novel. A Chinese man who strikes up a conversation with some of the children soon becomes a ﬁgure of fearful fascination and cruel teasing. Indeed, much of the story focuses on the relationships between the various children and teenagers in the area. Jackson here, as elsewhere in her work, excels at evoking the selfcontained, intensely insular world of children and troubled teenagers (a trait that would ﬁnd its fullest expression in the character of precocious mass murderer Merricat Blackwood in We Have Always Lived in the Castle). She pays particular attention to the doomed attempts of the ‘large-boned and stout’ Harriet Merriam to establish her own independent identity away from her controlling mother, who often forbids

The Suburban Gothic in Jackson and Matheson 23

her to play with the other children on the street and paws through her private letters and notebooks. The behaviour of the children unconsciously echoes that of their narrow-minded, materialistic parents. They too have a strict social hierarchy and the weakest members of the group are bullied mercilessly. Todd Donald, an awkward 13-year-old who is completely overshadowed by his athletic older brother and sneering, indifferent sister, is at the bottom of the social ladder, alternatively mocked and ignored by everyone – even his own parents – until he becomes the tragic centre of attention at the novel’s climax. In a scene that foreshadows later events, Todd takes out his aggression and loneliness on a group of girls by throwing stones at them: ‘He was possessed by as strong a desire for punishment as he had ever achieved’.21 He will later be accused of bashing a little girl’s head in with a rock, in the terrible incident which marks the climax of the novel. Whilst the adults tend to hide their feelings (at least until behind closed doors) their children are often openly cruel to one another. But really their elders are no better: Mrs. Roberts is shrewish and paranoid, her husband a serial adulterer; Harriet’s mother makes her daughter burn her private writings, belittles her husband, and ends her child’s only friendship; the Desmonds are smug and materialistic; the street’s spinster, Miss Fielding, refuses to help anyone else in case her dreary, routine existence is interrupted; and Todd’s parents ignore the isolation and unhappiness of their youngest child. The removal of the wall that separates Pepper Street from the far more prosperous enclave beyond is the key turning point in the text. As Lenemaja Friedman points out, ‘there is something safe about the wall: it offers protection and ensures the social stability of the neighbourhood. And, when it becomes clear that outside forces, belonging to the estates enclosed therein, plan to tear down part of the wall, people feel threatened and would stop the project if they could’.22 The construction work is an unsettling, disturbing inﬂuence, bringing workmen, dust and noise into the previously calm suburb. The residents are uncomfortably aware that once the road through their precious wall is completed, life in Pepper Street will never be the same again. The text constantly cuts back and forth between the various protagonists, in a style that is intentionally panoramic. There are several different plot strands at work: Harriet Merriam’s relationship with her overbearing mother and her new friend Marilyn; Todd Donald’s doomed attempts to endear himself to his family and to the rest of the youngsters in the neighbourhood; Mike Roberts’ philandering ways; the departure of the working-class Martin family and the arrival of the dysfunctional

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Terrells; the relationships between the women who assemble every week to sew and gossip; and the games and bullying that take place amongst the street’s youngsters. The novel climaxes with an ambiguous and undetailed death that shakes the community to the core of its complacent foundations. At the end of a neighbourhood garden party, Mrs. Desmond suddenly realises that Caroline, her three-year-old, is missing. Soon, the child’s anxious father has visited each home; characteristically, Miss Fielding again refuses to offer any assistance in a time of crisis. As evening approaches, the sense of urgency and foreboding amongst the residents increases. The local men are organised into a search party, whilst the women and children huddle together in expectation of disaster.23 The prevailing mood amongst the crowd is said by Jackson to be one of ‘keen excitement’. They are all connoisseurs of other people’s misery: No one really wanted Caroline Desmond safe at home, although Mrs. Perlman said crooningly behind Marilyn, ‘The poor, poor woman’ and Mrs. Donald said again, ‘If only we’d known in time’. Pleasure was in the feeling that the terrors of the night, the jungle, had come close to their safe lighted homes, touched them nearly, and departed, leaving every family safe but one.24 A visibly agitated Todd Donald appears at the Byrne house saying that he needs money and pleading for someone to buy his bicycle, and, as is usual, is told to go away. Towards nightfall, his absence is ﬁnally noticed, and a terrible suspicion begins to form in the minds of the waiting crowd. Little Caroline’s body is discovered at a nearby creek: her clothes are muddy, and an ominously blood-stained rock sits nearby. The unfortunate Todd, unaware of the unfolding drama and the extensive search now underway for him, simply goes home, and ﬁnds himself being interrogated by a terrifying policeman: ‘Tell us how you killed that little girl . . . listen sonny, we’re going to put you in jail’.25 The terriﬁed boy is left alone for a while to consider his ‘crime’: by the time the police return he has committed suicide. In typical Jackson style, the extent of the boy’s involvement – if he is involved at all – in Caroline Desmond’s death is never made clear. The death may have seemed suspicious, we are told, but the child could just as easily have fallen over, and some think that the offending rock was too heavy for a young boy to have lifted anyway. Ultimately, it is up to the reader to decide: what really matters is that for the residents of

The Suburban Gothic in Jackson and Matheson 25

Pepper Street, the worst-case scenario – one child murdering another – is all too easy to believe: they are determined to think the worst of one another at the expense of humanity and reason. Road is, as Judy Oppenheimer has observed, ‘a book remarkable for its smooth style, its unpleasant view of suburbia, and the amazing fact that it features not even one likeable character in a cast of many.’26 In that ﬁnal respect, Jackson’s debut has much in common with her later, more obviously gothic novel The Sundial (1956), another sour tale in which a large cast of isolated protagonists reveal their twisted, self-obsessed natures. For Jackson, this ﬁrst novel was perhaps a way of writing out of her system her disapproval of the sheltered, exclusive and materialistic surroundings in which she spent much of her childhood. She had after all grown up in ‘the sort of neighborhood that would be celebrated again and again on T.V., thirty years later, as a ﬁt setting for happy W.A.S.P. families.’27 But as in so much of her work, Jackson was compelled to look beyond the brittle façade of her suburban neighbourhood, to the prejudice, cruelty and class divisions beneath. Although largely overshadowed by Jackson’s later work, and by no means her most accomplished novel, Road is therefore nevertheless signiﬁcant in several respects. First of all, the novel showcases Jackson’s ability to combine the everyday with gothic incident in what would become her trademark style. According to Jackson, the recurring theme in all she wrote was her ‘insistence upon the uncontrolled, unobserved wickedness of human nature’.28 Hence her creation of ‘a middle class neighborhood where individuals attempting to progress according to their own limited visions were destroyed by their own wickedness’.29 Another signiﬁcant aspect of the novel is the way in which it reﬂects Jackson’s lifelong interest in houses, and in the psychological effect one’s living environment can have. The wall that physically separates Pepper Street from the rest of the world is representative of the selﬁshness, materialism and narcissism of the people within: they are literally unable to see much beyond their own back yards.30 Parents and children, husbands and wives, next-door neighbours are all unwilling – or unable – to listen to one another, or to engage at a level deeper than insincere friendliness or outright bullying. Interestingly, this type of self-containment – of distance from the realities and responsibilities of the ‘real’ world – was an aspect of the post-war suburban lifestyle that frequently aroused the ire of critics, both during the 1950s and after. Which brings us to what is probably the most signiﬁcant – and yet overlooked – characteristic of the novel: the way in which it anticipates the most salient issues and themes of the debates about suburbia

26

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that raged in American society throughout the 1950s. Written just as the suburban housing boom was getting underway, the novel, although set in 1936, nevertheless articulates a jaundiced view of suburban life that had much in common with the wave of similarly themed literature that materialised 20 years later. In her measured, panoramic portrayal of the hypocrisy and subtle nastiness of an earlier incarnation of suburbia, Jackson had preﬁgured by several years many of the themes more famously explored by a succession of later writers. Her careful use of gothic incident and tone is especially restrained – and all the more effective – when compared to the hysterical and often downright unlikely denunciations of others. The way in which suburbia itself was often cited by the more hysterical cultural commentators of the time as the root of all evil seems all the more simplistic when contrasted with Jackson’s treatment of the subject. Her love of eighteenth-century novels was, as Oppenheimer notes, an important inﬂuence upon her portrayal of the suburban lifestyle. The Augustan insistence on a ‘pattern precariously imposed upon the chaos of human development’ (Oppenheimer, p.125) was for Jackson aptly paralleled by the regimented neighbourhoods of the suburbs, which in her text represent ‘a human and not very rational order struggling inadequately to keep in check forces of great destruction, which may be the devil and may be enlightenment’.31 The residents of Pepper Street are undone because of their own innate wickedness, not that of their environment. The sheltered, exclusive, enclave in which they live is rather a perfect metaphor for their narrow minds and self-absorption and the wall which surrounds them a physical representation of the prejudice and hatred they all harbour within their hearts. Pepper Street may look Edenic, but as in the biblical garden, sin lurks within the picturesque façade.32 The houses themselves are not yet haunted, but the people inside certainly are. In Road, Jackson was also contributing to the long-standing tradition of gothic ﬁction that focuses on houses, castles and living spaces in general. Her deep interest in the psychological and emotional effects of one’s living environment, whilst to a large extent prompted by the societal circumstances under which her ﬁction was produced, has always also been a signiﬁcant theme of the gothic. Initially, the relationship between the tree-lined avenues of middle-class suburbia and the gothic seems a tad incongruous, but as Jackson (and a great many other writers operating in her tradition) would prove, the combination of these two apparently irreconcilable elements can have potent results.33

The Suburban Gothic in Jackson and Matheson 27

Whilst Road may lack the fantastical or supernatural elements which we will often see in many of the other texts discussed in this study, Jackson’s profound interest in the dark side of the suburban environment makes it a founding text of the Suburban Gothic. Furthermore, many of the story elements found in Jackson’s novel – conﬂicted parent/child relationships, the depiction of suburbanites as materialistic and self-absorbed, the fact that communal social events inevitably go terribly wrong, the climactic incidence of child abduction and murder, and the fact that the community turns on the supposed culprit – will turn up again and again in the sub-genre.

‘But would you let your sister marry one?’ Richard Matheson’s Suburban Gothic As any brief comparison of their ﬁction proves, Shirley Jackson and Richard Matheson share many of the same basic preoccupations – paranoia, entrapment, domesticity, neurosis, isolation, the redeﬁnition of the meaning of the terms ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ and the exploration of the dark side of American society during the 1950s, although Matheson more often used overtly fantastical tropes in his work. In his most famous novel, I Am Legend, Matheson created a notably contemporary variation upon the traditional vampire tale: what has been largely overlooked about the text until now is the importance of the story’s very suburban hero and setting. Though Matheson was initially thought of as a writer of science ﬁction, he was from the 1960s onwards recognised as one of the most signiﬁcant modern creators of terror and fantasy in both ﬁction and ﬁlm.34 As Matheson himself has acknowledged of his 1950s output, ‘my theme in those years was of a man, isolated and alone, and assaulted on all sides by everything you could imagine’.35 Unlike Lovecraft’s treatment of the same notion, the threat in Matheson’s ﬁction, as in Jackson’s, comes not from cosmic forces ‘but from the commonplace clutter of everyday life’. Though ostensibly set in the years 1976–79, I Am Legend36 was published in 1954 and is very much a product of the 1950s.37 The novel is part post-apocalyptic fantasy, part paranoid horror story: yet it is also as much a tale of 1950s suburban masculinity in crisis as it is the sum of its genre parts. In addition, the novel reﬂects conservative responses to racial integration and sexual equality and the inability of a certain type of man to adapt to the rapidly changing new world. As we shall see, protagonist Robert Neville is so conformist, conservative and routine-bound that it is possible that he is actually in some respects

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a satirical version of the so-called ‘organisation man’ immortalised by the likes of William H. Whyte. The plot is fairly straightforward. It is 1976 and Neville is the only human left alive in a world of ravenous vampires created by a mysterious kind of germ warfare which turned the rest of the population into predatory mutants who shun daylight and crave human blood. Neville, by some ﬂuke of biology or luck, (we are told that he was bitten by a vampire bat whilst serving in Panama during an earlier war) remains unaffected by the plague, and is helpless to do anything as his wife, daughter and the rest of the world die and are reborn as creatures of the night. He passes his days killing vampires and roaming the deserted streets of Los Angeles and its outskirts in a search for supplies, while his nights are spent barricaded inside his fortiﬁed suburban home, fending off the relentless wave of attacks that occur as soon as the sun sets. Unlike in the camp 1971 ﬁlm adaptation of the novel entitled The Omega Man, in which Neville holes up in a luxurious city-centre hotel suite in order to see out the apocalypse, Matheson’s original protagonist stays put in the suburbs. In the most recent (2007) ﬁlm version of the novel, Neville again lives in the city, this time in a swanky New York town house. A cheaply made but grimly effective earlier ﬁlm version of the story, The Last Man on Earth (1964), was actually a much more faithful adaptation than either the 1971 or 2007 versions, mainly because it retained the suburban setting and resisted the urge to make Neville a machine-gun-toting, sports-car-racing military scientist as in succeeding ﬁlm versions. Whilst Vincent Price is rather hard to swallow as a grieving white-collar everyman, the opening scenes in which he potters around his battered little home, repairing barricades and talking to himself for company, do have a certain melancholy poignancy, and the vampire hordes which besiege him look very much like the zombies in Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, released four years later. The suburban home-as-fortress was a fairly common notion during the 1950s and 1960s. As Guy Oakes has noted, President Eisenhower and other government ofﬁcials made it clear that in the likely event of a catastrophic nuclear conﬂict, survival would ‘largely be a do-it-yourself enterprise’.38 It was helpfully suggested that ‘by planning and practicing at home, families would acquire the requisite skills and develop the self control necessary to survive a nuclear attack’.39 All the survival skills in the world would presumably be somewhat redundant if one were reduced to a neat little pile of glowing cinders during the initial attacks, so the logical next step was to bombproof the average American home. One advertisement from that time, paid for by the auspicious-sounding

The Suburban Gothic in Jackson and Matheson 29

‘Portland Cement Association’, promotes ‘Houses for the Atomic Age!’, and goes on to excitedly inform us that, ‘Here’s a house with all the advantages of any concrete house – PLUS protection from atomic blasts at minimum cost.’ Conveniently, the bomb shelter was in the basement, next to the recreation room and a workshop.40 During this period, the ‘bomb shelter became an American institution . . . A whole cowboy industry tried to persuade paranoid suburbanites of the ﬁfties that shelters were as essential as a pool in the backyard, a ﬁnned car, and aluminium siding on the house . . .’41 As Kim Newman observed, those who were really preparing for the end intended to keep guns in their shelter in order to defend themselves against lesser prepared, irradiated friends and neighbours who might try to force their way in – a nightmarish possibility which has obvious parallels with the situation faced by Matheson’s embattled protagonist. This scenario also provided the basis for a classic The Twilight Zone episode that allowed Rod Serling to critique mob culture and suburban self-centredness. In ‘The Shelter’ (1961), an unfounded UFO scare exposes the egocentric nature of an otherwise idyllic neighbourhood. The local doctor has a shelter prepared for his family, but the problem is that there is only food and air enough for three people. Needless to say, his friends and neighbours take the news rather badly and batter the door down, only to shamefacedly retreat once it is revealed that the ‘UFO’ is only a harmless satellite.42 This wasn’t the only Twilight Zone episode in which suburbanites were revealed to be a selﬁsh and violent lot: in an earlier, similar story also by the proliﬁc, but occasionally repetitive Serling, entitled ‘The Monsters are Due on Maple Street’ (1959), a power failure and rumours of alien invasion again cause neighbour to violently turn against neighbour. Similarly, in a Simpson’s episode entitled ‘Bart’s Comet,’ Homer and many of the other townspeople barge their way into pious neighbour Ned Flanders’ shelter when it seems as though an incoming comet will destroy Springﬁeld.43 Luckily, as Homer had earlier predicted of the comet, it burns up in the atmosphere and what’s left is ‘no bigger than a Chihuahua’s head’. The town is therefore spared after all, though not before poor Flanders is forcibly expelled from his own refuge. In the event of sudden disaster, American suburbanites were all too aware that the self-sufﬁciency of the immediate family unit was all that they could rely upon, and that they probably had as much to fear from their neighbours as from Soviet missiles.44 Although ostensibly set in the late 1970s therefore, Legend is very much a novel of its time, and one even suspects that President Eisenhower and his advisors might have approved of

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Robert Neville’s no-nonsense approach to post-apocalyptic community relations. Much of the novel’s interest lies in the fact that Neville lives a life that is a horriﬁc parody of that experienced by the typical middle-class male of the 1950s. He is the epitome of conservatism and conformity, clinging to routine and to the habits that deﬁned his pre-plague existence in spite of the fact that the world around him has profoundly changed. He still lives in the suburban neighbourhood as before despite the fact that he is under constant attack, and has had to burn down the houses on either side of his to prevent ‘them’ from leaping on to his roof.45 His family home has become a fortress, fortiﬁed with planks, stakes and garlic, ﬁlled with freezers full of stockpiled food and powered by a generator. Neville lives a nightmarish bachelor’s existence, one characterised by a reliance upon frozen food eaten from paper plates, lacklustre housekeeping, and the fact that his bedroom has become a DIY workshop (his wife’s room is now the larder, so even after death she remains associated with the provision of food). Yet despite his solitary state, Neville still drives the quintessential family car – a station wagon. He also continues to ﬁll up on supplies at Sears, and even smokes a pipe in the evenings – although in the inevitable absence of a warm pair of slippers and a martini lovingly prepared by his wife he has installed a bar in the living room, and looks forward a bit too eagerly to his mid-morning drink. Neville desperately clings to the old ways even as the world rots around him. As Jancovich has observed, ‘even his task of making stakes to kill vampires is reminiscent of the workshop carpentry which became a popular pastime for the 1950s middle-class males who were concerned to prove the masculine skills absent from their ofﬁce jobs’.46 We are told that woodworking ‘gave him something to lose himself in,’47 as though he were unwinding after a hard day at work in the ofﬁce. Given that male sexual frustration is one of the most prominent preoccupations of the novel, one need not be a Freudian to see something in the fact that a protagonist so desperate for female company spends much of his day at a lathe sharpening stakes. As Neville unconvincingly reﬂects early in the novel, ‘they’d forced celibacy on him; he’d have to live with it’ but in fact his desperate longing for female company will ultimately be his downfall.48 The attacks upon Neville’s home are led by his nemesis, vampire Ben Cortman. Signiﬁcantly, Cortman’s roots are just as suburban as Neville’s. Before the plague struck they were close friends, next-door neighbours and work colleagues. As Neville spends much of his time

The Suburban Gothic in Jackson and Matheson 31

trying to ﬁnd the place where Cortman sleeps during daylight so that he can be dispatched, it is as if a once-friendly neighbourhood rivalry has become a deadly clash of wits, with the closeness formerly experienced by both parties now transformed into ﬁercely competitive loathing. The extent of Cortman’s apparent degeneration is in part communicated to us by the fact that he now has long, greasy hair and a beard. In fact, he sounds like nothing so much as a beatnik or an early version of a hippie, his untidy appearance all the more striking when contrasted with Neville’s initial WASP-ish insistence on good grooming even in the face of Armageddon (when he does grow a beard, later on in the text, it’s an indication of how depressed he has become). As the years progress, Neville actually comes to envy his old neighbour in a way, noting that ‘sometimes he thought Cortman was happier than he’d ever been before’.49 It’s as though Cortman had escaped the corporate rat-race and ‘dropped’ out of conventional society, whilst poor old Neville was still stuck with a demanding job (staking vampires, staying alive) and home to maintain, though without the family that would make all his hard work worthwhile. Despite the obviously improbable nature of the premise, the novel, through the steady accumulation of apparently mundane detail, remains ﬁrmly rooted in the actual and the everyday. Richard Matheson once stated in an interview that for him ‘fantasy [was] best done in strictly realistic terms’50 and it is true that in its own way, this is as much a novel exploring American masculinity in crisis and the deadening impact of suburban life as it is a traditional tale of terror. However, whilst Neville’s behaviour at many points could almost be a broad parody of the lifestyle of the typical suburban male as depicted by many of the milieu’s most vocal critics, the fact is that his obsessive adherence to routine is ultimately a means of ensuring survival, both mental and physical. If he is to protect his home and his life, Neville must board up his house afresh each day, whittle dowelling rods into stakes and protect the generator that is his only source of power. In a world without doctors and dentists, even the apparently simple acts of eating well-balanced meals and ﬂossing before bedtime are of vital importance. Routine is also Neville’s way of staying sane in an insane world, for despite his assertion early in the novel that ‘a man could get used to anything if he had to,’51 as time passes he becomes more and more prone to loneliness and depression. The unthinking repetition of everyday tasks is, in these circumstances, a lifesaver; although it is also hinted that Neville’s slavish adherence to order and routine hastened the demise of his wife and daughter.

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An important element of the novel’s suburban nightmare that has been overlooked until now is the racial subtext underpinning the narrative. Neville’s ‘Aryan’ credentials are established early on, when we are told that he is 37 years old, of English–German stock (his father is even named Fritz), blonde and blue-eyed; apparently innocuous details that take on extra signiﬁcance as the language used to describe the vampires who besiege his suburban home becomes increasingly loaded. Neville lives near Compton, on the outskirts of Los Angeles, which at the time was well on its way to becoming one of the most racially divided cities in the United States. As Eric Avila states in Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight, all too often post-war suburbanisation ‘sanctioned the formation of a new racial geography that spatialized the starker contrast between black and white’.52 In other words, as white families left the increasingly troubled inner cities behind, black families were generally obliged to stay put, a trend that was greatly helped by the fact that both the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) incorporated a racially biased set of policies that greatly frustrated black and minority attempts to buy into the suburban dream.53 We should note then that despite the fact that the vampires are pointedly described as ‘white-faced ghouls’, Neville consistently refers to them in terms of blackness. The ﬁrst such instance comes when he reads Dracula as part of his research into the plague, and notes that ‘something black and out of the night had come crawling out of the Middle Ages’.54 Shortly thereafter, in a ﬁt of drunken depression, Neville holds a mock-philosophical debate with himself in which he characterises the vampire threat in overtly racial terms [my italics]: Friends, I come here before you to discuss the vampire; a minority element if there ever was one, and there was one . . . Why cannot the vampire live where he chooses? Why must he seek out hiding places where none can ﬁnd him out? Why do you wish him destroyed? Ah, see, you have turned this poor guileless innocent into a haunted animal. He has no means of support, no measures for proper education; he has not the voting franchise. No wonder he is compelled to seek out a predatory nocturnal existence. Robert Neville grunted a surly grunt. Sure, sure, he thought, but would you let your sister marry one? He shrugged. You got me there buddy, you got me there.55 When he wakes up the next day, unsurprisingly suffering from a crippling hangover, Neville despairingly cries that ‘they’d beaten him, the

The Suburban Gothic in Jackson and Matheson 33

black bastards had beaten him’ [my italics].56 Neville’s willingness to characterise his struggle for survival in terms so reminiscent of existing racial tensions suggests that even prior to the outbreak of plague, he was unlikely to have been a card-carrying liberal, and that now a really bad element has moved into the neighbourhood, he can violently express feelings that would perhaps otherwise have been repressed. One would have thought that one of the most interesting aspects of the 2007 ﬁlm version of the novel would be seeing how the deeply conservative racial subtext of the original would be affected by the fact that Robert Neville is here, for the ﬁrst time, played by an African American actor (Will Smith), but the ﬁlm-makers ignored this aspect of the text entirely (although the mutants do have notably white complexions). However, the vampires whom Neville most loathes are female. During the daytime he roams the city and its outskirts, taking particular pleasure in murdering vampire women as they lie sleeping in their beds. Those that he takes home he works on with what Matheson revealingly describes as an ‘experimental fervour’,57 and although he tries to convince himself that his ‘research’ will help ﬁnd a cure for the plague, we are left in no doubt of the fact that Neville enjoys his work rather too much. It is all the more appropriate therefore that his downfall comes when he is lured into a trap by a vampire woman who is part of a ‘new society’ of plague victims who have discovered a way of living with their disease without sacriﬁcing all of their humanity. It is at this point that the increasingly depressed and unstable Neville begins to realise that his own behaviour was, to them, ‘monstrous’, and that he was to all intents and purposes a serial killer in their midst. Riven by self-examination and doubt, he ﬁnally ﬁnds himself unable to leave the house at all (a fate which very often befalls Jackson’s heroines as well). The suburban home, once a fortress, has now become a prison. The conclusion of Legend emphasises one of Matheson’s favourite themes: the overturning of conventional assumptions about normality and abnormality. Dragged from his house by representatives of the new breed of vampires, who have even usurped his role as slayer (and, much to his horror, quickly staked his old nemesis Cortman) Neville realises that he is part of a world ‘that was theirs and no longer his’.58 He is now, according to Ruth, the female mutant who engineered his capture, ‘the last of the old race’.59 Neville’s previously black and white perceptions of the world undergo a seismic shift as he realises that ‘I’m the abnormal one now. Normality was a majority concept, the standard of many and not the standard of just one man.’60 The old ways of living and thinking that he represented have no place in the new order: what

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was once the counterculture has become mainstream. As a result of this revelation, he willingly accepts the necessity for his own destruction: ‘he knew that like the vampires, he was anathema and black terror to be destroyed’.61 He gains some comfort from knowing that that he will become part of the mythic history of the new society and famously bows out by declaring ‘I am legend’. Matheson’s depiction of everyday suburban life suddenly transformed into a terrifying battle for survival continues in the two other genre novels he wrote during the 1950s: The Shrinking Man62 and Stir of Echoes. As in Legend, both novels focus upon a suburban everyman whose peaceful existence is violated by freakish happenstance. In the former, accidental exposure to radiation that reduces the protagonist’s height by one seventh of an inch a day; in the latter, an impromptu amateur hypnosis session that awakens the main character’s latent psychic abilities. Shrinking Man perhaps represents the apotheosis of Matheson’s ability to make the familiar terrifying. The novel opens with a tense description of the protagonist Scott Carey’s violent running battle with a domestic spider many times his own size. As in Legend, the narrative veers between past and present, detailing both Carey’s current battle to survive whilst trapped in the newly hostile environs of his own basement, and the story of how this unfortunate state of affairs came to pass. Although Carey’s confrontation with the spider is the most dramatic incident in the book, just as horrifying are the catalogue of setbacks and everyday humiliations that make up his daily existence. As his size diminishes, so does his inﬂuence within his own household. His wife, though initially sympathetic, soon begins to treat him like a little boy, and refuses to continue their sexual relationship. He is unable to work and becomes unable to maintain the ﬁnancial security of his family: the only way he can now provide for them is by capitalising upon his freakish physical state. As in Legend, the protagonist’s susceptibility to inappropriate feminine charms illustrates how far he has fallen. He becomes hopelessly obsessed with the frumpy teenager who has been hired to baby-sit and spends much of his time spying on her. Most humiliating of all, his young daughter refuses to accept his authority and tries to play with him as though he were a doll: ‘To her he’d stopped being a father and had become an oddity’.63 The freak reduction in size has comprehensively emasculated Carey, who is longer able to fulﬁl the role that society demands he fulﬁl, a role as rigid and in many ways as demanding as that asked of the typical housewife. The novel is therefore as much a dramatisation of the greatest fear of the 1950s man: for it suggests that masculine authority is a great deal more fragile than it seems, due more

The Suburban Gothic in Jackson and Matheson 35

to size and strength than it is to the innate order of things: take these factors away, Matheson argues, and the patriarchal ﬁgure loses all power in his own home. Signiﬁcantly, Carey only begins to regain self-respect when he is forced literally to battle for his survival in the basement, so much so that, even as he faces apparent annihilation he is able to reﬂect with pride upon the fact that he had spent his ﬁnal days ‘ﬁghting a good ﬁght’.64 Manhood is regained not in the domestic, suburban sphere, but in the brutal struggle against insurmountable odds in a strange new world. A familiar suburban locale also becomes a site of horror in Matheson’s generally overlooked follow-up to Legend, Stir of Echoes,65 in which a white-collar everyman is again forced to reassess all that he once took for granted. Horror intrudes into the everyday when go-getting corporation man Tom Wallace suddenly becomes aware of an entire world beyond that of the idyllic neighbourhood that he had previously perceived.66 Like Neville, Wallace lives in California, in a suburb of Inglewood; he has a two-bedroom tract house, a loving young wife and a good job at the ‘North American Aircraft Plant’. In a relationship that parallels that between Neville and Ben Cortman, Wallace often rides to work with his friend and neighbour Frank Wanamaker. His cosy, steady existence is violently disrupted when his brother-inlaw, a psychology major, hypnotises him at a neighbourhood party and unwittingly triggers in Wallace the power to see beyond the façade his friends and neighbours present to the world. As we shall see, in the Suburban Gothic, social events such as this are very often the point at which things start to go horribly wrong for our protagonists, as though social embarrassment and horror are interchangeable. Note for instance the fact that in Road, Caroline Desmond goes missing whilst everyone is at a garden party: communal togetherness, there, as here, is merely the prelude to some sort of awfulness (Anne Rivers Siddon’s novel The House Next Door, which will be discussed in Chapter 4, is perhaps the most extreme illustration of this trope: every time one of her well-to-do suburbanites brings out the canapés, disaster swiftly follows). Within days, Wallace’s perceptions of the suburban neighbourhood he had previously seen as friendly and welcoming have radically changed. He is suddenly able to peer through the veneer of politeness and sociability his neighbours have erected, and the results are terrifying. For instance, good old Frank is soon revealed as a sex-obsessed lecher. Wallace also discovers of his fellow suburbanites that ‘On one side we have a wife who kicks the guts out of her husband. On the other we have an adulterer and a drudge.’67 Then he sees the ghostly ﬁgure of a

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woman in his house and begins to suspect that an even worse crime has taken place under his very nose, despite the fact that, ‘It doesn’t make any sense. Why should a place like this be haunted? It’s only a couple of years old . . .’68 Interestingly, for Wallace one of the most disturbing things about his new ability is the fact that it makes him so susceptible to feelings and sensations he would otherwise actively resist. In fact, his powers are often described in a way that suggests that he was actually in thrall to a weird kind of feminine intuition (God forbid), as when he notes that: ‘What I felt wasn’t on the surface. It was a subterranean trickle of awareness far beneath the level of consciousness. All right, it was an emotion’,69 [my italics] and that ‘I was no general marshalling his psychic forces, but only a medium through which they could express themselves’.70 The very passiveness of his new abilities – the fact that he has no control over what he experiences – is almost as terrifying as what he now perceives. As in Legend and Shrinking Man, the intervention of otherworldly or fantastic forces is seen as a threat to the very masculinity of a Matheson protagonist. It also seems possible that the suburban setting itself and its associated trappings (comfortable home, desk job, sedentary lifestyle), according to Matheson (and many other male writers during the 1950s and 1960s) has in a way ‘softened up’ his white-collar protagonists, leaving them all too susceptible to powerful, irrational forces beyond rational comprehension. Try as he might to distract himself by undertaking mundane, comfortingly routine tasks like mowing the lawn, Wallace cannot help but pick up on the nebulous feeling of dread which permeates the idyllic-looking neighbourhood. As Matheson puts it, in a passage which perfectly sums up the principal preoccupations of the Suburban Gothic: All these things taking place in this peaceful neighbourhood of quiet, little houses basting in the sun. I thought of that. It reminded me of Jekyll and Hyde. The neighbourhood was two creatures. One presented a clean, smiling countenance to the world, and beneath maintained quite another one. It was hideous, in a way, to consider the world of twists and warps that existed beneath the pleasant setting of Tulley Street.71 As we shall see, time and again in this sub-genre, it is the very disparity between what suburbia seems to be on the outside – the fact of its very newness, and neatness, and supposed wholesomeness – and the darker energies detected underneath which really disturbs us. Note

The Suburban Gothic in Jackson and Matheson 37

that Wallace compares Tulley Street to one of the classic ﬁends of horror ﬁction, and the manner in which he embodies the neighbourhood with sinister human characteristics: the classic gothic meets the new gothic. The strain of latent misogyny that permeates Neville’s character in Legend is again present here, as female sexuality is once more overtly associated with monstrousness. Wallace realises that the relationship between his neighbours Ron and Elsie is not quite as serene as he would have otherwise believed: in fact, Elsie is the one with all the money and the power whilst her hen-pecked husband must do her bidding or suffer the consequences. The discovery that Elsie, not Ron owns their home is intensely disturbing to Wallace’s conservative mindset: ‘Dear God, I thought, her house. She didn’t want his clothes lying all over her house. Ron was a boarder here, not the legal owner. A man’s home is his castle, I thought, until his wife makes him live in the dungeon.’72 One suspects that were the roles reversed, Wallace would not have been half as unnerved by the relationship between the two. What really makes Elsie an object of fascinated repulsion for Wallace however is the fact that she has a sexual interest in him: I wasn’t amused now. I almost felt afraid of her. And, no matter how I went about it, there was only one explanation. I’d seen behind her words, behind her actions. Somehow, I’d been inside her mind. It was an awful place.73 When he tells his wife Anne of his suspicions regarding Elsie, she responds, ‘My God . . . You make her sound like a monster’, to which Wallace replies, a triﬂe melodramatically, ‘Maybe we’re all monsters underneath.’74 It is surely no coincidence that the ghostly ﬁgure that haunts Wallace is that of a woman, or that her presence is much stronger when his wife is absent. Like the sexually rapacious and sinister Elsie, the ghost of Helen Driscoll makes Wallace’s life a misery. And just as Neville reveals that he has unconsciously characterised an inherently supernatural threat in racial terms during an unguarded drunken rant, so does Wallace deliver a remarkably misogynistic assessment of his own situation at a similar moment: ‘And the most monstrous of monsters is the female monster’, I mumbled, ‘because they are shrewd monsters of deceit, because they can lurk monstrously, hiding themselves behind a veneer of falsity, because they are monsters of deception’.75 We are less than shocked therefore to discover that Helen Driscoll was murdered by Elizabeth Wanamaker, who shoots also her husband Frank towards the

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end of the novel, and that Wallace’s home is in fact a burial ground (the body is walled up in the cellar). Even though the mystery of Helen’s death is ultimately resolved and Wallace is ﬁnally able to rid himself of the psychic powers that have plagued him, nothing can ever be the same again – ‘order’ can never be fully restored. He has penetrated the veil of the everyday and discovered the rot and darkness that lies beneath. In typical Matheson fashion, his most disturbing discovery is the realisation that: The most hideous of moments . . . could take place in bright sunlight, in the most mundane of locations. Night is not a requirement; nor are thunderstorms, high winds or the rain-lashed battlements of mad doctors. There were no monsters here, just . . . human beings.76 Matheson’s examination of the sinister secrets beneath the outwardly placid façade of an average suburban neighbourhood in Stir links the novel to Jackson’s take on the same subject in The Road Through The Wall. By that novel’s conclusion, as we have seen, one neighbourhood child has died and the teenage boy accused (possibly unfairly) of involvement in her death has killed himself. The community’s culture of parental and moral neglect has had terrible ramiﬁcations. It is clear, as in Stir of Echoes, that the residents can never view themselves or their neighbours in the same comfortably blinkered light ever again. At the time at which Jackson and Matheson were writing the novels I have just discussed, the mass suburbanisation of the United States was barely a few years old. However, both in their own way recognised that the milieu was the perfect setting for gothic and horror-themed ﬁctions which critiqued the shiny new world into which Americans had supposedly been delivered in the years immediately following the Second World War. Up until this point in time, American-set gothic and horror ﬁctions had to a large extent always been associated with particular geographical regions – one need only consider Charles Brockden Brown’s depictions of a corrupt and disease ridden Philadelphia, H.P. Lovecraft’s Rhode Island, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Puritan New England, Bradbury’s small-town mid-west and the intensely Southern gothic of William Faulkner, Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor. Whilst, as we shall see, geographical location is not always irrelevant to the Suburban Gothic, in most instances it has become subordinate to the universality of the suburbs themselves, in a way therefore replicating the alleged ‘sameness’ of such neighbourhoods themselves.

The Suburban Gothic in Jackson and Matheson 39

Jackson never wrote another suburban-set novel, but the themes and preoccupations she ﬁrst explored in The Road Through the Wall would ﬁnd further expression in her three great ‘house’ novels, in which she comprehensively reinvented the gothic home in order to delve into the anxieties and underlying fears of the modern age. Matheson too would go on to write a non-suburban variation on the traditional haunted house (the uneven Hell House, 1971), but his greatest contribution to the gothic genre would lie in his ability to locate the monstrous and the fantastic ﬁrmly in the everyday. For as we shall see in succeeding chapters, by the early 1960s, the fantastic and the supernatural had well and truly entered the pop culture mainstream, and the kinds of concerns about what constitutes normality and abnormality amidst the uniquely contrived suburban environment seen in Matheson’s work would rise to unprecedented prominence. The Suburban Gothic, the dark side of the modern American unconscious, had arrived, and it was here to stay: the only question was, what forms would it take next?

2 Conjure Wife: The Suburban Witch

As we have seen, in I Am Legend Richard Matheson updated one of the most powerful horror icons of all, the vampire, and in doing so also effectively dramatised many of the most pervasive fears and anxieties of the post-war era – in particular those of the insecure suburban male. In this chapter, I concentrate upon the horror genre’s most infamous female icon – the witch – and discuss the ways in which this underused symbol of female power similarly resurfaced within a decidedly modern, suburban setting. As Sharon Russell has noted, ‘The witch as a ﬁgure holds an interesting position relative to other monster ﬁgures in popular culture. Although there are many novels and ﬁlms that deal with female monster ﬁgures, there are few serious treatments of witches as ﬁgures of terror and power’.1 Furthermore, ‘most monster ﬁgures emerged from the Gothic tradition in which women were most often victims or – what is a tamer version of the witch – the femme fatale or the belle dame sans merci’. According to Russell, ‘those female monsters which become, in the twentieth century, the subject of ﬁlm are mainly extensions of the vampire myth, a myth which posed a popular rather than ofﬁcial fear and had male as well as female manifestations’.2 In this chapter I will explore the manner in which the witch is combined with the ﬁgure of the 1960s and 1970s suburban housewife, most speciﬁcally in the sitcom Bewitched as well as George A. Romero’s Jack’s Wife (1972). I will also address a number of related topics and texts, beginning by brieﬂy discussing the ﬁgure of the witch in the American popular imagination generally, from the days of the Salem witch trials to the publication of Fritz Leiber’s classic horror novel Conjure Wife (1943; 1953) and the release of popular movies such as I Married A Witch (1942) and Bell, Book and Candle (1958). I will conclude by brieﬂy considering the resurgence of interest in witches and witchcraft which 40

Conjure Wife

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occurred during the late 1990s and which found expression in ﬁlms and television shows such as Sabrina the Teenage Witch (1996), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997), Charmed (1998), Practical Magic (1998), and The Craft (1996). I will also outline the ways in which these texts differ from those in which women were depicted as witches during the post-war era. As one historian writing on witchcraft in colonial New England put it, ‘The story of witchcraft is primarily the story of women, and I suspect this accounts for much of the fascination and elusiveness attending the subject. Especially in its western incarnation, witchcraft confronts us with ideas about women, with fears about women, with the place of women in society, and with women themselves’.3 Similarly, when a feminine ideal of such ideological importance in post-war American society as that of the maternal, modern, ultra-domesticated housewife is suggestively combined with that of the disruptive, archaic and powerful witch, the resulting hybrid ﬁgure has the potential not only to tell us a great deal about the conﬂicted position in which American women often found themselves during this time, but also further testiﬁes to the manner in which gothic and horror inﬂected texts can illuminate barely concealed societal truths. The housewife is suddenly given great power; the witch is domesticated; and the average-looking suburban home becomes the setting for unlikely and, on occasion, overtly supernatural events. Of course, one cannot embark upon a discussion of the twentiethcentury witch in American popular culture without some mention of the infamous historical events which helped make witches and witchcraft one of colonial America’s most contentious issues. The standard account of events has it that the outbreak originated with a group of impressionable young girls and their crude (and strictly forbidden) attempts at fortune telling and divination during the long, difﬁcult winter of 1691–92. In comparison to the witch hunts which had taken place in Europe for centuries, and which at the very least, claimed thousands of lives, the imprisonment of around 156 people and the death by hanging of 19 others was arguably fairly tame.4 Nevertheless, the witchcraft trials of 1692 and 1693 were a decided aberration in the larger context of English and New England history. After all: there had only been thirty-four prior cases in eastern New England, and only three of these came after 1680 . . . the Salem outbreak was thus unprecedented in New England’s history. What was more, by 1690 the number of cases in England had sharply declined, and convictions had become all but impossible. Learned judges pressed juries to ﬁnd a verdict of not guilty. Salem was an exception in its time,

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a throwback to the witch-hunting crazes of a much earlier time in Continental Europe and England’.5 More people were executed in the Salem witch trials of 1692 than had been put to death for practising witchcraft since the establishment of the colony at New England.6 The trials had an immensely disruptive effect on the community at large, as everyone feared being denounced by a jealous or suspicious neighbour. The outbreak may have peaked in less than a year, but the long-term consequences would take much longer to dissipate. The (supposedly) female, domestic origins of the outbreak had a profound inﬂuence upon the manner in which witches have been depicted in American popular culture during the twentieth century. Female horror icons tend to be both fairly uncommon, and, in general, conﬁned to the second division of genre ﬁgures: far below the likes of Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster. However, ‘there is one incontestably monstrous role in the horror ﬁlm that belongs to woman – that of the witch’.7 As we shall see, in recent times the witch is more likely to appear on screen in lightly supernatural romantic comedies rather than as an outright villain. This is perhaps in part a reﬂection of the ambiguous feelings aroused by the nation’s most infamous witch-hunt, generally now considered an ill-advised and brutal aberration. When the witch is depicted as a powerful, malevolent ﬁgure, the stereotypical characterisation of the evil, ugly old hag who has made a pact with Satan generally comes into play, as in Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and The Blair Witch Project (1999). In general the witch has been underrepresented in American horror and gothic ﬁlm and ﬁction, albeit with a few notable exceptions, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables and stories such as ‘Young Goodman Brown’, and, much later, Shirley Jackson’s 1962 novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle. The witch barely featured at all in the Universal Studios’ cycle of horror ﬁlms during the 1930s (although witches did feature prominently in that decade’s most famous fantasy ﬁlm, The Wizard of Oz), and ‘it was not until the sixties that the witch becomes another creature in the gallery of available horror ﬁlm creatures’.8 Even then, the ﬁgure usually appeared within a historical, medieval and decidedly European context, save for the odd Americanset (but British-made) effort such as The City of the Dead (1960). The non-romantic comedy witch narrative therefore tends to concentrate on the witch-hunt or on the presence of the Devil, something which Sharon Russell persuasively attributes to the fact that, as a horror ﬁgure, the witch ‘embodies fears men would rather forget’:9

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Because witches are believed to have the power to cause impotence, they are the ultimate expression of male fears of castration, and as such they cannot be confronted too often on the screen . . . Horror is usually perpetrated on women, rather than by them.10 Signiﬁcantly, then, the witches I discuss here are almost all deﬁned in relation to the men in their lives rather than as independent, powerful supernatural beings in their own right. During the Salem witch trials, the ﬁgure of the American witch had ‘not yet been domesticated, commercialized and trivialised’ and instead lived in the imagination as ‘a supremely dangerous, uncontrollable menace’; in the middle of the twentieth century, though, she is more often depicted as a confused young woman struggling to reconcile her powers with the demands of conventionality and domesticity, and more likely to be exiled in suburbia than raising hell in Salem.11 One of the texts which helped establish the parameters of this narrative dynamic was I Married A Witch (1942). Here, Veronica Lake starred as a witch, burned at the stake during Puritan times and reborn in the twentieth century, who sets about tormenting a descendant of the man who ordered her execution, Wallace Wooley Jr (Fredric March). Things fail to go to plan, however, when she falls in love with her quarry and decides to make him marry her instead. A similar premise informs the 1958 ﬁlm Bell, Book and Candle, in which a witch is forbidden to fall in love but uses her physical and supernatural charms to ensnare publisher Shepherd Henderson (Jimmy Stewart). In both ﬁlms, ultimately, the witch must chose between settling down with the mortal love of her life and continuing to live as a powerful, carefree, but lonely witch. Naturally, as in Bewitched, which is essentially a televisual continuation of these ﬁlms, the former option is chosen over the latter. It is a plot device which reﬂects the powerful drive towards domesticity and marriage which existed during the ﬁrst two decades of the post-war era. It also further highlights the manner in which the wife-as-witch narrative has consistently been torn between initial delight in the freedom and power represented by the independent witch and a ﬁnal, purportedly laudable, repudiation of these privileges in favour of a life of decidedly commonplace domestic fulﬁlment. In Fritz Leiber’s Conjure Wife (originally published in 1943 and later extended for novel-length publication) we ﬁnd rehearsed many of the tropes and preoccupations which would come to dominate the witchas-wife narrative.12 Leiber excelled at producing tales in which the irrational and the supernatural suddenly disrupt the lives of protagonists

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who otherwise live a fairly well regulated, and indeed, mundane existence. The novel is the most notable literary version of the ‘my wife is a witch’ narratives which manifested themselves between the mid 1940s and the early 1970s, and which culminated in the creation of Bewitched. Leiber’s chief protagonist is a self-satisﬁed professor of sociology named Norman Saylor, who is shaken to the core when he ﬁnds more than he had bargained for in his wife’s dressing room.13 The sudden urge to paw through his wife’s possessions when she is out on an errand leads to the discovery that she is a witch who has been conjuring protective spells for years. Saylor simply cannot accept that his apparently sensible wife would actually have faith in such primitive superstition, a point of view which is undermined from the outset by Leiber’s consistent suggestion that beneath the ordered, modern surface of his characters’ lives, something darker and more atavistic lurks. Saylor unconsciously recognises this even as he basks for a moment in the satisfaction of having completed a paper on ‘The Social Background of the Modern Voodoo Cult’: Oh, it was a wonderful day all right, one of those days when reality becomes a succession of such bright and sharp images that you are afraid that any moment you will poke a hole in the gorgeous screen and glimpse the illimitable, unknown darkness it ﬁlms; when everything seems so friendly and right that you tremble lest a sudden searing ﬂash of insight reveal to you the massed horror and hate and brutality and ignorance on which life rests.14 Similarly, while the Saylor home may appear to be a typical academic residence, which ‘seemed to wear bravely its middle-class intellectual trappings of books and prints and record albums’, it also has Chinese devil masks on the wall and a cat named Totem, and as Norman will soon ﬁnd out, is full of protective charms and other magical devices.15 Norman considers himself something of a maverick within the staid and narrow-minded conﬁnes of the Hempnell college academic community, which he smugly considers an ‘unamiable culture with its taboos against mentioning reality, its elaborate suppression of sex, its insistence on a stoical ability to withstand a monotonous routine of business or drudgery’.16 However, his open-mindedness evaporates the moment he penetrates the overtly feminine space of Tansy’s dressing room and ﬁnds a cardboard box ﬁlled with neatly labelled bottles of graveyard dirt and other tools of the witchcraft trade. Apart from the fact that his ‘hardheaded New Englander’ of a wife has been dabbling in the occult for

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years, the thing that bothers Norman most is the fact that she has so successfully kept this secret from him. That his wife has been living a parallel life of which he knew absolutely nothing comes as a profound blow: It was almost impossible to take at one gulp the realisation that in the mind of this trim modern creature he had known in completest intimacy, there was a whole great area he had never dreamed of, an area that was part and parcel of the dead practices he analysed in books, an area that belonged to the Stone Age and never to his, an area plunged in darkness, acrouch with fear, blown by giant winds.17 It is all the more shocking to him because, as we are told in an aside, ‘For a woman, she [Tansy] was almost oddly free of irrationality’ – irrationality being a key feminine trait of course, and presumably one which makes them much more likely to partake in foolish primitive rituals. Upon Tansy’s return, Norman confronts her and the full story comes out. Tansy has been practising magic for years, but only in order to protect her husband and help advance his career (similarly, in Bewitched, Samantha Stevens most often uses her apparently unlimited powers to help out career-obsessed husband Darrin). What’s more, Tansy claims that she is not the only witch on campus, and that she needs to continue practising magic in order to protect them both from vengeful rivals amongst the other faculty wives. Norman refuses to listen, and manages to convince Tansy that her dependence upon charms and spells is merely superstition. Furthermore, he demands that in order to ‘make a clean break of it’ (a metaphor which emphasises the ‘magic as tranquilisers’ metaphor often found in this kind of narrative), she must burn all of her protective charms. However, Norman’s faith in his sober-minded rejection of magic is soon undermined by a succession of alarming incidents.18 He immediately receives two disturbing phone calls in a row – one from a besotted female student, and the other from a male student enraged by his low grades. When he arrives in work the next day, Norman ﬁnds that his sense of paranoia and fear is gradually increasing. Even the cement dragon which sits on the roof of the college begins to terrify him, and seems to turn up in all sorts of unexpected places. At the weekly faculty bridge game, he cannot help but imagine the female players as ‘witch women, all three of them, engaged in booting their husbands to the top of the tribal hierarchy’ (female professional advancement obviously being impossible, these women can apparently only satisfy

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their repressed ambitions by furthering their husbands’ progress by any means necessary).19 As Norman suddenly realises, ‘Half of the human race was still practicing sorcery, and using it to ﬁght their husband’s battles from behind the scenes’.20 The everyday is increasingly overshadowed by Norman’s unease, and things get worse for the couple. Norman’s promotion is awarded to his plodding nemesis Harvey Sawtelle. His newfound recklessness and lack of judgement leads to foolish mistakes at work, and, even more ominously, their cat is found dead in the driveway, his body crushed as if by a large stone ﬁst. The horriﬁc elements of the novel really take off when Tansy’s soul is removed from her body by a rival witch and she becomes a zombie-like ﬁgure devoid of all personality and will – a literal shell of her former self, and an interesting precursor to the ‘housewife as mindless automaton’ trope found in Ira Levin’s 1972 novel The Stepford Wives, or Jack Finney’s depiction of the ‘pod people’ in his 1956 novel Invasion of the Body Snatchers (both of which will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 3): Her sensory organs still responded to stimuli. They sent impulses to the brain, where they travelled about and gave rise to impulses which activated glands and muscles, including the motor organs of speech. But that was all. None of these intangible ﬂurries we call consciousness hovered around the webwork of nervous activity in the cortex. What had imparted style – Tansy’s style, like no one else’s – to every movement and utterance of the body, was gone. There was left only a physiological organism, without sign or indication of personality.21 Norman’s refusal to allow her to practise magic has therefore had even more dangerous consequences for her than it has for him: as a witch without magical protection she is easy prey for evil rivals. The couple are forced to ﬂee to a hotel, and there Norman must try and ﬁgure out how to regain his wife’s soul and set things right, his panic worsened by the new-found knowledge that there exists a secret community of women practising magic just below the sightlines of ordinary life – even the maid who cleans their room instinctively knows what is wrong with Tansy – and that the so-called ‘weaker’ sex is actually much more powerful than men realise. In fact, Saylor soon comes to the conclusion that while women actually possess the power and the ability to rule the world openly, ‘they do not want the work or the responsibility’ – a conclusion which manages both to acknowledge female superiority in the realm of

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magic, yet simultaneously seeks to contain this power by deciding that on the other hand, they’re too lazy to take charge. In order to defeat his wife’s enemies, Norman must learn to accept the presence of magic in the world, and ﬁgure out how to ﬁght the evil coven on their own terms. He does so by reducing the spells prepared by Tansy before her soul was taken to a series of logical mathematical formulae – a stereotypically masculine way of reconciling his orderly, rational, world-view with theirs. Eventually, Norman is (apparently) able to restore Tansy’s soul to her body – his refusal to believe in the power of magic and the reality of witchcraft may have caused the whole mess in the ﬁrst place, but male logic and intelligence also ultimately saves the day, as does his ability to recognise his own wife under the strangest of circumstances. Leiber’s work here is typical of the most prominent horror and fantasy authors of the 1950s and 1960s in that he presents the reader with an apparently average milieu and unremarkable set of characters and then strips away the veneer of security and order to reveal a world that is actually at the constant mercy of dark and irrational forces. Witchcraft deﬁnitively moved into the suburbs in the ABC sitcom Bewitched, which initially ran on American television from September 1964 to July 1972. In the section which follows, I will discuss Bewitched’s depiction of an immortal, all-powerful witch who reluctantly agrees to renounce her supernatural abilities in order to settle down with an advertising man and raise children in relation to the often contradictory roles of women in the suburbs during the 1950s and 1960s.

From Salem to suburbia: Bewitched While Bewitched was the ﬁrst television show to use magic in a modern, suburban setting,22 at least one decidedly non-humorous depiction of magic in the suburbs had previously appeared, in the form of Charles Beaumont’s story ‘The New People’ (1953).23 In this bleak tale, a whitecollar worker named Hank reluctantly moves to a new suburb at his wife’s bidding. He’s loathe to deny any of her requests since he suffers from crippling impotence, and has never been able to consummate their marriage. From the outset, he has his reservations about the new place: ‘It’s a good house, well built, well kept up, roomy. Except for the blood stain, cheerful’.24 The stain is an ominous reminder of the fact that the previous tenant killed himself. Harvey’s adopted son, Davey, is terriﬁed of the other neighbours. The couple hold a housewarming party to which the whole neighbourhood comes, and they all seem like fairly

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average, well-off people, save for one, a bachelor named Matt Dystal who drinks far too much and seems very much on edge. Once everyone leaves, Dystal telephones Harvey, and insists upon telling him the truth. Dystal informs Harvey that, according to the most dominant authority ﬁgure in the neighbourhood, a man named Ames, boredom is the only real sin. He and many of the others had long since reached the peak of their professional careers, achieved the familial stability and ﬁnancial security they had longed for, and now found themselves becoming distinctly jaded. To spice up their comfortable but mundane lives, Ames decided that they would play games once a week. It started simply enough, with gambling, and then a spot of wife-swapping (a frequent pastime in literary suburbia), but soon, at his insistence, they began to commit crimes in order to get their kicks. The previous occupant of Harveys’ house drew the short straw in a contest to see who would have to kill themselves within twelve hours. Now, Dystal warns, Ames and the others have started their own satanic coven, and in order to save his family, Harvey should leave at once. It is too late, of course, and he is dragged to the basement where the coven intends to perform a virgin sacriﬁce, the victim being his wife Ann. Harvey’s sexual impotence is mirrored in his climactic inability to do anything to intervene as both his wife and his young son are brutally murdered by the coven of thrill-seeking suburbanites. As in many other horror stories of the 1950s, suburban respectability and wealth is merely a means of disguising dark secrets and terrible deeds for which the man of the house ﬁnds himself notably unprepared. Rather more recently, black magic within a suburban setting provided the premise for an episode of The X-Files entitled ‘Arcadia’.25 FBI Special Agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully pose as newcomers to an outwardly placid gated community in order to investigate the mysterious disappearance of three local couples. It transpires that the well-travelled Gene Gogolak, all-powerful head of the local residents association, has summoned a murderous Tibetan ‘Tulpa’ (a kind of thought-Golem made out of mud and garbage) to dispatch anyone who violates the community’s vast rule book, because ‘It’s important that people ﬁt in’. A similar convergence of black magic and obsessive adherence to the rules amidst the setting of an exclusive suburban community also manifests itself in Bentley Little’s novel The Association (2001) in which dissenters are harassed, brutally mutilated and even murdered. Of course, no one was ever sacriﬁced to Satan in Bewitched and the witches and warlocks and other magical beings that interfered with the workings of the Stevens household on a weekly basis were mostly of

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a benign nature. Indeed, witchcraft’s occult associations were scarcely alluded to at all. Nevertheless, the show did make sly references to the popularity of Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968), and to the witching community’s umbrage at being portrayed in such a negative manner, an instance of wry self-awareness deepened further by the fact that one of Bewitched’s regular actors, Maurice Evans, played Rosemary’s friend Hutch. In the sitcom world, even those witches and warlocks with malevolent intent could generally be outsmarted by Samantha Stevens and gently forced to see the error of their ways. In the remorselessly predictable manner of the typical American sitcom from the beginnings of the format to the present day, no problem was ever so insurmountable that it couldn’t be happily resolved within half an hour. While it may have been founded upon much the same premise as Conjure Wife, then, the complications which arise in Bewitched are overwhelmingly of a benignly amusing rather than malevolently threatening nature. But here too, suburban conventionality is merely a cover for unlikely supernatural activities. Indeed, one of the staple scenes of the show is one in which relentlessly nosy next-door-neighbour Gladys spies something strange happening in the Stevens’ place, but is unable to substantiate her suspicions to husband Abner. The basic premise of the show was established in the pilot episode, ‘I Darrin take this Witch’. An up-and-coming advertising executive named Darrin Stevens (Dick York, later replaced by Dick Sergeant) meets an attractive young woman, Samantha (Elizabeth Montgomery), in a revolving door.26 The two begin a relationship which rapidly culminates in marriage. As the voiceover tells us, everything about this couple is average, save for the fact that ‘as it so happens, this girl is a witch’. On their honeymoon night, Samantha is scolded by her mother, Endora (Agnes Moorhead), who tells her, in a warning that carried particular weight in the mid-1960s, ‘You don’t know what kind of prejudice you’re going to run into’. However, Samantha cannot be dissuaded, and, after a few demonstrations of her power, manages to persuade her new husband that she is indeed a fully-ﬂedged witch. Darrin is less than delighted, and immediately demands that she cease using her powers at once. His main reason for this seems not to be fear that she will be exposed to the world, but, as in Conjure Wife, horror inspired by the fact that his wife is considerably more talented and powerful than himself. Indeed, one of the biggest ﬂaws in the show is that it is very difﬁcult to see why any bright, attractive woman would give up such an appealing way of life in order to marry a career-obsessed insecure specimen of

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masculinity such as this. Regardless, once Darrin makes his demands, Samantha promises to be ‘the best wife a man ever had!’ He follows this ultimatum up by informing her that: ‘You’re going to have to learn how to be a suburban housewife. You’re going to have to learn to cook, keep house, and go round to my mother’s house every Friday night’, a numbingly mundane timetable to which Samantha earnestly responds, ‘I’ll try, I promise I’ll try!’ Bewitched was only the most notable of a number of fantasy-tinged sitcoms to appear on American television during this period, in which classic horror icons and paranormal beings of all sorts were stripped of any threatening qualities they might otherwise have possessed and relocated within decidedly conventional, domestic settings. Beginning with Mr Ed’s talking horse in 1960, there soon appeared on television screens a whole cycle of sitcoms based upon fantastical and gimmicky premises.27 Indeed, the ‘magic’ sitcom was arguably the most popular type of programme on all of American television during the decade.28 They included shows such as My Mother the Car (1965–66), The Munsters (1964–66) and The Addams Family (1964–66), the latter two of which both had their television debuts within a week of each other. Bewitched even had its own imitator in the form of the slightly more hip I Dream of Jeannie (1965–70). The Munsters in particular indicated the extent to which the horror icons of a generation ago had been assimilated into the mainstream and transformed from threatening, marginalised monsters into amiably eccentric and decidedly unscary comic ﬁgures. As with The Addams Family, based upon Charles Addams’ morbidly witty cartoons in The New Yorker, the overarching plotline in the show lay in the contrast between the freakish-looking main characters and the decidedly contemporary setting and ‘normal’ friends and neighbours who they encountered each episode. Similarly, Bewitched also placed a familiar horror icon, in mundane suburban surroundings. The main difference between Samantha Stevens and the Addams family, however, was that they were comfortable in their own skin, and, like the Munsters, genuinely couldn’t understand why other people might be frightened of them. By contrast, the basis for most Bewitched plots revolved around Samantha trying to hide her powers from mainstream society and conform to the restrictive demands of her conservative husband. This was by no means an unusual dynamic in the fantasy sitcoms of the era: In all the magic shows (except The Munsters and The Addams Family, which are about entire families of innocent monsters trying to

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live their deviant lives amongst hostile, intolerant, ‘normal’ people), an unpretentious middle-class heterosexual male is miraculously handed a roommate – animal, woman or alien – whose magical powers turn out to be more trouble than they’re worth. Out of sheer magnanimity, however, the single white male adopts the Other and tries to teach it the profound satisfaction of simple, unsupernatural, consumer-orientated bourgeois life in the USA.29 Perhaps part of the reason why Bewitched immediately became such a hit with American viewers was that the show reﬂected in suitably fantastical, comic form, many of the tensions which were at the time percolating just below the surface of American family life. The Stevens live in Westport, Connecticut, where just a few years later both Wes Craven’s ultra-violent horror ﬁlm The Last House on the Left (1972) and Brian Forbes’s 1975 adaptation of The Stepford Wives would be ﬁlmed. Indeed, the original title suggested for the show was The Witch of Westport, thus emphasising from the outset the signiﬁcance of the suburban setting.30 As a charming and apparently submissive young wife and mother Samantha Stevens seems like the perfect, idealised suburban housewife. Of course, we all know that in order to maintain this illusion of domestic perfection, Samantha must daily try (and usually fail) to resist the urge to use her boundless magical powers lest she upset her relentlessly conformist husband, whose job as an advertising executive indicated the extent to which he colluded in the creation of the era’s prevailing materialist and domestic myths.31 As Gerard Jones has commented: Samantha’s domestic life was like a satire of the sterility of mainstream sitcom values. Her daughter was cute but drained of personality and initiative. Her house was militantly devoid of personality . . . her community gave her nothing but conformist assaults. On the other hand, Sam’s family represented all the rich diversity of sophisticated society . . . one could have not laid a more thorough groundwork for a satire lambasting Middle Class America and demonstrating how a poor confused woman allowed her spirit to be suffocated by the patriarchal dictates of traditional domesticity. Indeed, Sam opted for domesticity again and again and again, no matter what tempted her. Yet as Montgomery played her, she was so content, so hip to herself, so much smarter than everyone else on the show that every episode asked viewers to believe that she was doing the right thing. What was going on here?32

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What was ‘going on’ here, and was reﬂected in some manner in each and every episode of Bewitched, was that the drive towards family and domesticity which became so powerful in the years following the Second World War was, by the time of the show’s debut, already on the verge of collapse. The contraceptive pill ﬁrst became available in 1960; Friedan’s highly inﬂuential bestseller The Feminine Mystique would appear in 1963; and the nascent women’s rights movement was beginning to become ever more vocal: ‘the suburban revolution had been accomplished, and they now found that – in an age of labour saving devices, afﬂuence, and social ﬂuidity – homemaking was not enough’.33 There was, from the outset, a strong connection between suburbia and the idealised image of the American housewife. The simple fact of an unprecedented growth in the number of families in 1950s America was the prime factor in the growth of the suburbs. The post-war marriage rate was more than twice that of the preceding decade: the inevitable baby boom that followed caused a population increase of 30 million during the decade.34 In the ever-expanding environs of suburbia, sex roles were polarised as never before, as commuting city-bound fathers left home at daybreak, while their wives held the fort at home and took care of the house and children. As Glenna Matthews has noted in Just a Housewife (p.212), suburban housing patterns reinforced a woman’s isolation from the world of adults, whilst the percentage of her day spent chauffeuring other family members about increased exponentially. As a locale for the stay-at-home housewife, suburbia was most often perceived as a less than stimulating environment, and the impact that this would have upon women’s mental health soon became a common concern, as ‘psychologists, sociologists, and cultural critics became convinced that suburban life was essentially sad and demoralising for women’.35 Indeed, much of the criticism that took aim at the presumed dangers of suburbia focused upon the locale’s supposedly negative impact upon women and children: according to some of the more vociferous anti-suburban commentators, ‘it turned families into matriarchies with overbearing wives, emasculated husbands, over involved mothers, absent fathers, spoiled and delinquent children’.36 So call ‘Momism’ – suffocating, emasculating and ultimately poisonous over-maternity, as deﬁned by Philip Wylie in his misogynistic bestseller Generation of Vipers (1942) – was seen as a major problem, with the suburbs the perfect breeding ground for broods of cosseted brats. Yet, at the same time that such concerns – unfounded and otherwise – were being expressed by many critics, sociologists and psychologists, the all-pervasive dogma of domestic idealism was being reinforced

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in practically every aspect of popular American culture. For instance, women’s fashions, typiﬁed by the decade’s deﬁning trends of the tightly cinched-in waist and bouffant skirt hadn’t been so conﬁning and impractical since the nineteenth century.37 American movies of the 1950s and early 1960s celebrated a male culture of individualism and strength – exempliﬁed in rugged lone heroes played by actors such as John Wayne and Gary Cooper – while the leading female movie stars were non-threatening sex kittens like Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansﬁeld, or cheery girls-next-door like Doris Day. They were very different role models indeed from the sassy, sharp-witted and sexually aggressive career women played by actresses such as Katharine Hepburn, Rosalind Russell and Joan Crawford that had dominated the movie screens during the late 1930s and 1940s. The status quo was further reinforced by another of the decade’s pop culture media – the women’s magazines. As Friedan and others would later demonstrate, these magazines printed story after story extolling the unassailable virtues of motherhood and domesticity. In such tales, the man was the undisputed head of the household, the career woman an evil (but lonely) schemer who had missed out on the much more satisfying blessings of love and marriage.38 It was perhaps no wonder, then, that Shirley Jackson, who frequently published in such outlets herself, sardonically referred to The Woman’s Home Companion as Womb’s Home Companion. The ﬂedgling medium of television too contributed to the ideal that women were expected to live up to. In every facet of American culture, women saw reﬂected back at them an aggressively idealised vision of womanhood and domesticity that they were being urged to personify in everyday life. Yet behind all the rhetoric, statistics suggested that many women, like Samantha Stevens, were quietly breaking (or at least bending) the ideological rules. As William Chafe has noted, according to the precepts of the so-called ‘feminine mystique’ women could secure fulﬁlment only by devoting themselves to homemaking. Housework was therefore presented to women as a ‘creative adventure’. However, there was also ‘something profoundly suspicious about this rhetoric – the effort to reinforce traditional norms seemed almost frantic, as though in reality something very different was taking place.’39 And indeed, in many cases, something very different was taking place. During the 1950s, the proportion of married women who worked outside the home rose dramatically. In 1940, married women had represented barely a third of all working women: by 1950, they had formed 52 per cent of that group.40 Indeed, as Carl Degler states: ‘This amazing increase in the number of

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married women who joined the work force during the 1950s and 60s also meant that for the ﬁrst time in American history more women than men took jobs’.41 Millions of married women had entered the work place, ‘thereby directly contradicting the popular stereotype’.42 What is more, the biggest work increase was led by those who had allegedly found lasting contentment in home and domesticity – middle-class wives and mothers like the ﬁctional Samantha Stevens. Reality was diverging signiﬁcantly from the innately conservative domestic ‘ideal’ usually associated with the post-war years. As Chafe has pointed out, ‘the most striking feature of the 1950s was the degree to which women continued to enter the job market and expand their sphere’.43 However, things were not quite as progressive as they may at ﬁrst appear. The fact remained that it was still extremely difﬁcult for women to ‘accept much in the way of advancement outside the family home.’44 The vast majority of working women still occupied the lower levels of the economic pyramid, and matters remained that way even up to and including the 1960s and 1970s.45 Women also tended to take up highly segregated, traditionally ‘feminine’ positions, generally low-paid, lowskill jobs in which few or no men were ever employed – working as secretaries, typists, maids, cashiers, nurses, kindergarten teachers and waitresses – jobs that were badly paid, usually part-time, and which offered little opportunity for professional advancement. While it may have seemed to confound many of the personal stereotypes, women’s working patterns during the 1950s were prompted by an effort to support the family, rather than increase women’s autonomy within the family.46 Carl Degler even suggests that: ‘in spite of the transformation after World War Two, women’s relation to the family remained as primary and central as it had ever been. It was now combined with work . . . but that outside job was secondary and supplemental to the family, which still remained the primary concern and sphere of most women’.47 Yet, for all that, the generally unacknowledged extent to which American women entered the workforce during this era helped demonstrate that ‘despite the decade’s gloriﬁcation of domesticity and togetherness there was a growing gap between the public images of smiling stay-at-home suburban housewives and the private realities of everyday family life. Behind the rhetoric of domestic bliss seethed vast, only partly hidden frustration and discontent’.48 In practically every episode of Bewitched, then, viewers saw niggling indications of this powerful, but carefully repressed, undercurrent of discontent and domestic unease manifest themselves. As one critic has noted, it was ‘peculiarly ineffective in selling its own point of view.

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It was a visibly uneasy and phoney show’.49 This can be seen even in the second episode, ‘Be It Ever So Mortgaged’, in which Darrin takes the decidedly unilateral decision that the couple should move to a house in the suburbs (presumably because everyone else is doing the same thing). Until now, like millions of average Americans, the Stevens have been renters, something to which Samantha seemed to have no prior objection. Now, Darrin declares, they should get ‘our own house, something we can own from one end to the other’ – but his new wife looks decidedly unimpressed by the prospect of a move from the city, and the belt-tightening that will be necessary to pay for it. Nevertheless, Darrin’s word, no matter how unreasonable, is law, and Sam agrees, despite her own misgivings. This anticipates the initial reluctance to move to the suburbs which often occurs in the female-focused Suburban Gothic, as we shall see in The Stepford Wives and even Lionel Shriver’s 2002 novel We Need to Talk About Kevin, to name but two examples: the move is almost always prompted by a male desire to leave the city and settle down within a setting of conventional domesticity. Nevertheless, Sam reluctantly declares that ‘Anything that makes you happy makes me happy’, the kind of sentiment that would be equally at home coming from the perfectly formed mouths of one of Ira Levin’s slavishly domestic suburban fembots just a few years later. Luckily for the viewer, Samantha’s strong-willed mother Endora pops in to jeer at Darrin’s decision to move, and, in a moment which approaches actual poignancy, to lament the fact that her beloved daughter would trade the magic and wonder of the witching way of life ‘for a quarter of an acre of crabgrass’. Their new home is a bland, soulless tract house, which has obviously just been erected (there isn’t even a lawn). Endora can’t resist the urge to zap into existence a ﬂower-ﬁlled garden. She and Samantha proceed to employ magic to furnish the house just the way they want it, and Sam decides that the move would be a good thing after all (though not before insisting that her mother restore the place to its barren state, because she and Darrin are going to ‘do it the right way – with seeds!’), which indicates that she has already been comprehensively brainwashed into conformity by her unadventurous spouse. However, for all her attempts to conform, the fact remains that the fundamental premise of the show rested upon the fact that Sam was never quite able to forsake her magical abilities (or her magical family) for a life of absolute suburban mundanity. As most commentators discussing the show have noted, the lively, charming Samantha, her witty and adventurous mother, and the other lovably eccentric, supernaturally empowered beings who feature in the show always seem

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much more likable (and indeed human) than the perpetually dull, demanding Darrin, his disloyal boss Larry Tate, and next-door neighbours Abner and Gladys. Ultimately, even the Stevens’ children, Tabitha and Adam, are a witch and a warlock respectively, magical ability being passed down through their mother. Darrin, like that other conservative Robert Neville in I Am Legend, thus becomes a minority in his own home. While his wife may rather unconvincingly seem to have renounced apparently inﬁnite power in favour of domesticity and the lot of the suburban housewife, she never quite gives her abilities up completely, and ultimately he must become just as accustomed to the magical world as she must to the ‘normal’ one: the times are, after all, a-changing, whether he likes it or not. Sam’s continued allegiance to the world of her birth is reinforced by the fact that, apart from Darrin, she never convincingly establishes any real ties to her ‘normal’ neighbours or strait-laced in-laws,50 and by the frequent appearances of Sam’s kooky, free-thinking ‘cousin’ Serena (Elizabeth Montgomery in a brunette wig), a self-centred and fun-loving representative of the decade’s burgeoning counterculture. As Gerard Jones has observed, Serena was a deeply destabilising addition to the show’s inherently conservative dynamic, for she was ‘the Sam-that-might-have-been, the sexy sprite who loved every minute of her own life but brought terror and trouble to poor schmucks like Darrin’;51 she also provided an indication of the kind of attitude towards life that millions of young American women would take in the turbulent years that followed. Signiﬁcantly, ‘good’ witches such as Samantha almost always have a dark (or at the very least, more irresponsible) double to contend with, in a striking reminder of the witch’s destabilising potential. Even the Good Witch of the North in The Wizard of Oz has to contend with the Wicked Witches of the East and West. Sabrina the Teenage Witch (Melissa Joan Hart) has an evil twin named Katrina who wants to take over her life. Even when the doubling isn’t as blatant as in I Dream of Jeannie, Bewitched, or Sabrina (in which the doppelganger is played by the same actress as the heroine), the benign witch is often opposed to a darker or more troubled version of herself. In Alice Hoffman’s Practical Magic, stable, domesticated mother Sally Owens must contend with the trouble caused by her irresponsible and sexually adventurous sister Gillian, and in the 1996 teen witch horror ﬁlm The Craft, the conscience-driven, blonde-haired new girl in town, Sarah, is favourably contrasted with her ultimately power-crazed, working-class friend Nancy (naturally, a brunette), whose desire to use her magical powers for revenge and personal gain ultimately leads to madness. Even Wiccan Willow Rosenberg,

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best friend of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, has a vampiric double from a parallel universe. The recurrent appearance on Bewitched of the heroine’s irrepressible alter ego (in twenty-two episodes in all) reinforced the impression that the show’s depiction of Samantha was representative of a repressive era that was already drawing to a close. After all, as Arlene Skolnick has emphasised, the family patterns of the 1950s were a decided aberration in the ﬁrst place, ‘a throwback to the Victorian cult of domesticity with its polarised sex roles and almost religious reverence for home and hearth’52 helped along by the desire to return to ‘normality’ after the war. The slowing down of the marriage and birth rates, and rapid rise in the number of divorces which occurred during the 1970s and 1980s may have been a marked departure from patterns in the 1950s and early 1960s, but it was actually this behaviour rather than that of the previous generation that was consistent with long-term trends. As Skolnick noted at a time when there was much wringing of hands at the ‘deterioration’ of American family values, ‘had the 1940s and 1950s not happened, today’s young adults would appear to be behaving quite normally’.53 In other words, in the near future, American women would begin to embrace lives much more like those of the ‘swinging’ and deﬁantly antidomestic Serena than the stay-at-home philosophy so unconvincingly espoused by her cousin Sam, just as in the show itself the seemingly endless possibilities offered by the magical realm would ultimately triumph over the suburban and the everyday.

‘The only person imprisoning Joan is Joan’: Jack’s Wife George A. Romero’s Jack’s Wife (also sometimes known as Season of the Witch and Hungry Wives), released in 1972, the same year that Bewitched ended. Again, the focus here is on witchcraft within a repressive suburban setting, but whereas Sam was a fully ﬂedged witch from birth who chose to give up her powers in favour of a life of domestic respectability, the protagonist of Jack’s Wife (Joan Mitchell) follows the reverse path, using the possibility of magical empowerment as a means of escaping her overbearing husband and dull, routine-driven life. In Bewitched, therefore, as in most of the earlier ‘I married a witch’-style narratives, the witch’s power was something to be contained so that the heroine could live a ‘normal’ life; by contrast, in Romero’s ﬁlm, this power is a potential escape route from that very fate. Like his previous effort, The Crazies (1973), Jack’s Wife was an attempt by Romero to break away from the more obviously supernatural

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associations of Night of the Living Dead (1968). Cheaply made and jarringly edited (due to the fact that a series of opportunistic distributors tried recutting the ﬁlm as a porn movie), Romero’s characteristically intelligent approach nevertheless retains undeniable power, and the ﬁlm deserves to be much more widely discussed than it has been.54 The ﬁlm is about a frustrated 40-something housewife who feels suffocated both by her suburban surroundings and by her obnoxious, detached husband Jack. In an indication of the blurring of the lines between reality and fantasy which will recur throughout the ﬁlm, it opens with a long and symbolically dense dream sequence in which conventional images of suburban domesticity are combined with images of entrapment and submission. Joan is ﬁrst seen tangled up in branches; then being led, naked, through a forest while her husband leads her on a leash; and ﬁnally caged in a pen. We then cut to a scene (which at ﬁrst the viewer mistakes for reality, although it is in fact another dream sequence), in which an overbearing (male) realtor leads Joan on a tour of her own home – her prison, in fact – and points out all the amenities which come with it, such as friends in a similar position, her teenage daughter, a weekly allowance from her husband, bills to pay, an addiction to tranquillisers: the whole package. Joan is horriﬁed by the thought of losing her looks and her vitality, a preoccupation reinforced by the fact that she keeps catching glimpses of herself in the mirror as an old crone. Having fulﬁlled her childbearing duties, and produced a daughter, Nikki, who is beginning to embark upon an independent, sexually active life of her own (despite her father’s request that she ‘try to stay a virgin’), Joan fears that her usefulness, at least so far as society sees it, is coming to an end. Left alone for much of the time Joan’s only solace is the pills she pops to keep her on an even keel. She and Jack are virtually strangers to each other now. Much of the early part of the ﬁlm depicts the mindless, endless series of minor chores and activities which ﬁll Joan’s average day: shopping, cleaning, cooking, and stopping in at the drugstore. She has considered having an affair, she admits, but hasn’t quite gotten round to it yet. She sees a psychiatrist, but he is of no use whatsoever. The only thing which breaks up this endless round of monotony is the occasional social gathering with friends and neighbours, but in their own way these bawdy, booze-fuelled gatherings are just as predictable and mind-numbing: Joan is always much more of an observer than a participant in the faintly desperate revelry.55 It is at one such party, however, that Joan ﬁrst hears a snippet of gossip which instantly piques her interest. Glancing over at a glamorous middle-aged woman, Marion Howe,

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one of Joan’s friends mockingly states ‘She’s a witch!’ Joan visits Marion to have her fortune told, and to ﬁnd out more about witchcraft, which is apparently ‘becoming quite the in thing for the WASP set’. Marion, it seems, did not become a witch, but rather, like Samantha Stevens, was born into the faith. We get the distinct impression that it is, for her, just like another religion, something to be observed rather than necessarily lived, whereas Joan displays the typical zeal of the convert, declaring ‘If you’re not going to do it for what it really is, what’s the point?’. This element of the ﬁlm, in which the question of whether one is born a witch, or becomes a witch, also reﬂects the ongoing debate about whether one is socialised into adopting certain feminine modes of behaviour, or is rather born with these traits, a question which, as we shall see in Chapter 3, is also alluded to in Ira Levin’s novel from the same year The Stepford Wives. Joan’s desire to break free from her sterile existence is further stimulated when Nikki brings home an aggressively hip young lecturer named Greg. Along with her equally unhappy friend Shirley (whose own home life is less than perfect – her husband is secretly gay), Joan and Greg get drunk one evening, and in a moment which displays the streak of cruelty in Greg’s character, he convinces the very drunken Shirley that the cigarette she has been smoking has been spiked with pot. Desperate to do something wild and out of the ordinary, clueless Shirley proceeds to act as though she is completely stoned, in a powerful illustration of the placebo effect and a subtle foreshadowing of the kind of role that the drug of witchcraft will soon come to play in Joan’s life. Here, as Greg sardonically notes, the power of belief is everything: in an argument that, intentionally or not, cannot help to bring to mind Norman Saylor’s paper on ‘The Social Background of the Modern Voodoo Cult’, he states that ‘Voodoo only works because you believe it works. Your mind does the work’, ‘I’m not ﬁnished yet!’, Shirley cries – in other circumstances the rallying call of the post-menopausal woman, but here an expression of absolute despair – as the others drag her home to be with the husband she despises. Like Joan, she suspects that any chance for real happiness and fulﬁlment in life has long since ﬂed. In a bid to prove otherwise, Joan throws herself into the study of witchcraft, but in the meantime, things are getting worse at home. Nikki runs away, Jack slaps her in the face during an argument, and she keeps having strange dreams (or hallucinations) in which a faceless intruder breaks into the house while she is alone. In an effort to take control of her life, Joan heads to the city and uses her MasterCard to buy herself all of the props apparently necessary to be a witch. It is at

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this point that the editing in the ﬁlm really perks up and the narrative takes on a rather more urgent momentum after the fairly languid pace of the earlier section of the story. As though she were studying for an Open University degree, Joan embarks upon a self-taught ‘how to be a witch’ course, all the while hiding her new-found passion from Jack. She even pretends to have been to church on Ash Wednesday: one ornate and ceremonial religion (Catholicism) has apparently been replaced by another (witchcraft). The suburban living room at one point becomes a witches’ den. Joan even casts a spell on Greg Williams to make him interested in her (although his attraction to her has already been evident in earlier scenes), and the two of them have sex. She later tells him that she is a witch, something to which he reacts with scepticism, even though she seems genuinely frightened by the forces which are beginning to make themselves known to her. Nevertheless, disregarding Marian Howe’s warning never to abuse her powers, she performs a powerful ritual to summon a demon in which her ‘magical’ abilities and her sexual reawakening are explicitly connected. The next time she ‘dreams’ that there is an intruder in the house, Joan grabs a gun and shoots him, only to ﬁnd that she has killed Jack instead – whether accidentally or on purpose is for the viewer to decide. The ﬁlm ends at a cocktail party in which Joan’s actions (‘She thought he was a prowler’) are discussed by everyone present as she herself moves regally and conﬁdently through the crowd, a very different woman from the difﬁdent observer of previous gatherings. This scene, signiﬁcantly, is intercut throughout with one in which Joan, naked, and surrounded by a hooded group of deﬁantly ordinary-looking women, becomes a fully ﬂedged member of the local coven. As part of the ceremony, a red cord is tied round her neck, and she is lightly whipped by the head witch, a scene obviously meant to evoke the powerful dream sequence with which the ﬁlm opened. We must ask ourselves whether she has just exchanged one ideological straitjacket for another, even as the newly conﬁdent Joan recites that ‘I would know myself for what I am’ and, in her ﬁnal words, declares that ‘I’m a witch’. The possibility that her immersion in witchcraft provides a successful escape from the mindless sterility of her previous life is somewhat undermined by the fact that, as she moves through the party in the ﬁnal moments of the ﬁlm, Joan is suddenly stopped dead by a whispered comment from one of the other guests explaining who she is to a bystander: ‘You remember – Jack’s wife’. The ﬁlm ends with a sustained close-up on her as she stares, apparently blankly, into the distance, the theatrical conﬁdence and glamour of but a few moments before replaced by something else entirely. Is it

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possible that her new life as a witch is in its own way as hollow as her previous existence as a housewife and mother, and that her new reliance upon spells and charms is as harmful as her previous dependence upon tranquillisers to get her through the long day?56 If, as John Muir has suggested, ‘Witchcraft is the ﬁlter through which Joan ﬁnds suburban existence tolerable’,57 the closing moments of the ﬁlm would seem to suggest that this ﬁlter cannot completely block out what Romero obviously sees as the soul-destroyingly tedious reality of life as a middle-aged woman in 1970s suburbia. This is a horror ﬁlm of sorts, despite the lack of any overtly supernatural incident, but the horror here lies not in Joan’s growing fascination with the occult and with the witching life, but in the oppressive sense of entrapment and claustrophobia which pervades the narrative, and the ultimate sense that despite her best efforts, Joan is still imprisoned within a realm she will never quite be able to escape completely. After all, as her therapist tells her early on, ‘The only person imprisoning Joan is Joan’, an observation which could equally be applied to the unhappy female protagonists of both The Stepford Wives and Todd Haynes’ bleak 1995 ﬁlm Safe. Just as is seen in these ﬁlms as well, in Jack’s Wife the self can never truly be escaped.58 Studies in the 1970s which built upon the pioneering work done by the likes of Herbert J. Gans in The Levittowners generally refuted the suggestion that suburbia was an inherently damaging locale for women. One study of a New Jersey suburban community that was then in its planning stages discussed both the positive and the negative aspects of suburban living for women. The researchers found that women ‘appreciated their new home, the sense of neighbourliness and the openness and safety of the residential environment for both themselves and their families’, but criticised the inadequate provision of shopping facilities and the lack of public transportation, a crucial requirement for women who commuted to work and back, but were denied access to the family car during the day.59 Yet, as Mark Clapson has demonstrated, ‘there was no convincing evidence that women in either American or English suburbs were particularly prone to neuroses. Moreover, the growing number of women settling in the suburbs during the later twentieth-century strongly suggested that the attractions of suburban living strongly outweighed the disadvantages’.60 A vital demographic change began to take place in the suburbs during the 1970s. The ﬁrst generation of American children born and raised in this environment had grown to adulthood and was beginning to settle down with families of their own. Whereas earlier suburbs had been

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populated mostly by former city-dwellers for whom the move was a major lifestyle change, for millions of women suburbia was now the norm (as leading sociologist Sylvia Fleis Fava noted), and being born there meant that they tended to exhibit a strong preference for suburban living in the future.61 Obviously, the suburbs were not problem-free, but nor were they always the mind-numbingly conformist, vapid and psychologically damaging hellholes that they had so often been depicted as in the 1950s and early 1960s. Nevertheless, as Jack’s Wife illustrated, by the beginning of the 1970s, major changes were beginning to take place in the way in which gender roles were to be fulﬁlled in American society, and for many feminists the milieu was seen as a repressive and claustrophobic environment which irrevocably stiﬂed women’s potential for happiness and fulﬁlment by encouraging them to remain locked into the constrictive ideals regarding the nature of the nuclear family. After all, as Arlene Skolnick noted, ‘between 1960 and the publication of Friedan’s book [in 1963] the plight of the trapped housewife became a media obsession’.62 Furthermore Skolnick continues, ‘Surveys taken at the time conﬁrm it as a dramatic turning point in sex role beliefs as well as in acceptance of the women’s rights movement itself. Traditional concepts of sex roles in family and marriage – for example, the notion that married women, especially mothers, should conﬁne their activities to the home – gave way to more “modern” egalitarian methods.’ Signiﬁcantly, it was around this same time that the ﬁgure of the witch began to be embraced by some feminists as a powerful symbol of female power founded upon the belief that benign matriarchal rule and communion with nature were once commonplace and should somehow be accomplished once more. In 1968, the so-called ‘Action Wing’ of a group of radical New York-based feminists (including Robin Morgan, who as a child had starred in the sentimental 1950s family comedy I Remember Mama) took the name ‘W.I.T.C.H’ (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy From Hell) as a means of ironically exploiting the ‘negative associations of the witch as a woman of dark power’ and invaded a Bridal Fair held at Madison Square Garden dressed in an appropriately ‘witchlike’ fashion.63 In a process that had started during the late 1950s and accelerated during the decades that followed, witchcraft was revived as a neo-pagan religion which attracted those who felt disconnected from Christianity and other mainstream religions.64 The association between feminism and witchcraft has continued to the present day, for, as Diane Purkiss has noted, ‘The women who entered modern witchcraft after the second wave of the women’s liberation movement saw traces of

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what an earlier generation of women had made: a religion that might really offer a corrective to patriarchal religious practices, a real place for female creativity and imagination’.65 In addition, as seen in Jack’s Wife, one of the most attractive things about modern witching practices is that they allow ‘a creative reinvention of the self . . . the witch is encouraged to identify with many attractive ﬁgures from mythology, and is allowed to choose a Craft-Name for herself’; given the attractiveness of this credo and the rapid decline of organised religion it is perhaps no surprise then that by some estimates there are between 83,000–333,000 practicing witches in the United States today’.66

Girl power: the suburban witch today The ‘coven as female self-help group’ notion which emerged during the 1970s and 1980s certainly ﬁnds expression in John Updike’s 1984 novel The Witches of Eastwick (succeeded by The Widows of Eastwick, 2008), about a trio of self-proclaimed witches who live in the afﬂuent Rhode Island town of the title, all of whom are sexually adventurous, self-absorbed divorcees. For Jane, Sukie and Alexandra, the power of witchcraft creates both a powerful bond between them and provides a valuable opportunity to enrich their lives. The complex relationship they simultaneously embark upon with the charismatic, quasisupernatural newcomer Darryl Van Horne highlights their willingness to eschew traditional notions of family and morality in favour of selfsatisfaction and independence, a reﬂection of the era’s changing familial and social patterns (the novel is set during the Vietnam War). Like Joan Mitchell, Updike’s coven has no problem at all with using their magical powers to help satisfy their own selﬁsh urges. Alice Hoffman’s novel Practical Magic (1995) also employs witchcraft within a small-town New England setting. Here two very different sisters struggle to reconcile their powerful magical abilities with the realities of romantic entanglements and everyday life. Signiﬁcantly, like Samantha Stevens (who was brought up by her mother Endora, who long since seemed to have jettisoned her warlock husband), Sally and Gillian Owens have been raised by their eccentric aunts in an allfemale environment in which men feature only in a rather peripheral manner, as boyfriends or as husbands. Female supernatural empowerment can only truly ﬂourish, it seems, in a matriarchal setting rather than in a more ‘traditional’ family dynamic. Even the title character of Sabrina the Teenage Witch reaches magical maturity whilst being raised by her eccentric aunts (again, also witches), while the sisters in Charmed

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were brought up ﬁrst by their mother, and then by their grandmother. Updike’s Van Horne is a rare example of a man who is as powerful as his supernaturally gifted female counterparts. Following the recurrent appearance of the ‘my wife is a witch’ premise in the 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s, the trope seemed to fade out of American popular culture during the later 1970s and 1980s, perhaps because (as Jack’s Wife has demonstrated) the rapid pace of changing social and cultural mores meant that the magically empowered housewife was no longer as appealing a creature as she had once been. It wasn’t until the late 1990s that the witch began to reappear with any regularity on the nation’s movie and television screens, and by then an inevitable change had taken place in the way in which ﬁctional witches were being characterised. Gone were the married (or about-to-be married) women who desperately tried to suppress their magical urges in order to maintain the domestic status quo and soothe the insecurities of the men in their lives. The new breed of suburban witch was typically a single woman in her late teens or early twenties, a demographic which demonstrates that the age at which women these days get married has risen and risen since the 1950s. The contemporary suburban witch tends to be hard at work either at high school or college, or pursuing a successful career; she juggles a variety of attractive, and understanding boyfriends; and, while still somewhat fearful of public exposure, she is always willing to use her powers to battle threatening supernatural forces (demons, vampires, rogue warlocks) or otherwise engage in unlikely adventures. The extent of this sea change can be seen reﬂected even in Nora Ephron’s poorly received 2005 reimagining of Bewitched: the witch here is no longer a devoted, if conﬂicted, wife and mother, but rather an independent, single young woman seeking to establish a life of her own away from her interfering family.67 The fact is, whereas the pervasive domestic ideology of the 1950s and early 1960s just about made it possible for contemporary audiences to accept the fact that a woman with the power and the freedom afforded the pre-marriage Samantha would willingly try to give it all up for a career-obsessed husband and a house in the suburbs, it was obvious that nobody in 2005 would swallow this premise, at least not without some radical reconﬁguration (which ironed out whatever charm the original show had in the ﬁrst place). The gradual resurgence of interest in witches and witchcraft experienced during the 1990s had much to do with the considerable cult following attached to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The show rapidly became a huge hit with young teenagers, and helped spark a great deal of interest

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in magic and the supernatural, seeing the emergence of a rash of spin-off books of spells and guides to witchcraft,68 Buffy’s success was somewhat anticipated by a live-action television version of the 1960s comic book (and later, cartoon) Sabrina the Teenage Witch, which, like Bewitched, was initially inspired by movies such as Bell, Book and Candle. There had been two witch-related television shows in the interim – romantic detective series Tucker’s Witch (1982–83) and the ABC sitcom Free Spirit (1989). Neither show ran for longer than a season. The 1980s was not a good time for the television witch, a fact anticipated in 1977 when the Bewitched spin-off Tabitha similarly sank without trace. Running from 1996 to 2003, Sabrina the Teenage Witch starred Melissa Joan Hart as Sabrina Spellman, an apparently normal girl who discovers that she is a witch – the daughter of a warlock and a mortal – on the day of her sixteenth birthday. Living with her eccentric aunts Hilda and Zelda, and her talking cat Salem – a former warlock turned into a feline as punishment for trying to take over the world – Sabrina struggles to succeed both at school and as a witch, and the show, like Bewitched, tended to revolve around plotlines in which the heroine must conceal her powers from suspicious mortals or use them to get her into zany, but always solvable, situations. Once again, a New England heritage is associated with magical females: Sabrina lives in Westbridge, Massachusetts and, in a ﬁrst season episode wryly entitled ‘The Crucible’, even experiences a recreation of the Salem Witch Trials in which her high-school nemesis Libby is her chief persecutor (like the Halliwell sisters in Charmed, and Samantha in Bewitched she will also encounter witch hunters and travel back to unenlightened Puritan times as well).69 In addition, in Charmed, the Halliwell sisters even have an ancestor, Melinda Warren, who was burned at the stake at Salem. Sabrina the Teenage Witch ran for seven seasons, and, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, was accordingly able to trace (albeit in a much more light-hearted and less violent fashion) the growth and development of super-powered heroine from the awkward teenage years to fully ﬂedged adulthood. Just as she must work hard at school in order to gain good grades, so too must Sabrina study her ‘Witches’ Handbook’ before she is allowed to become a fully ﬂedged witch, and in fact, many of the earlier episodes in particular deal with the trials she must endure before she is ﬁnally granted her all-important ‘Witch’s Licence’. Indeed, by the ﬁnal episodes of the show, ‘What a Witch Wants’ and ‘Soulmates’, Sabrina is a successful magazine journalist who has graduated from college, lives with friends, and even acts as an occasional mentor to an irresponsible junior witch. She was on the brink of marriage, before she rejected

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her unsuspecting ﬁancée in favour of her long-standing love interest, Harvey Kinkle, who happily accepted her abilities as a witch and had no desire for her to renounce them. It is a conclusion which demonstrates the extent to which the depiction of young witches in recent times has functioned as a powerful metaphor for the female maturation process. It also highlights the way in which expectations forced upon young women have changed since the days of the more old-fashioned suburban witch narrative, in which such abilities are something to be repressed and controlled if one wants to maintain a successful romantic relationship. Needless to say, Sabrina’s high school experience was very different from that depicted in Andrew Fleming’s 1996 ﬁlm The Craft. Sarah Bailey (Robin Tunney), a troubled newcomer to an afﬂuent Catholic school in the Los Angeles suburbs, befriends three outcasts who have formed their own coven. In one of the ﬁlm’s few witty asides, they are disparagingly referred to as ‘The bitches of Eastwick’ by their fellow students. Invigorated by Sarah’s latent magical abilities, the members of the coven rapidly become more powerful than they had ever anticipated, and decide to resolve the most pressing problems in their lives by magical means. When Sarah decides that she no longer wishes to be a part of the group, she ﬁnds that her new friends are only too willing to use their powers to punish her. Initially, then, the girls’ magical experiments are seen as an empowering force, but the latter section of the ﬁlm is concerned with punishing them for their ambition and hubris, and, in the words of one review, showing ‘the awful things that can happen to bad girls who vent their evil thoughts’.70 As Sue Short has observed, whereas earlier Hollywood comedies depicted witches who gave up their power for love, here Sarah ‘does so in order to be normal, events having shown how easily “the craft” can be abused . . . although the ﬁlm brieﬂy provides a sympathetic view of female kinship, it chieﬂy warns against the rivalries and power that female power can bring’.71 A similar crisis formed the basis of one of the most memorable storylines in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in which the usually mild-mannered Willow Rosenberg went mad with rage after the murder of her girlfriend and tried to use her occult powers to bring about the end of the world. The evil consequences of witchcraft are also emphasised in one of the most successful horror ﬁlms of the 1990s, the famously low-budget hit The Blair Witch Project (1999), a ‘mockumentary’ in which three student ﬁlm-makers go in search of the infamous ‘Blair Witch’ only to meet a grisly fate in the Maryland wilderness. The ﬁlm is notable for

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being the only recent ﬁlm in which the ﬁgure of the witch is explicitly associated with a traditional forest setting, and with entirely malevolent intentions. The consequences of not adhering to the so-called witch’s code are also a common concern in Charmed (1998–2006). Piper, Phoebe and Pru Halliwell, hip twenty-something sisters living in San Francisco, discover that they are the legendary ‘Charmed Ones’, the most powerful witches ever born. Like Buffy and her cohorts, they must protect humanity from evil demonic forces, while at the same time juggling demanding jobs and hectic romantic lives. Again, the witches in question here are all free-thinking, independent-minded young women for whom their (undeniably demanding) magical powers are an irremovable part of who they are. Everyday life must be balanced with supernatural responsibilities, and there is never any suggestion that one must be outweighed by the other (which ultimately makes it a rather more optimistic show than Buffy, in which the heroine is constantly having to make painful personal sacriﬁces in order to protect humanity). Thus, it seems that the era in which witches were always asked to forsake some, if not all of their power and independence in order to settle down into happy domesticity has deﬁnitely had its day. Whereas every second episode or so of Bewitched seemed to feature a plot line in which Samantha Stevens anxiously tried to prepare a last-minute cocktail party or dinner for her husband and his clients, the new breed of (much younger) suburban witch is more likely to be found battling demons or hanging out with her friends than making dinner at home (although, like Piper Halliwell in Charmed, she may one day run a restaurant). It is also seldom suggested that she will forsake her powers once she meets the right guy. It may be difﬁcult, shows such as Sabrina, Buffy and Charmed seem to suggest, but today’s young witch truly can have it all, so long as she uses her powers for benevolent purposes. As has been noted elsewhere, ‘it is notable that a more glamorous, youthful image of the witch has recently appeared on screen. Furthermore, in contrast to the ‘snarling toxic hyper-pregnant’ utterly abject portrayal of female satanic possession in The Exorcist (1973), the supernatural female has become a celebrated ﬁgure, appearing in both television and ﬁlm as a ﬁgure of female empowerment’.72 The frustrated, guilt-ridden, middleaged witches of the past no longer exist, and the suburbs have, for today’s supernaturally empowered female (on television, at least) merely become the setting in which unashamedly heroic deeds and unlikely adventures take place, rather than a place of claustrophobic domesticity. And while the accommodation between career, family, friends and

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heroic destiny reached in this kind of television show may in many respects appear rather too smooth to be entirely believable, the fact that the modern suburban witch is, at the very least, her own woman at last, attests to the way in which American culture and society have evolved in the years since Norman Saylor ﬁrst began to snoop around in his wife’s dressing room.

3 Aliens, Androids and Zombies: Dehumanisation and the Suburban Gothic

From the very beginnings of post-war suburban development, the characteristic which most disturbed those who disliked the new communities springing up all over the nation was their supposed ‘sameness’ and homogeneity. During the 1950s, critics of suburbia ‘watched conformity spreading across the land, and attributed its spread to the concurrent phenomenon of suburbanisation. People moved to the suburbs, such arguments ran, and the suburbs made people conformist’.1 In this chapter I will discuss the ways in which this perception of suburbia as a repetitive, repressive milieu which posed a very real threat to individualism has been expressed in texts which vividly dramatise powerful post-war fears of dehumanisation and creeping conformity. The obvious preoccupation of 1950s and 1960s American science ﬁction and horror with such issues has typically been seen as the product of contemporary Cold War anxieties, but I will argue that it can equally be attributed to the insecurities caused by the unprecedented social, economic and cultural changes which took place in the United States at the same time. As one of the most visible manifestations of such changes, the rapidly spreading suburbs – so often likened to a ‘disease’ or an ‘invader’ by their many detractors – became an obvious inﬂuence upon gothic and horror-themed texts of this nature. The chapter will be divided into three sections. The ﬁrst will serve as an introduction both to the texts which will be discussed here and to the ways in which suburbia has been characterised as a bland and dangerously conformist environment. It will also discuss the ﬁrst suburban-set text that overtly ﬁctionalised such concerns, Shirley Jackson’s short story ‘The Beautiful Stranger’ (1946, in Jackson, 1965). The second section will look at Jack Finney’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) in relation to William H. Whyte’s descriptions of ‘The New Suburbia’ in 69

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his bestselling book The Organisation Man (1956). Finally, I will consider the ways in which suburban insularity and materialism are critiqued in George A. Romero’s ‘Living Dead’ series of ﬁlms, Ira Levin’s 1972 novel The Stepford Wives and the 2006 ﬁlm Fido. Discussion of The Stepford Wives will also consider the ways in which the text depicts female insecurity and feelings of entrapment within a suburban setting, and the chapter will conclude with a brief consideration of the 1995 ﬁlm Safe, which dramatises similar anxieties.

The domain of Arnheim: suburbia and conformity In The City in History (1961), Lewis Mumford outlined what he considered to be the purpose of the original, pre-twentieth-century suburb, stressing the desire for individual freedom and expression that lay at the heart of the concept. Before their present-day incarnation, therefore, the aim of the classical suburb, according to Mumford, was to allow the individual to ‘be your own unique self; to build your unique house mid a unique landscape: to live in this domain of Arnheim a selfcentred life, in which private fantasy and caprice would have licence to express themselves openly . . .’ However, in the mid twentieth century, he famously claimed, everything changed: In the mass movement into suburban areas a new kind of community was produced . . . A multitude of uniform, unidentiﬁable houses, lined up inﬂexibly, at uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste, inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless prefabricated foods, from the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect to a common mould, manufactured in a central metropolis.2 The ultimate effect, Mumford concluded, was to create ‘a low grade uniform environment from which escape is impossible’. Mumford had characterised suburbia as a shoddily constructed, repetitive and joyless hell: needless to say, he wasn’t the ﬁrst to do so and would by no means be the last. As in the even more vituperative writing of John Keats, the milieu has already become a site of fear and disgust, a nightmarish vista of ‘identical boxes spreading like gangrene’, inhabited by mindless, materialistic automatons as Keats unforgettably put it in The Crack in the Picture Window (1956, p.7). The anti-suburban tract, as expressed by Mumford, Keats and others such as the authors of The Split-Level Trap

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(Gordon et al., 1961), was from the outset a kind of futile jeremiad: a rallying call against an enemy that had already triumphed. At the time at which anti-suburban sentiment was highest, it was already clear that the suburbs were here to stay. It is no wonder, then, that variations upon the same scene tend to recur again and again in the ﬁlms and novels I am going to discuss in this chapter, and that the scene is one with which we are all by now quite familiar: the moment when our protagonist ﬁnally accepts that the worst has happened, and that the aliens are taking over, robots are replacing our friends, or the dead have risen from the grave. The most famous depiction of suburban dehumanisation is probably found in the ﬁlm version of Levin’s The Stepford Wives. Very much a product of its time (a satiric, but still effectively nightmarish, portrait of deeply conservative male responses to the then-burgeoning women’s rights movement), The Stepford Wives nevertheless penetrated the popculture collective unconscious in a manner that few movies manage. Until now, Levin’s novel, like most of these texts, has yet to be satisfactorily considered within its suburban context. Yet, as we shall see, narratives of depersonalisation and body replacement actually represent one of the most signiﬁcant tropes of the Suburban Gothic. Indeed, this kind of narrative can be traced back to the very beginnings of the post-war era, and to the publication in 1946 of Shirley Jackson’s eerie short story ‘The Beautiful Stranger’. The story opens as a housewife drives to the local railway station to collect her husband, who has been away on a business trip. It is at the railway station that, as Jackson describes it, ‘What might be called the ﬁrst intimation of strangeness’ occurs.3 Jackson’s protagonist has been anxious from the outset, ‘oddly afraid of being late’, and her children are fussy and out of sorts even before they arrive. The narrative is therefore already infused with a strange sense of disorientation and wooziness, a feeling heightened when we are told that the young housewife ‘had an odd sense of lost time’. At least some of her anxiety may be due to the fact that she and her husband had been quarrelling before he left: ‘she had spent the week of his absence determining to forget that in his presence she had been frightened and hurt’.4 The protagonist meets her husband and they drive home in ‘appalling silence’. All of a sudden, it occurs to her that the man sitting beside her may not be her husband after all, a fact she seems to accept with surprising ease: ‘There was no astonishment in her; she would have thought perhaps thirty seconds before that such a thing was impossible, but since it was now clearly possible, surprise would have been meaningless’.5 Signiﬁcantly, it is relief rather than fear that she experiences at this

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juncture, for the ‘new’ John seems to share in her secret amusement at this unlikely situation. Indeed, in stark contrast to the protagonists in other body-replacement narratives discussed here, Jackson’s lonely housewife is delighted rather than appalled by the fact that a loved one appears to have been replaced by someone else. In typical Jackson style, the reader, like the protagonist, is never quite sure if things are truly what they seem. Has the main character been driven to madness by loneliness? Is the ‘new’ John a ghost, or just the ﬁgment of his wife’s disturbed imagination? Or are forces even more powerful and fantastical at work here? Once ‘John’ sets off for work again, the young wife despairs at the thought of yet another day at home alone: Another long afternoon with no one but the children, another afternoon of widowhood, was more than she could submit to; I have done this too much, she thought, I must see something beyond the faces of my children. No one should be so much alone.6 She ﬂees home, desperate to be with other adults, and goes on a shopping trip, during which she carefully selects gifts for her ‘new’ husband. Returning, she is unable to pick out her own house from amongst the anonymous suburban mass before her. The story concludes with a paragraph which captures a certain strain of suburban isolation and female desperation in a manner that has seldom been equalled: ‘The evening was very dark, and she could see only the houses going in rows, with more rows beyond that, and somewhere a house which was hers, with the beautiful stranger inside, and she was lost out here’.7 Were one to examine Jackson’s story from a purely psychological perspective, one would ﬁnd that her disorientated heroine may well have been stricken by one of the most unusual of all psychiatric disorders: Capgras syndrome, a so-called ‘misidentiﬁcation’ syndrome in which the sufferer harbours the delusional belief that impostors have replaced people familiar to them. An individual stricken with Capgras syndrome (often associated with severe head trauma, schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s) will recognise the person but deny his or her identity, often claiming that a similar-looking ‘impostor’ or ‘double’ has been substituted instead.8 Believed to be caused by a fundamental disconnect between the mind’s ability to recognise faces and the emotional response they usually evoke, Capgras is ‘one of the rarest and most colourful syndromes in neurology’ not least of all because the sufferer, although otherwise quite lucid, will often concoct fantastical explanations to account for their sudden inability to recognise fully those closest

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to them.9 One discussion of the disorder describes the case of a thirtyyear-old man who had been seriously brain-damaged in a car accident and afterwards could not be dissuaded from the powerful belief that impostors had replaced his mother and father. As he told his doctor, in an exchange strikingly close to similar scenes in ﬁlms and novels of the ‘body-replacement’ type, ‘Yes, he looks exactly like my father but he really isn’t. He’s a nice guy, doctor, but he certainly isn’t my father’.10 For reasons that will be outlined below, suburbia became a frequent setting for texts which explore the kinds of anxieties aroused by Capgras syndrome, anxieties which helped create a particularly resonant subgenre of modern horror/science ﬁction: the so-called ‘body replacement’ or ‘invisible invasion’ narrative, in which the real threat comes from those around us, not from any external source, and in which the ultimate horror is not death or physical injury, but rather the loss of the self and the death of personality. Jackson’s story was merely one of the ﬁrst in a succession of suburban-set popular ﬁction, ﬁlms and television shows that dramatised nightmarish narratives of alienation and depersonalisation. Indeed, the post-war era in general saw a preoccupation amongst many Americans with the alleged erosion of individuality and uniqueness taking place within (and indeed, because of) the decade’s climate of unprecedented social and economic development. Unsurprisingly, these anxieties have also very often been attributed to fears aroused by the spectre of Communism and other associated Cold War tensions. As one critic has noted, ‘Brainwashing was a perfect metaphor for the Cold War: we were free and the Soviets were automatons. What other explanation could there be for their inhuman behaviour?’11 While Cold War anxieties undoubtedly form part of the explanation for such preoccupations, unease at the rapidity of the nation’s social, political and economic change was just as signiﬁcant. As one of the most visible manifestations of the unprecedented manner in which everyday life in the United States was changing, suburbia was therefore always going to be of particular signiﬁcance. With the establishment in 1947 of the ﬁrst ‘Levittown’, the development that virtually invented the post-war suburb, the single-family dwelling became the American norm.12 But not everyone was pleased by this innovation. ‘The rows of virtually identical $10,000 dream homes that marched across the once-rural landscape in the 1950s made suburbia an easy target for nay-sayers quick to equate stylistic sameness with middle-class conventionality and intellectual conformity’.13 There was also the fact that the availability and affordability of homes in these new developments (along with the generous federal grants awarded to

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ex-servicemen after the war) seemed to ‘doom traditional hierarchies of wealth and class: if anybody could afford a house, and all houses were pretty much the same, what distinguished the occupants of one little box from their next door neighbours?’14 Moreover, as many critics of the suburban project loved to point out, suburban neighbourhoods tended to attract upwardly mobile young families of roughly the same age, class and ethnic background. Thus, it is unsurprising that the milieu was seen by some as a genuine threat to long-standing social and economic boundaries. In The Suburban Myth (1969), Scott Donaldson attempted to overturn many of the most vigorous attacks upon the milieu and its inhabitants produced in the previous decade. A particular target for his ire was John Keats, who had railed against suburbia and suburbanites in the strongest possible terms in The Crack in the Picture Window. Keats painted a nightmarish portrait of a land rapidly colonised by ‘jerry-built’, identikit slums thrown up by unscrupulous developers interested only in making a fast buck and moving on to the next site. Even more disturbing was the psychological and emotional damage wrought upon those foolish enough to inhabit such homes: he claimed that the intolerably standardised dwellings created intolerably standardised people. Even more threatening than the traditional gothic castle or haunted mansion, the suburban home apparently had the power to turn its heedless occupants into mindless, materialistic and unhappy automatons. As Keats outlined it, in this environment ‘Mary Drone’ becomes ‘an impossible nag of a wife’, her husband John ‘a weakly weary imitation of husband and father’.15 Accordingly, Keats and many of his fellow detractors of suburbia depicted suburbanites as feckless consumers hopelessly in thrall to their own greed. The fear of the mindless masses that is fundamental to the modern zombie movie can also be traced back to the particularly American anxiety regarding the deadening effects of industrialisation and mass production. What made the suburbs so affordable and so easy to erect was the fact that wartime prefabrication techniques meant that preassembled homes could be put up much more quickly and cheaply than a traditional home built from scratch. For as little as a hundred dollars down payment (subject to the often strict vetting procedures laid down by the developers), a young couple could secure their own piece of the American dream, often with all mod cons and suitable furnishings thrown in as well. But efﬁciency and affordability did have its drawbacks: the choice of homes was usually limited to a carefully selected range of models, amongst them the ever popular ‘Ranch’, ‘Colonial’

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and ‘Cape Cod’ style houses. Architectural similarity was one of the major (and most maligned) characteristics of the American suburb.16 As Kenneth Jackson explained: A few custom houses were built for the rich, and mobile homes gained popularity with the poor and the transient, but for most American families in search of a new place to live some form of tract house was the most likely option. In order to simplify their production methods and reduce design fees, most of the larger developers offered no more than a half-dozen basic house plans, and some offered half that number. The result was a monotony and repetition that was especially stark in the early years of the subdivision, before the individual owners had transformed their homes and yards according to personal taste.17 It is hardly surprising then that the very repetition of the suburbs should have aroused condemnation, especially in a nation that prided itself upon facilitating the expression of individual freedom and uniqueness. But as has been suggested by Gans, Donaldson and other critics who have in recent decades reassessed suburbia from a rather more balanced point of view, perhaps the ﬁnal judgement should be left up to those who actually live there. Gans persuasively rebuked the criticisms of fellow intellectuals alarmed by the apparently repetitious nature of such communities, noting that ‘critics of the suburbs also inveigh against physical homogeneity and mass-produced housing. Like much of the rest of the critique, this charge is a thinly veiled attack on the culture of working-class and lower-middle-class people, implying that mass-produced housing leads to mass-produced lives’.18 As he pointed out, the upper-class town houses of the nineteenth century were also physically homogenous; everyone drives mass-produced, similarlooking cars without noticeable psychological damage; and only the rich can afford custom-built homes. Most important of all was the fact that his study had shown him that the Levittowners themselves had no such complaints, and were quick to make the kinds of subtle interior and exterior changes to the property which helped them feel that it was truly their own. The work of Donaldson, Gans and their adherents has therefore helped to redress many of the more exaggerated critiques of the milieu and its residents and highlighted ‘the need to study suburbia without preconception’.19 Nevertheless, the fact remains that in the decade or so following the Second World War, a unique conﬂuence of environmental,

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economic, political and cultural factors, of which suburbia was a signiﬁcant component, helped create the perfect environment in which ﬁctions of everyday unease and depersonalisation could ﬂourish in American popular culture. As we shall see, Keats’s John and Mary Drone are but a step away from Finney’s ultra-conformist Pod People and Romero’s mindlessly insatiable zombies.

The inconceivable alien: body-replacement narratives and 1950s science ﬁction Alongside the so-called ‘Creature-Features’ of the 1950s and early 1960s, the body-replacement narrative – in which loved ones, friends and neighbours are invisibly ‘taken over’ or ‘replaced’ by threatening, usually alien forces who seek to overthrow everything that God-fearing, freedom-loving Americans hold dear – became one of the most obvious tropes in American horror and science ﬁction. As a result, ‘more than any other aspect of the science ﬁction ﬁlm, the plot device of “take over” has commanded the serious attention of critics of both ﬁlm and popular culture’.20 Prior to the War, American horror and science ﬁction had generally focused upon terrifying external threats, generally personiﬁed by overtly alien or supernatural menaces. In its terrible aftermath, a signiﬁcant strand of genre-writing and movie-making began to focus instead on dangers that were much closer to home. The body-replacement narrative derives its visual and emotive effectiveness from the unnerving contrast between a commonplace, ordinary setting and the quietly aberrant behaviour of those who wish to subvert normality.21 After all, what could be more terrifying than suddenly realising that those around you have gradually been ‘replaced’ by someone, or something else? In ﬁlms such as Invaders from Mars (1953), It Came From Outer Space (1953), The Brain Eaters (1958), The Brain From the Planet Arous (1957), and I Married A Monster From Outer Space (1958), it is always small towns, the very heartland of the American psyche, which get invaded ﬁrst. In William Cameron Menzies’ Invaders from Mars, a little boy sees a ﬂying saucer land in his backyard. His parents, unsurprisingly, try to convince him that it has all been a nightmare, but when his father ﬁnally goes outside to investigate, he returns a very different man, oddly cold and emotionless. Soon, virtually every local ﬁgure of authority known to the child has been taken over by the invading Martians. In The Brain Eaters, furry alien parasites from inside the earth latch on to human hosts and control their every move, and in I Married a Monster

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From Outer Space, a young man is replaced by an alien replicant desperate to mate with a human woman in order to save his dying race. Robert Heinlein’s novel The Puppet Masters (1951) opens with the discovery that an alien spacecraft has landed in a ﬁeld in rural Iowa. Written ﬁve years before Jack Finney’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers exploited a similar premise, The Puppet Masters makes clear the parallels between the alien slugs, which attach themselves to their human hosts, and the threat of Soviet invasion.22 Heinlein’s novel features an overtly futuristic setting, a plethora of fancy gadgets, and a protagonist who works as a secret agent, effectively diffusing much of the unease that might otherwise have been aroused by the disturbing premise. By contrast, Finney’s text and the ﬁlms based upon it (four to date) come much closer to evoking genuine dread because they are so obviously set in the real world.23 Like so many of the other 1950s ‘invisible invasion’ ﬁlms, Finney’s novel (originally a story serialised in Collier’s Magazine) is set in an idealised small town, the Californian town of Mill Valley (renamed ‘Santa Mira’ in the 1956 ﬁlm.) Although, most obviously, it is a tale of insidious alien invasion, it is also a commentary on the death of an old way of life, and of the ways in which the apparently unstoppable forces of modernity and technology are changing an idyllic little town into something strange and unfamiliar. Ostensibly set in the then-future (1976), from the outset, the tone is one of barely disguised nostalgia for an idealised, particularly American way of life that has now gone forever. At the time that Finney wrote Body Snatchers, thousands of small towns all over the United States were being gradually inﬁltrated by ruthlessly modern outside forces: but the threat did not come from alien pods. Rather, it came in the form of the relentless expansion of the suburbs, which many feared would replace small-town charm and character with soulless conformity and ‘sameness’. Finney’s narrator, Miles Bennell, begins by warning us that this will be anything but a straightforward tale: ‘What you’re starting to read is full of loose ends and unanswered questions. It will not be neatly tied up at the end, everything resolved and satisfactorily explained’.24 Miles is 28 years old, born and raised in Mill Valley, and recently returned home to practise medicine following the break-up of his marriage (itself an indication that the old ways of life are already changing). Miles cannot help but compare the Mill Valley he knew as a child with the place to which he has returned as an adult, which is quickly shedding the humane, comfortable way of life familiar to his parents, and in particular his father, who was the town doctor before him. Miles conforms quite closely to William H. Whyte’s discussion of ‘the new breed of

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American citizen, the “transient”’, as outlined in his chapter on ‘The New Suburbia’ in The Organisation Man. Whyte begins by discussing the fact that, nowadays: the man who leaves home is not the exception in American society, but the key to it. Almost by deﬁnition, the organisation man is a man who has left home, and, as it was said of the man who went from the Midwest to Harvard, kept on going. There have always been people who left home, and the number of them is not decreasing, but increasing – and so greatly that those who stay put in the hometown are often as affected by the emigration as those who leave.25 Soon after his return home, Miles receives a visit from Becky Driscoll, an old girlfriend who has herself just been through a divorce. According to Becky, her otherwise perfectly rational cousin Wilma (still unmarried at the age of 35, which Miles notes is ‘too bad’), has suddenly got it into her head that her beloved Uncle Ira isn’t actually her uncle anymore. Though sceptical, Miles pays a house call anyway, and drives to Wilma’s home in an ‘unincorporated suburb’ just outside the city limits.26 There, he ﬁnds Wilma outwardly normal, save for her unshakable belief that her uncle has been ‘replaced’. In a famous exchange which perfectly captures the paranoid certainty that helps make the body-replacement narrative so unnerving, Wilma explains herself: ‘I’ve been waiting for today,’ she whispered. ‘Waiting till he’d get a haircut; and he ﬁnally did.’ Again she leaned towards me, eyes big, her voice a hissing whisper. ‘There’s a little scar of the back of Ira’s neck; he had a boil there once, and your father lanced it. You can’t see the scar,’ she whispered, ‘when he needs a haircut. But when his neck is shaved, you can. Well, today – I’ve been waiting for this! – today he got a haircut –’ I sat forward, suddenly excited. ‘And the scar’s gone? You mean –’ ‘No!’ she said, almost indignantly, eyes ﬂashing. ‘It’s there – the scar – exactly like Uncle Ira’s!’27 Miles tries to talk some sense into Wilma. It just isn’t possible for two people to look identically alike, he points out: ‘Even identical twins can always be told apart by their intimates. No one could possibly impersonate your Uncle Ira for more than a moment without you, Becky, or even me seeing a million little differences’. But Wilma cannot be dissuaded, mostly because of the fact that while the ‘impostor’ looks, sounds and

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acts just like Uncle Ira, ‘“inside he’s different. His responses” – she stopped, hunting for the word – “aren’t emotionally right”’.28 Of course, Wilma’s proves not to be an isolated case. Within a week, Miles has seen ﬁve more patients reporting exactly the same symptoms, and, signiﬁcantly, it seems to be women and children who seem most susceptible to what his psychiatrist friend Manny Kaufmann calls a ‘contagious neurosis’. In his hours off duty, Miles is otherwise busy re-establishing a decidedly passionless relationship with Becky. Miles’ reluctance to become emotionally entangled so soon after his divorce and his insistence upon rational thinking may help explain why it takes him so long to realise that this is no case of simple mass hysteria. It is only when his friend, writer Jack Belicec, calls him up and insists that he come over to view a mysterious ‘something’ that he’s just found, that Miles’ eminently reasonable, blinkered worldview begins to tilt off its axis. For here at last is solid, tangible proof that something very strange is happening in Mill Valley, in the form of a naked, lifeless and curiously unﬁnished-looking body lying on Belicec’s pool table. The body is alien in its very perfection, with no nicks or scars or any of the countless little imperfections which indicate a normal life. Miles is forced to conclude that ‘There is no cause of death because it never died. And it never died because it’s never been alive’.29 The mood of escalating unease is only heightened a few pages later, when Becky announces ‘My father isn’t my father at all!’ From this point on Miles views his hometown and its residents in a terrifying new light. As Mark Jancovich has noted ‘even if the novel lacks any overt and self-conscious subtext, it clearly works in relation to fears of conformity and standardisation, and as is the case with the ﬁlm [Don Siegel’s 1956 adaptation], these threats are not solely identiﬁed as the products of alien invasion . . . these texts do not suggest that the threat is purely external, but that it is only the inevitable outcome of developments within American society and culture’.30 Miles ‘is the precursor of all the other traditionalist heroes of Jack Finney’s later books, but in The Body Snatchers, Miles’s town of Santa Mira, Marin County, California still is the unspoiled mythical gemeinschaft community that later heroes have had to travel through time to recapture’.31 As Miles angrily thinks to himself when he receives a hastily aborted phone call, in his father’s day, things would have been very different: a night operator, whose name he’d have known, could have told him who’d called. It would have probably been the only light on

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the board at that time of night, and she’d have remembered which one it was, because they were calling the doctor. But now we have dial phones, marvellously efﬁcient, saving you a full second or more every time you call, inhumanly perfect, and utterly brainless: and none of them will remember where the doctor is at night, when a child is sick and needs him. Sometimes I think we’re reﬁning all the humanity out of our lives.32 Even before the pods have arrived, therefore (pushed to earth over millions and millions of years by light), Finney establishes that the world, and in particular, Miles Bennell’s corner of it, has gradually become a little less compassionate, a little less humane than it had been before. Again, this brings to mind Whyte’s observations regarding the fate of the ‘organisation man’ who returns home. Of course, Miles is not an organisation man in the strictest sense of the word: he is a doctor, not a corporate employee, and he works alone, not as part of the machinery of business and industry. But his path in life – that of the white-collar, middle-class and college-educated male – does resemble that of Whyte’s subjects, particularly those who eventually return home to ﬁnd that it has changed almost as much as they have: But perhaps the most important reason the transients can’t go home is that they won’t ﬁnd it there if they do. It’s not just the physical changes – the new sub-developments on the old golf course, the shopping-centre strip just outside town, the new factory. As the young transients have left town, their opposite numbers from other towns have come in, and in many American communities there has been wholesale displacement from positions of power of the names that once ‘meant’ something. Even in towns relatively untouched by urbanisation the exodus of youth has left a vacuum the community itself cannot replenish.33 In Finney’s novel, of course, this vacuum is ﬁlled not by white-collar workers, but by alien life forms which, if left unchecked, will take over the entire world. Indeed, one of the most terrifying things about the pods is the fact that their aim is not an understandable, if dangerous one, such as the desire to seize control of American institutions, to replace one form of dominant political and cultural hegemony with another. Instead, the pods only seek only to survive and to reproduce; an accidental invasion force that could just as easily have fallen anywhere.

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In a way, the invaders are no more than a more sinister version of the kudzu vine, silently, rapidly spreading all over the United States. As Jack Belicec asks: ‘How many of those things is down there in town right now? Hidden away in secret places’.34 Indeed, it soon becomes clear to Miles and his small band of allies that the warm, cosy little town they all know and love has been transformed into a place that is alien, sinister, and above all, unkempt – and that this process has taken place right under their noses. Early in the novel, Miles had casually noted that the busy little restaurant where he usually ate his evening meal was strangely uncrowded. As the novel progresses, this early hint of wrongness, of urban malaise, gradually becomes one of Finney’s most obvious preoccupations: Worry, doubt and fear were twisting through my mind as I walked the block and a half to the ofﬁce, and the look of Throckmorton Street depressed me. It seemed littered and shabby in the morning sun, a city trash basket stood heaped and unemptied from the day before, the globe of an overhead street light was broken, and a few doors from the building where my ofﬁce was a shop stood empty.35 It is shortly after this scene that Miles’ unease blossoms into fullblown paranoia. One by one, his frightened patients recant their stories. The common denominator is the fact that each of them claims to have been ‘brought round’ by Mannie Kaufman, the local psychiatrist. The discovery of four more seed pods – or ‘blanks’– in Jack’s coal-bin brings home the ﬁnal chilling revelation: that the pods model themselves on the people closest to them. As the last barriers to acceptance are eroded by fearful fact, Miles gazes at the town he thought he knew so well, and ﬁnds that what was once eminently familiar has now become terrifyingly alien: I’d grown up here; from boyhood I’d known every street, house and path, most of the back yards, and every hill, ﬁeld and road for miles around. And now I didn’t know it anymore. Unchanged to the eye, what I was seeing out there now was beyond that in my mind – was something new. The lighted circle of the pavement below me, the familiar front porches, and the dark mass of houses and town beyond charm – were fearful. Now they were menacing, all these familiar things and faces; the town had changed or was changing into something very terrible, and it was after me.36

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During the course of a panicked conversation with a college pal who now works in the Pentagon, Miles and the others realise that even their only line of communication to the outside world – the telephone exchange – is in the hands of the enemy. They decide to leave, but discover that the highway has deteriorated too badly to escape. So they have no choice but to return home, and silently wander eerily deserted streets, on which even the houses look ‘withdrawn, resentful and evil’. Businesses are boarded up, windows are dirty, and the little restaurant offers only three entrees, when ‘for years they’d always had six or eight’. As Becky remarks: ‘“Miles, when did all this happen?” Becky gestured to indicate the length of the semi-deserted street behind and ahead of us. “A little at a time,” I said, and shrugged. “We’re just realising it now; the town’s dying”’.37 It is a scene reminiscent of countless other moments in horror and science ﬁction, in which the survivors of some terrible nuclear holocaust or natural disaster make their way through the deserted city streets, much as Robert Neville does in I Am Legend. The difference here is that, although familiar buildings and people are still present, they have been irrevocably transformed. There can be no escape. As has been noted by Vivien Sobchack, what is so fascinating about ﬁlms and novels of this nature ‘is the way in which the secure and the familiar are twisted into something subtly dangerous and slyly perverted . . . those aliens in these ﬁlms who have “taken over” human bodies behave so nearly correctly that the primarily quiet distortions of human behaviour are like a slap in the face’. Indeed, it is ‘the absence of response, a non action we are told to watch for’.38 So while the ‘replaced’ residents of Mill Valley continue to live in the same homes, look the same, dress the same and appear to conform to the same routine, the fact is they just don’t care anymore, and it shows. Apathy and the absolute lack of any human emotion is their most terrifying characteristic. The small-town values of home, family and nation are meaningless. No one bothers to wash their windows or pick up trash or serve a decent cup of coffee in the local diner because they are simply going through the motions. As Stephen King puts it Danse Macabre (1981), ‘this is not an invasion of roses from outer space, but of ragweed. The pod people are going to mow their lawns for a while and then give up. They don’t give a shit about the crabgrass’.39 Perhaps most horriﬁc of all is the revelation that the alien duplicates will live, at most, ﬁve years. Like many of the suburbs popping up all over the countryside (or rather, as their critics often claimed), the replicants are not built to last. And when they have mindlessly cloned

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copies of every human being, plant and animal in their path, they will just expire, leaving behind a vast and uninhabitable ‘desert of nothingness’. By fooling the pods into replicating a fake copy of themselves, Miles and Becky are able to escape, and manage to set ﬁre to a ﬁeld of pods about to be shipped off to other parts of the country. At ﬁrst, their heroic gesture seems fruitless: the ﬁre burns itself out, and there are just too many of the things for only two people to destroy. But, in a fairly unconvincing reversal, it seems that this and other desperate acts of human resistance have convinced the pods that it is just too much trouble to conquer, and they suddenly rise into space and ﬂy off, presumably in the hopes of ﬁnding another, less spirited planet to inﬁltrate.40 However, even though the pods ultimately leave, things will never be the same again, for the replicants have been left behind. If you make your way to Mill Valley, ‘You’ll simply see a town, in a few places a little shabbier and run down than it quite ought to be, but – not startlingly so’, but the status quo has deﬁnitely not been restored. There’s the small matter of the strangely listless, apathetic people who hang around the bus station (presumably still with the urge to spread the invasion, but without the means to do so), the higher-than-average death rate, the strangely high number of empty houses, and the odd patches of dead vegetation. Yet the vacancies, we are told, are being ﬁlled up by ‘new people, most of them young and with children’, and ‘in a year or two, or three, Mill Valley will seem no different to the eye from any other small town’.41 As Jancovich has observed, ‘even the defeat of the pods does not end the gradual depersonalisation of the town. The continual migration of the American population soon ﬁlls up the homes of those who have died so that many of the people in town are no longer long-term neighbours whom Miles has known all his life, but rather strangers who come from elsewhere and whose names he does not even know’.42 Indeed, ‘it hints at a creeping conformity and a lack of identity in which Santa Mira [Mill Valley] is becoming indistinguishable from any other small town, in which American communities lose their identity and become mere replicas of one another’.43 In other words, as in thousands of other small communities all over the United States, Mill Valley has been irrevocably changed by the unstoppable tide of progress and technological advancements, invaded by legions of ‘newcomers’ or ‘transients’. Downtown is gradually dying, and a whole new way of life has come into existence. It’s a conclusion surprisingly similar – although much bleaker – to that arrived at by Henry James in The American Scene, when he visits Ellis

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Island and ﬁnds himself profoundly affected by the sight of so many newcomers: I think indeed that the simplest account of the action of Ellis Island on the spirit of any sensitive citizen who may have happened to ‘look in’ is that he comes back from his visit not at all the same person that he went. He has eaten of the tree of knowledge and the taste will forever be in his mouth. He had thought he knew before, thought he had the sense of the degree in which it is to share the sanctity of his American consciousness, the intimacy of his American home with the inconceivable alien; but the truth has never come home to him with such force . . . I like to think of him, I positively have to think of him, as going about ever afterwards with a new look, for those who can see it, in his face, the outward signs of the new chill in his heart. So is stamped, for detection, the questionably privileged person who has had an apparition, seen a ghost in his supposedly safe house. Let not the unwary, therefore, visit Ellis Island.44 In Finney’s Mill Valley, the ‘inconceivable alien’ has changed forever the rhythms of small-town life, although here, of course, ‘alien’ is not merely a metaphor but a reality. Whereas James comes to an acceptance of the changes which will be wrought upon his home by the ceaseless tide of European emigration to the United States, stating that ‘we must meet them more than half way’, one suspects that Miles Bennell will never come to such an accommodation, even if the aliens in his midst are no longer much of a threat anymore. However, both James’s sketch and Finney’s novel dramatise (albeit to very different effect) the anxieties aroused by the immensely rapid changes which were taking place in American culture and society at the time at which each text was written. The pod people who quietly and efﬁciently take over Bennell’s home town may ultimately be defeated by good old American moxie, but the cosy, insulated place that he grew up in will, like nineteenth-century New York, never be the same again. Like thousands of other small communities all over the United States during the post-war era, Mill Valley has been irrevocably encroached upon by the outside world. To suburbia’s most vociferous critics, the rapidly erected, identikit housing developments spreading across the country like wildﬁre, were, like the aliens in Finney’s novel, a very real threat to the core values of American culture and society. For some, the upwardly mobile young families which populated them were frighteningly homogenous invaders who cared nothing about the cities they

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left behind to unruly minorities or the once-pristine countryside which was bulldozed in order to make way for affordable, modern homes. Given the frequency with which Finney’s hero rails against the unfeeling, overtly technological focus of modern society, it seems clear that the novel’s critique of conformity has at least as much to do with anxieties such as this as with fears aroused by Cold War tensions. It is no coincidence, then, that Becky’s cousin Wilma (the ﬁrst patient to suggest to Miles that something is very wrong in Mill Valley) lives in ‘an unincorporated suburb just outside the city limits’.45 As we shall see, there could be no more appropriate starting point for a narrative in which individualism comes under such powerful threat.

Welcome to zombieville Such preoccupations ﬁnd further expression in one of twentieth-century horror’s most iconic representatives: the zombie. The late 1960s saw the release of a groundbreaking horror movie, which completely reimagined the concept of the zombie and in doing so presented a horriﬁcally compelling vision of the American masses as mindless, emotionless consumers. George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) took a supernatural threat which had previously been located in the Caribbean and associated with black magic and instead depicted zombies roaming around the American countryside, shambling parodies of their former selves. Romero’s masterpiece owes a great deal to I Am Legend, whose suburban protagonist, as we have seen, is also besieged by hordes of undead ghouls infected by a mysterious plague. Indeed, Sidney Salkow and Ubaldo Ragona’s 1964 ﬁlm adaptation The Last Man on Earth, is visually quite similar to Romero’s much superior ﬁlm. The post-1968 zombie – no longer uniformly black or otherwise ‘foreign’, the product of voodoo or black magic, but instead distinctively white, American, and above all, hungry – is actually the unacknowledged missing link between the paranoid alien-invasion ﬁlms of the 1950s and the loaded sexual and cultural mores of ﬁlms such as The Stepford Wives. As Jamie Russell noted in Book of the Dead (2005): ‘as the small town American setting and doppelganger scenario of Invasion of the Body Snatchers suggested, the monsters might not be readily identiﬁable as bug-eyed aliens. Much worse – they might look like our friends and neighbours. In some ways, the Zombie was perfectly suited to this paranoid fear as the living dead looked so ordinary: they looked like us; heck, they once were us.’ In other words,

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Romero takes the paranoid fears of Invasion – in particular its vision of the mass as a terrifyingly homogenous entity – and multiplies them several times over.46 In addition, by making his zombies cannibals (a characteristic otherwise largely absent from previous zombie movies) Romero facilitated his desire to pass comment on what he saw as the mindless consumerism and materialism of later twentieth-century American life. Consumerism indeed becomes an overriding preoccupation in Romero’s Dead series (currently consisting of four ﬁlms), but most noticeably in his 1978 follow-up Dawn of the Dead. Having been encouraged in the nineteenth century to produce, in the mid twentieth century Americans were urged to consume,47 and suburbia played no small part in this culture change. The ‘buy now, pay later’ philosophy which helped so many eager young couples move into houses they would otherwise not have been able to afford soon trickled into all other aspects of ﬁnancial life as well. The ﬁrst credit cards were introduced in 1950. Prospective home owners learned that for just a little extra on their mortgage payment each month their home could come fully furnished, or with a brand new, state-of-the-art television (which they’d probably be paying off for the next 30 years). Manufactured obsolescence was of course a notable characteristic of many new household products: like Finney’s pod people, the brand new vacuum cleaners and lawnmowers being sold to millions of ordinary Americans were not built to last. Sensing the opportunity to make a healthy proﬁt, corporations increasingly tailored their products and their prices to the demands of the hastily expanding, convenience-hungry new middle classes. And as Gans noted, with reference to the Levittowners, ‘people like them are the principal market for the consumer goods offered by big national corporations, the entertainment and information provided by the mass media, and the political appeals that come out of Washington. They are the customers for whom these agencies create their product – and they are the people who converse about soap and aspirin in television commercials.’48 This kind of dynamic was ﬁrst noted in American society during the late 1920s, when commentators observed that America had a new idea to spread to the rest of the world – ‘the idea that labour should be looked on not simply as workers and producers, but as consumers . . . pay them more, sell them more, prosper more is the equation’.49 It was a concept that blossomed fully during the post-war era, when it was realised that the masses were out there, and hungered for material goods and a

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higher standard of living marked by spacious new homes, refrigerators and fridge-freezers and vast new cars which guzzled gallon after gallon of enviably cheap fuel. The period saw shopping raised to a new religion: the shopping mall, the gleaming cathedral of consumerism, had at last arrived. Indeed, malls were amongst the greatest success stories of the late 1950s and early 1960s.50 Most malls were built in suburban locations, and the suburbanisation of shopping saw the establishment of hundreds of so-called ‘strip malls’, purposely built to facilitate vehicular rather than pedestrian access. Following the opening of the ﬁrst post-war shopping centre in Raleigh, North Carolina in 1949, succeeding years saw rapid changes: by 1955, there were already 1,000 malls in the country; and by 1956, the number had risen to 1,600, with 2,500 more planned.51 The opening of the ﬁrst enclosed mall in 1956 – temperature-controlled and designed to be comfortable and exciting – raised the stakes even higher, for ‘the large scale and well-provisioned shopping centre was to become an important retail feature of post-war American suburbia’.52 It seems altogether appropriate, then, that the protagonists of Romero’s highly successful follow-up to Night – Dawn of the Dead – should barricade themselves inside a vast shopping mall in order to protect themselves from the zombie hordes who have apparently overrun the rest of the world. Having ﬂed the rapidly disintegrating city of Philadelphia in a stolen helicopter, Romero’s quartet of survivors – television station employee Fran (Galen Ross), her boyfriend Steven (Scott Reiniger), and SWAT team members Peter (Ken Foree) and Roger (David Emge) – are soon forced to take shelter in a shopping mall. The catch, of course, is that the place is absolutely infested with zombies, ‘still fascinated by an environment which is now really redundant in terms of their new appetites’.53 As Dawn tentatively suggests, and Romero’s later additions to the series, Day of the Dead (1985) and Land of the Dead (2005) reinforce, it becomes clear that the zombies still retain a residual trace of their former personalities. Dawn of the Dead’s zombies ﬁnd themselves shambling around the shopping complex, though they lack the ability to understand why. Romero’s scathing take on contemporary society only becomes more unsettling as the parallels between his living protagonists and their undead counterparts become increasingly obvious. In a slapstick montage sequence, zombie after zombie is cheerfully dispatched by the humans, and in no time at all, the mall, the ultimate haven from the world outside, is theirs. Finally free to take possession of anything they could possibly desire, the group gleefully satisfy their material desires, turning their attic

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hideaway into a kind of rough approximation of the ideal suburban home, ﬁlled with tasteful contemporary furnishings, the centrepiece of which is a large television set which eventually only shows static, yet still remains switched on. Like Bennell, they cling to the old ways of life even though the world has changed beyond all recognition. Once they have settled into their new home, ‘the group essentially become a middle class family’ – with the pregnant Fran and self-centred Steven as the unhappily attached parents, and Peter and the injured (and subsequently infantilised) Roger as their children – a bitterly ironic and unconscious re-enactment of the destructive mores of the old world. Gradually, it becomes clear to Fran and Peter, as it does to us, that although the mall is seemingly a safe haven, it is also a gilded cage. The climactic invasion of this poisoned sanctuary by a psychotic biker gang, which allows the excluded zombies to gain entrance once more, is therefore inevitable. The ﬁnal shots are of the interior of the mall, and of the zombies mindlessly trooping round the shops once more, to the accompaniment of ironically light-hearted muzak. In Zack Snyder’s 2004 remake the original movie’s oblique connection between suburban mores and the zombie apocalypse is highlighted from the outset. The ﬁlm opens in the hospital in which female lead Ana (Sarah Polley) works. The ﬁrst intimations of the unfolding disaster come when a series of patients are admitted to the emergency room, exhibiting unusual strength and aggression. Tired after a long shift, Ana fails to realise the gravity of the situation and drives home to spend some quality time with her husband Louis. Theirs is clearly a quiet, family-centred neighbourhood, as Ana’s warm exchange with Vivian, the little blonde girl who lives next door, testiﬁes. Safely enclosed within her cosy home and within the arms of her husband, Ana remains completely unaware of the crisis gripping the outside world, until the next morning, when the couple awaken to ﬁnd little Vivian standing stock still in the doorway of their tastefully appointed bedroom. It is at this point that suburban insularity is violently and irrevocably disturbed. Vivian attacks, ripping out Louis’s throat as he tries to fend her off with a bedside lamp. He rapidly bleeds to death, immediately comes back to life as a zombie himself and lunges at Ana, who manages to scramble out the bathroom window and into her car. As she ﬂees with her suddenly monstrous husband running after her, we see that in a matter of hours the formerly peaceful suburb has descended into anarchy and bloodshed, as the infected have turned against their loved ones and neighbours, who themselves immediately become zombies.

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The quartet of survivors in Romero’s original ﬁlm ﬂed a rapidly disintegrating inner city (Philadelphia) and attempted to establish a rough approximation of middle-class life within the conﬁnes of an out-oftown shopping mall (thus paralleling the move from the cities to the suburbs which characterised housing patterns during the 1950s). The more numerous protagonists of Snyder’s ‘reimagining’ – about a dozen survivors make it to the mall here – seem to have no such interest in recreating the suburban way of life, perhaps because, like Ana, they have already seen the milieu tear itself apart. Signiﬁcantly, whereas Romero’s characters went out of their way to renovate their attic hideaway so that it resembled a family home, and thus maintained a distinction between their living quarters and the mall itself, Snyder’s protagonists make no such distinction and seem happy to live within the stores themselves. The fact that there are many more characters in this version of the ﬁlm also means that they never gel as a ‘family’ in the way that their predecessors do. Indeed, the only real family in the place – African American Frank and his pregnant wife Luda – quickly hole themselves up in a maternity store, away from the rest of the survivors. The reason for this retreat is revealed towards the end of the ﬁlm, when we discover that Luda has been bitten and that her unborn child has been infected too. The resulting offspring is a hideous zombie baby which must then be destroyed, unlike Fran’s unborn child in the original, which provides at least some hope of new life amidst the oceans of death which surround her. In contrast to the vaguely optimistic conclusion of the original, the climax of the remake is even more obviously downbeat. While Ana and a few remaining survivors do manage to ﬂee the mall, their efforts prove fruitless, and as the end credits roll, they are ﬁnally overrun by zombies. More recently, Fido makes the connection between suburbia and zombies even more explicit. Set in an idealised, exaggerated 1950s parallel universe in which humanity has successfully contained a zombie outbreak, writer/director Andrew Currie envisions a world in which, as at the conclusion of Shaun of the Dead, zombies are controlled by electronic collars and can therefore become a perfectly acceptable addition to the average suburban home. Fido is an ambitious satire combining elements of Sirkian melodrama, Romero’s Living Dead series, and the ‘Timmy’s down the well’ style plotting of heroic dog ﬁlms such as Lassie and Old Yeller. The parameters of the ﬁlm’s universe are outlined in the amusing spoof newsreel that opens the ﬁlm and owes much to Night of the Living Dead. A cloud of cosmic radiation containing particles that can reanimate the dead led to the so-called Zombie Wars, in

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which the last remnants of humanity desperately tried to eradicate the undead menace. The distinctly Halliburton-style ‘ZomCon’ corporation managed to contain the outbreak, and developed control collars which enabled them to ‘tame’ wild zombies for use as cheap labour during the reconstruction of society. Set some three decades after the Zombie Wars, Fido’s lead character is a lonely boy named Timmy Robinson (K’Sun Ray) whose life is transformed when his status-conscious mother Helen (played by Carrie Anne Moss) overrules the objections of her Zombiephobic husband Bill (Dylan Baker) and buys one to help around the house. There are no black or brown faces in Timmy’s hometown of Willard, but there are plenty of blue ones, courtesy of the shambling, old school-style Zombies who shufﬂe round the neighbourhood carrying out all the tasks that wealthy suburbanites would prefer not to have to do themselves. Most of Fido’s best moments come courtesy of its attempts to envisage life in a society in which zombies are an everyday reality and a sudden death poses a threat to the entire community. Timmy and his classmates are taught how to handle ﬁrearms from an early age, adults carry handguns as a matter of course, and old folk’s homes are now maximum security facilities. Bill Robinson’s affections can only be couched in decidedly morbid terms: he’s immensely proud of the fact that he is able to provide burial insurance for all three of them, and upon hearing that his wife is pregnant, whines ‘I just don’t think we can afford another funeral’. It is unsurprising, then, that the loyal and only intermittently murderous Fido (Billy Connolly) should soon seem like a rather more attractive option to the frustrated and attention-starved Helen. Their relationship has much in common with that of Ron Kirby and Carrie Scott in All That Heaven Allows or Raymond Deegan and Cathy Whittaker in Far From Heaven, except that in this case, the complicating factor isn’t race, class or an unconventional age gap, but the fact that Fido is a reanimated corpse whose control collar is prone to unfortunate malfunctions. The conﬂation of Sirk-style melodrama and Romero’s zombie ﬁlms isn’t as incongruous as it at ﬁrst appears. From Night of the Living Dead onwards, Romero’s work presented radical critiques of the American family and of the complacency and materialism of post-war society. In Fido, ZomCon’s control of North America is made possible by the actions of the repressive security force whose most powerful representative is the Robinsons’ dictatorial new neighbour, Timothy Bottoms. Bottoms, who has personally killed thousands of Zombies, banishes citizens who violate the community’s strict code of conduct to the so-called ‘Wild Zone’, and hence condemns them to certain death.

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By projecting Romero’s vision of a zombie apocalypse slightly backwards into a twenty-ﬁrst-century vision of 1950s suburbia, Andrew Currie’s ﬁlm therefore manages to make some pertinent points about the containment culture of both that period and of our own. The notion of a suburban, all-American community patrolled by aggressive security forces, fenced off by a ring of steel from the lawless and threatening ‘Wild Zone’ brings to mind Baghdad’s heavily fortiﬁed ‘Green Zone’, as well as the growth of gated suburban communities in the United States. Once Timmy and Helen Robinson are able to create their own, less repressive family unit, they have no great interest in changing the world around them, and so the ﬁlm ends with the status quo all but restored to its original state. There will be no zombie civil rights marches in this community anytime soon, and no one seems to think that there should be. Thus, Fido is set in a deeply insular, self-absorbed world in which idealistic notions of political and social justice are ultimately subordinate to the desires of the nuclear family. As in Stepford therefore, the ﬁlm ends with politics as usual in Willard, even if it is an uneasy and essentially inauthentic approximation of ‘normal’ life. Whereas Fido sees electronically controlled zombies become apparently perfect domestic servants, in Levin’s novel it is, of course, the housewife who becomes a docile, zombie-like ﬁgure, thanks to the technological wizardry of the sinister local ‘Men’s Association’. Readers of Levin would probably have already noticed that his writing often featured paranoid heroines betrayed by the men in their lives as in his debut novel A Kiss Before Dying (1952) and Rosemary’s Baby (1967). Similarly, in The Stepford Wives, a trusting but increasingly suspicious wife is fatally deceived by her selﬁsh husband. The premise of the ﬁlm reﬂects a recurring preoccupation of 1970s popular culture. The 1950s and 1960s had frequently seen ﬁlms and television shows in which people were ‘taken over’ or ‘replaced’ by hostile alien life forms. During the 1970s aliens were usurped by the products of man-made technology, and American science ﬁction during the period was full of cyborgs and androids, from Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep? (1968) to Michael Crichton’s 1973 ﬁlm Westworld. On the small screen, the last vestiges of humanity battled the Cylons, evil alien robots, in Battlestar Galactica (1979), while astronaut Steve Austin (Lee Majors) became a cybernetic superhuman in The Six Million Dollar Man. When Lindsay Wagner soon followed in his footsteps as The Bionic Woman, among her most powerful foes were the so-called ‘Fembots’, which meant that viewers were able to watch a heroine who was part machine battle enemies who were all machine.

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What makes the Stepford concept so resonant is the way in which the story effectively dramatises contemporary anxieties regarding the changing role of women in the home and in society at large.54 Another fascinating aspect of both novel and ﬁlm is the manner in which the female struggle for self-awareness and independence is intertwined with a fairly obvious critique of consumerism and materialism as it relates to the suburban way of life. Indeed, Levin’s novel at times reads like a ﬁctionalisation of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963). In his discussion of The Feminine Mystique as a variety of conspiracy theory, Peter Knight points out that the book’s popularity was in part due to its undoubted liveliness: ‘in many places the book reads like a thriller, with Friedan as the lone detective chasing up the clues to this mysterious mystique’.55 In addition, like any good gothic heroine: Friedan reads coincidence as signs of a conspiracy. She ﬁnds ‘many clues by talking to Suburban doctors, gynaecologists, obstetricians, high-school guidance counsellors, college professors, marriage counsellors, psychiatrists and ministers’. What the clues reveal is a concerted effort by welfare, educational and media institutions to manipulate women in the post-war period into returning to a life of domesticity, despite the gains which Friedan attributes to the ‘ﬁrst wave’ of late Victorian and early Twentieth-century feminism.56 The result of this effort, according to Friedan, is the ‘progressive dehumanisation’ of the American woman, from the time that she assumes her ‘feminine sexual role’ as housewife. From this point on, she will no longer ‘live with the zest, the enjoyment, the sense of purpose that is characteristic of true human health.’57 And one of the main causes of this condition, alongside the ‘feminine mystique’, is her resulting incarceration in suburbia. Friedan even compared the lot of the typical suburban housewife to that of prisoners in a concentration camp, arguing that ‘there are aspects of the housewife role that make it almost impossible for a woman of adult intelligence to retain a sense of adult identity, the ﬁrm cores of self or “I” without which a human being, man or woman, is not truly alive’, and suggesting that these conditions resembled those which destroyed the ‘human identity’ of so many during the holocaust: For in the concentration camps the prisoners were forced to adopt childlike behaviour, forced to give up their individuality and merge themselves into an amorphous mass . . . They were manipulated to

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trap themselves; they imprisoned themselves by making the concentration camp the whole world, by blinding themselves to the larger world of the past, their responsibility for the present, and their possibilities for the future . . . 58 It isn’t difﬁcult to see the obvious connection between the kind of rhetoric employed by Friedan – which is, above all else, here concerned with the erosion of individual identity – and the preoccupation with the dehumanising effect of post-war life and the suburban lifestyle expressed by commentators such as Keats, Whyte and Mumford. What differentiates Friedan, of course, is her sustained focus upon the lot of American women. But she does use the kind of language and imagery already familiar to us from our discussion of Romero’s zombie movies and of the ‘Invisible Invasion’ ﬁlms of the 1950s and early 1960s. When explaining the psychic stresses caused in the woman who does her best to ‘conform outwardly to one reality whilst trying to maintain inwardly the values it denies’, Friedan states that she becomes ‘an anonymous biological robot in a docile mass’. It is a striking analogy, and one that clearly has obvious parallels with Levin’s premise, for his docile and submissive homemakers literally are ‘biological robots’, uncannily realistic living dolls who have long since replaced their more demanding human counterparts. Whereas Friedan made use of extreme metaphorical comparisons in order to dramatise what she saw as the intolerable lot of the middleclass, suburban housewife, in Levin’s novel and in the ﬁlm adaptation that followed, that striking metaphor becomes ﬁctional reality. Levin was obviously well aware of the resonances with Friedan’s subject: the novel opens, after all, with a highly pertinent quote from Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1961), while his doomed heroines, Joanna Eberhart and Bobbie Markowe, are more than familiar with the rhetoric and aims of the then-emerging women’s rights movement.59 Indeed, we are pointedly told in the ﬁlm that both ‘dabbled’ in the ‘movement’ before they were married. Yet ironically, their very self-consciousness about the nature of their own situation – the fact that they belong to the second generation of American women to move to suburbia, and that they both possess the language and the intelligence with which to articulate their growing sense of unease regarding the Stepford way of life, actually does them no good at all: both are murdered and then replaced by the end of the story. Therefore, one of the most disturbing things about the premise is the fact that Joanna and Bobbie and all of the other women who have been ‘replaced’ literally ﬁnd themselves unable to escape a trap which they had already spotted. Indeed,

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the novel even suggests that it was the growing independence and self-awareness of the women of Stepford which precipitated the terrible actions undertaken by the Men’s Association: Carol Van Sant, the Stepford wife who seems most prominent in both novel and ﬁlm as a ridiculous exemplar of docile femininity, was actually at one time one of the leading lights of the local women’s group – a group which once hosted Betty Friedan, as we are pointedly informed. The minute Joanna Eberhart leaves behind the messy, chaotic and stimulating environs of the city and sacriﬁces her nascent professional ambitions in order to move to orderly, family-oriented Stepford, Levin seems to suggest, her fate is sealed. The Stepford Wives begins as the heroine and her family leave the city behind in order to move to more rural climes, in this case the afﬂuent Connecticut suburb of Stepford. Initially at least, Joanna and Walter Eberhart seem to have a secure, fairly ‘modern’ relationship: they talk a great deal, and apparently make all of the household decisions together, while Walter seems to have no problem with washing-up after dinner or minding the kids as Joanna works in the darkroom on her photographs. But he is still a fairly typical suburban husband, not all that different in many respects from the ‘organisation man’ of a generation ago: he commutes to the city every day while Joanna, despite her college degree and ambition to become a professional photographer, remains at home to look after their children. The move to suburbia has ostensibly been made for their sake, and for that of the entire family, but from the outset it is clear that Joanna is experiencing some ambivalent feelings about the decision, as she hopes that, ‘the lives of all four of them would be enriched, rather than diminished, as she had feared, by leaving the city – the ﬁlthy, crowded, crime-ridden but so-alive city!’60 It soon becomes clear that Walter was the main impetus behind the move, and that his motives were less than selﬂess. Stepford itself, in both book and ﬁlm, is obviously an afﬂuent, comfortably middle-class and upper-middle-class suburb, not a destination for couples who have just got their start in life, but rather a large step up the ladder for the slightly older and more upwardly mobile kind of family. The movie adaptation was ﬁlmed in Westport, Connecticut, a popular location for movies and television shows which was also the setting for Wes Craven’s 1972 horror ﬁlm The Last House on the Left. Levin’s novel states that the Men’s Association headquarters – the most traditionally gothic-looking building in the ﬁlm – was built in the nineteenth century by a railroad tycoon, which suggests that Stepford came into being during a much earlier cycle of suburbia than the less exclusive

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post-war developments, a fact also highlighted by the fact that the members of the Men’s Association are almost all afﬂuent professionals. They include an illustrator, a psychiatrist, lawyers, electronics executives, a linguist and the manager of the local mall. Of course, this roll call of professions, as well as the fact that the outskirts of Stepford are home to a number of industrial plants (such as a plastics factory and an electronics company) takes on a more sinister signiﬁcance as the plot develops. As she begins to settle into Stepford, Joanna gradually realises that most of the women she encounters there have an unusual attachment to their roles as housewives and mothers. For example, eerily submissive next-door neighbour Carol refuses to come over for coffee because she has to wax her living-room ﬂoor, and when Joanna is in the supermarket she notices that the intimidating domestic perfectionism of the suburb’s housewives extends even to the neatness with which they arrange their shopping carts. It is with relief, then, that she ﬁnally encounters wisecracking Bobbie Markowe, herself a newcomer, whose house is even more untidy her own. Soon the women are best friends, each helping to reassure the other that the behaviour of Stepford’s other women is most deﬁnitely not normal. At times the two of them seem like nothing so much as a pair of self-consciously cynical teenage girls, attempting to disguise their own insecurities by mocking those around them. It is an impression reinforced in the ﬁlm by the fact that Joanna (played by Katharine Ross) and Bobbie (played by Paula Prentiss) are almost always seen dressed casually, in shorts, t-shirts and jeans, in stark contrast with the other Stepford wives who are costumed in Laura Ashley-style dresses, aprons and large-brimmed hats.61 Bobbie has been in Stepford slightly longer that Joanna, and it is she who ﬁrst puts into words the unacknowledged suspicions that Joanna has yet to admit to herself. As she puts it in the novel, ‘Something ﬁshy is going on here! We’re in the town that time forgot!’ (p.21). What is wrong with Stepford is that many of the other women act like they are taking part in a commercial. It’s a preoccupation that arises even in the opening paragraphs of Levin’s novel, when the old lady who welcomes newcomers to the town compliments Joanna and Walter on moving to Stepford in the ﬁrst place: ‘It’s a nice town with nice people! You couldn’t have made a better choice!’ She follows this up by thrusting a basket of free samples at Joanna, exhorting her to ‘Try them, they’re good products!’62 Even Joanna and Bobbie cannot help but ironically converse in the language of advertisements: as Bobbie says upon their ﬁrst meeting: ‘Given complete freedom of choice, wouldn’t you just as soon not squeeze the Charmin?’63 The women bond because

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of their wry awareness that their homes and their lives do not resemble those in a commercial. While visiting the other women in Stepford in the hopes of starting up a new women’s club, Joanna and Bobbie ﬁnd themselves becoming increasingly demoralised by the fact that home after home is as perfect as a television ad, and all of the women decline the invitation because they ‘simply have too much to do’ around the house. It is while she is sitting in one of these perfect homes that Joanna experiences an epiphany which, unbeknownst to her, is the key to understanding Stepford. Watching Kit Sunderson fold laundry into perfectly neat, colour-coded piles, Joanna realises that she is behaving just like an actress in a commercial because: That’s what she was, Joanna felt suddenly. That’s what they all were, all the Stepford Wives: actresses in commercials, pleased with detergents and ﬂoor wax, with cleansers, shampoo and deodorants. Pretty actresses, big in the bosom but small in the talent, playing suburban housewives unconvincingly, too nicey-nice to be real.64 It’s the kind of implication that arises again and again in suburbanset literature and ﬁlm: an acknowledgement of the fact that in many respects the suburban home has from the outset been a stage on which a drama of perfect family life should ideally be played out; a recognition that for many people buying into the suburban dream, they are purchasing not just a home, but hopefully, an entire way of life.65 This artiﬁciality is further heightened when Kit, asked if she feels that she is living a ‘full life’, responds in the vacant, blank manner much like that of a ‘re-educated’ prisoner of war praising his captors during a show trial: ‘Yes, I’m happy,’ she said. ‘I feel like I’m living a very full life. Herb’s work is important, and he couldn’t do it nearly as well without me. We’re a unit, and between us we’re raising a family, and doing optical research, and running a clean, comfortable household.66 Indeed, much of the novel, even more so than the ﬁlm, is spent detailing Joanna’s hectic, but ultimately unfulﬁlling daily routine, the everyday chores and events which punctuate the life of the busy young wife and mother. Typically, it is Bobbie who again articulates the dreadful sense of anxiety that Joanna is beginning to experience regarding life in the suburbs, though given that this is the eco-aware 1970s, she initially seeks an environmental explanation for Stepford’s oddness:67 ‘There’s something,’ Bobbie said, ‘in the ground, in the water, in the

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air – I don’t know. It makes women interested in housekeeping and nothing else but. Who knows what chemicals can do?’68 Bobbie goes on to use phraseology which deliberately harkens back to the kinds of concerns we have seen in earlier portraits of suburban-related dehumanisation: ‘There’s something here, Joanna! I’m not kidding! This is zombieville!’69 Soon, she’s sensibly looking for a new house, her disquiet having blossomed into full-blown paranoia. When Joanna asks about the potential upheaval this move will cause to the children, Bobbie is forcefully unapologetic, and once more the Stepford wives are compared to zombies: ‘Better a little disruption in their lives than a zombie-ized mother;’ she said. She really was drinking bottled water, and wasn’t eating any locally grown produce. ‘You can buy bottled oxygen, you know,’ Joanna said. ‘Screw you. I can see you now, comparing Ajax to your current cleanser’.70 Note that once again, Bobbie and Joanna communicate in a fashion which ironically parrots a commercial: repeatedly, both novel and ﬁlm reference the visual and verbal rhetoric of the advertising industry.71 It is another deliberate reference to Friedan’s scathing analysis of the housewife’s ultimate purpose in The Feminine Mystique: as Knight has observed, that book is also an attack upon the contemporary culture industry, and in particular upon the advertising industry, which grew to unprecedented prominence in the post-war era. It also indicted women’s magazines, which Friedan accused of deliberately perpetuating the domestic ideology for their own commercial gain. As she put it: ‘the crowing moment of realisation in The Feminine Mystique comes with the discovery that during the post-war period of rapid suburban development, women spent three quarters of the household budget.’72 Furthermore, ‘Why is it never said that the really crucial function, the really important role that women serve as housewives is to buy more things for the house?’[my italics]. What’s more, ‘the housewife is often an unaware victim’ of such sinister machinations, subtly manoeuvred into ‘buying things that neither fulﬁl her family’s needs nor her own’.73 It makes sense then that the women who have already been replaced in Stepford should behave as though they are acting in an advertisement. Thus forewarned, the reader knows from the moment that Bobbie’s home is described as looking like ‘a commercial’ that she too has been replaced.

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Even as Joanna desperately struggles to uncover the truth about Stepford, she is unknowingly playing right into the hands of the Men’s Association, by allowing her voice to be recorded, and permitting 1950s magazine illustrator Ike Mazzard to sketch her portrait. The truth, in fact, is so close to home (literally) that it isn’t until it’s too late that she realises that she need look no further than her own husband for answers. It soon turns out that the entire move to suburbia – a move made largely at Walter’s behest – was made for the purpose of replacing Joanna with a fancy new model. The evil mastermind behind the plot is Dale ‘Diz’ Coba, president of the Men’s Association. Diz came by his nickname because he was an electronics whiz formerly employed at Disneyland: his speciality, naturally, was ‘audio animatronics’, that is, the creation of life-like automatons to take part in the theme park’s historical tableaux. His wife was also a founder member of the Stepford women’s club. Aside from providing a fairly plausible explanation for Coba’s skill in creating androids, the Disney references are resonant in other ways as well. The connection between suburbia and Disneyland during the 1950s and 60s was a suggestive one: ‘While post-war Americans, not unlike Walt Disney himself, were forsaking their small-town roots for the “good life” that burgeoned on the suburban periphery of American cities, the rush to suburbia was fuelled in part by the kind of vision that Disney celebrated in ﬁlm and ultimately enshrined in Disneyland’.74 Indeed, one of the most famous attractions in Disneyland was ‘Main Street, USA’, a highly idealised three-quarter-scale celebration of the kind of small town that was rapidly becoming extinct, there to be nostalgically viewed by visitors who had never actually known this kind of life, or had already forsaken it for the affordability and convenience of suburbia. Is it mere coincidence, then, that Levin should have named Joanna’s husband ‘Walter’, given that he willingly sacriﬁces his living, breathing wife for an animatronic stand-in who conforms to an outmoded and deeply nostalgic ideal of American womanhood? The Disneyland connection also brings to mind Jean Baudrillard’s meditations on the theme park as an imaginative space: ‘Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation.’75 It could be said that, within the context of Levin’s novel, the Disney references also serve to remind both Joanna and the reader that Stepford is itself a simulation, a desperate and murderous attempt to recreate a regressive and conservative ideal of suburban living which

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itself owes much to the machinations of advertisers and the culture industry. Levin’s novel climaxes with Joanna’s murder at the hands of the robotic double of her best friend. The climax of the ﬁlm differs, in that it is Joanna who kills the Bobbie replicant, stabbing her in the abdomen with a kitchen knife. But here too, there can ultimately be no escape for Joanna, for the very forces of law and order are arrayed against her: ‘Stepford is a fantasy world of patriarchal control’.76 In the ﬁlm, Joanna is ﬁnally murdered by her own robotic double, in a room in the Men’s Association mansion which has been mocked up to look just like her own. The fact that Joanna is killed, in a sense, by herself, is foreshadowed even in the opening scene of the ﬁlm, when she is ﬁrst seen gazing sombrely at her own reﬂection. The Stepford Wives functions as a satiric, but chilling dramatisation of fears which would have been familiar to many women during the 1970s. The growing prominence of the women’s rights movement meant that they would have been well aware of the kind of powerful rhetoric espoused by Friedan and others, yet despite all this, most women still found themselves drawn into the supposed ‘trap’ represented by motherhood, marriage and a nice house in the suburbs. Could they in some sense hold themselves responsible for any future unhappiness arising from this arrangement? Given the novel’s preoccupation with issues surrounding suburban consumerism and female entrapment, it makes sense that both it and the ﬁlm adaptation should famously conclude with a scene set in a bright, dreamily lit supermarket, and a sequence showing the ‘new’ Joanna gliding around the aisles in a long dress carefully ﬁlling her shopping cart and exchanging bland pleasantries with the other Stepford wives as soothing muzak plays in the background. It is a scene which once again dramatises Friedan’s frightening vision of the suburban housewife’s restricted existence, and which furthermore resembles the ﬁnal moments of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. The Stepford wives may not be zombies in the living dead sense, but like Romero’s ghouls they are (literally) mindless consumers: an ad-man’s dream and a feminist’s worst nightmare. The years following the success of the 1975 movie version of The Stepford Wives saw the release of three made-for-television sequels. The ﬁrst was Revenge of the Stepford Wives (1980); then the self-explanatory The Stepford Children (1987); and ﬁnally the inevitable The Stepford Husbands (1996). The ﬁlm also spawned imitations, such as the otherwiseunrelated 2002 horror movie Disturbing Behaviour which is essentially

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‘The Stepford Teens’. There has also been an inevitable remake, in the form of the ﬁtfully amusing but desperately uneven 2004 ‘reimagining’ of the original ﬁlm. Directed by Frank Oz and starring Nicole Kidman, the new ﬁlm was (unforgivably) so poorly plotted that the screenwriters appear undecided as to whether the Stepford wives are robotic doubles or merely ordinary women with computer chips in their heads. In addition, this version is supposed to be a witty black comedy rather than a science ﬁction/horror ﬁlm with satirical elements. While this change of tone seems to makes sense – after all, gender dynamics have changed a great deal since the 1970s, and the original ﬁlm’s climactic twist would already be familiar to a contemporary audience – in reality it doesn’t work because the writing just isn’t sharp enough to carry it off. Furthermore, the problematic nature of the ﬁlm’s ﬁnal revelations, which reveal that the dastardly plot was the brainchild of a deranged ex-career woman seeking to re-establish an excessively idealised version of 1950s suburban life, means that any pretensions towards genuine sociological commentary remain unfulﬁlled. Though essentially unsatisfying, these revelations do make overt one of the original novel’s most signiﬁcant preoccupations: the fact that replacement of the town’s housewives by android doubles is all part of a concerted effort to turn back the clock to a somehow ‘simpler’ period in which gender roles were more clearly deﬁned (and much more restrictive for women, of course). There is also one undeniably funny scene: the moment when evil mastermind Mrs Wellington (Glenn Close), asked if she is ‘a person or a machine’, responds with psychotic dignity, ‘I’m a lady!’ In contrast to the muddled Stepford Wives remake, perhaps the most unnerving depiction of suburban alienation and dehumanisation in recent years is that found in Todd Haynes’s ironically titled Safe (1995), an unapologetically intellectual horror ﬁlm which features a housewife heroine who has everything that she could possibly want and nothing that she actually needs.77 Set amidst the luxurious suburbs of the San Fernando Valley during the late 1980s, the movie stars a notably pale and emaciated-looking Julianne Moore as the ironically named ‘Carol White’, an afﬂuent young wife and stepmother whose meaningless, hopelessly routine-bound lifestyle begins to take a terrible toll.78 Most often seen staring blankly into space, Carol lives with her affectionate, if increasingly distant, husband in a huge suburban mansion enclosed by a large gate. Although her home is set amongst the hills of southern California, new homes of this type are being built almost everywhere she looks: nature, it is made grimly clear, is being relentlessly bulldozed in the name of progress.

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In a scene which perfectly captures the odd mix of horror and uneasy comedy which so often surfaces in the Suburban Gothic, it is the mistaken delivery of a black couch (which clashes terribly with her all-white living room) which seems to set in motion the chain of events which will eventually condemn Carol to an uncertain existence as tortured invalid willingly conﬁned to a dubious new-age health farm. ‘Oh my God’, she says, upon seeing the offending couch, in a state of distress completely disproportionate to what has happened, ‘this isn’t what we ordered!’ Continually framed as a small, insubstantial ﬁgure set against the overtly spacious conﬁnes of her gleaming, soulless home, Carol wanders around like a disaffected child, so much an outsider even in her own kitchen that she plaintively asks her Hispanic maid for a glass of milk. She is a housewife who no longer even has anything to do with her own house. Surrounded by the constant hum of ﬂuorescent lights, the noise and dirt of trafﬁc, the barely-heard chatter of the television and car radios, it seems unsurprising to the viewer when Carol suddenly ﬁnds herself becoming violently allergic to the world around her. Exhaust fumes from a passing truck almost choke her; a trip to the hairdresser results in a nosebleed, and, suggestively, the smell of her husband’s hairspray makes her gag. Conventional science, in the form of her local doctor, can provide no answers, save to suggest that her malaise is psychological in origin: in an echo of the original The Stepford Wives, when Carol decides to take a walk in her garden at night, her reverie is interrupted by the arrival of a police car on routine patrol. The ﬁlm’s concern with the environment and the effect that everyday pollutants have upon people is also present in Stepford, albeit much more overtly here, when the undercurrent of ecological unease intermittently present in American horror since the 1970s becomes a full-blown nightmare, compounded by the 1980s fear of the AIDS virus. Many of the early scenes in Safe pivot on moments of acute social discomfort caused by Carol’s sudden inability to behave in the manner expected of her. She has a panic attack at a friend’s baby shower, runs out of the gym during an exercise class, and embarrasses her husband during dinner with a business acquaintance when she ﬁnds herself completely unable to make polite small talk. When she collapses during a trip to the dry cleaners after inhaling pesticide, Carol ﬁnally decides that she must take action, and follows the information displayed on a ﬂyer which she spots at the local health club, which asks ‘Do You Smell Fumes? Are You Allergic to the Twentieth Century?’ This leads her to a parallel world of people apparently suffering in the same way as she is, and to the hope of spiritual and physical rebirth at ‘The Wrenwood

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Centre’ a new-age retreat in the New Mexico desert (but still an oasis from which the drone of trafﬁc on the nearby highway can be heard). Needless to say, whereas a lesser ﬁlm might have taken Carol’s ﬂight from suburbia and into the supposed safe haven of the desert as the cue for her physical and psychological convalescence, much to the ire of many critics, Haynes provides his audience with no comforting resolution. By the end of the ﬁlm, Carol, now a full-ﬂedged disciple of new-age clap-trap, is still staring blankly into the middle distance, even more fragile and isolated-seeming than ever (she ends up living in a hermetically sealed igloo at the edge of the settlement), having merely exchanged one deeply damaging and artiﬁcial way of life for another (a conclusion has something in common with the ending of Jack’s Wife). In her own way, she is perhaps as much of a zombie as Romero’s shufﬂing undead or the robotic Joanna Eberhart, save for the fact that she is all too aware of the emptiness of her own existence, which makes her plight all the more unbearable to watch. The quietly bleak personal apocalypse depicted in Safe suggests that after more than 60 years of the suburban neighbourhood as the dominant American living environment, depictions of this setting as a place in which alienation thrives and individuality is under threat are still fairly common. This implies that the unease which many of suburbia’s ﬁrst critics voiced has yet to disappear, and has merely changed form. The persistent belief that homes tell us a great deal about the people who live there lingers still, as does the suspicion that beneath the seeming order and neatness of the suburban neighbourhood something nasty, and dangerously indeﬁnable, lurks. ‘We don’t really own our own lives’, Carol White overhears a friend say near the beginning of Safe, a statement that resonates throughout the rest of that ﬁlm, as it does at various times throughout many of the Suburban Gothic’s most suggestive texts. For it obliquely acknowledges the fear that has been there since the beginning of mass suburbanisation: the terrible feeling that perhaps by ﬁnally having almost all of their material wants satisﬁed, Americans – and in particular American women – have unwittingly sacriﬁced something far more valuable and completely irreplaceable. At ﬁrst glance then, ﬁlms which depict alien takeover, ﬂesh-eating zombies, eerily submissive androids, and deeply unhappy 1980s housewives may not initially seem to have all that much in common with each other, beyond their obvious preoccupation with the fear of being ‘taken over’ or ‘replaced’ by powerful forces beyond rational understanding. However, they are all fundamentally linked by the way in which each directly (or indirectly) indicts suburbia and the relentless tide of economic and

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social development which drives it. As Robert Beuka has observed, in relation to two of these texts: ‘Like Body Snatchers – a ﬁlm that has been read as a critique of the homogenisation of identity in post-war suburbia – The Stepford Wives broaches the possibility that something in the suburban experience fosters the erosion of personal autonomy’.79 It is this suggestion, in many respects as prevalent now as it was at the beginning of the post-war era, which helps make narratives which deal with issues of dehumanisation and alienation one of the most powerful strands of the Suburban Gothic.

4 ‘You Son of a Bitch! You Only Moved the Headstones!’ Haunted Suburbia

In Charles Beaumont’s 1955 story ‘Free Dirt,’ a greedy suburbanite named Mr Aorta ﬁnds out the hard way that there really is no such thing as a free lunch. So heroically miserly that he shoplifts rather than buy groceries, Mr Aorta’s covetousness is fatally aroused when he spies a sign outside the local cemetery saying ‘Free Dirt’. He decides then and there that he will spread this windfall on his backyard and over the next few days dumps load after load on to his ground. Then he ﬁlls the rich soil with vegetable seeds of every conceivable type. Gradually, the seeds start to grow, but soon the supply of soil dries up, and Mr Aorta goes to the cemetery under cover of darkness to steal dirt from fresh graves. As if overnight, the entire garden comes to glorious fruition, and, ever the glutton, Mr Aorta eats every single bite. It is only when a horriﬁed neighbour ﬁnds his hideously distended corpse a day later that the reader realises just what it is that Mr Aorta has actually been eating. The garden full of delicious vegetables was nothing but a vivid hallucination: he has actually swallowed mouthful after mouthful of rich cemetery soil. ‘Free Dirt’ may be one of the ﬁrst stories explicitly to connect the burial ground with the suburb, but it is by no means the last. Mr Aorta is simply amongst the earliest in a long line of greedy opportunists who ﬁnd out the hard way that disrespecting the dead, even amidst the conﬁnes of the modern suburb, is seldom a good idea. The ghosts of the murdered and the wronged actually do haunt the suburbs with surprising frequency.1 Indeed, as Mr Aorta’s fate demonstrates, the gnawing awareness that America as a nation has been built on stolen ground resurfaces with renewed ferocity in many of the hauntings found in the Suburban Gothic. As one commentator has put it, ‘In another context, setting out to build a haunted house would be absurd. However, in America, where every white house displaces an Indian one . . . it may 104

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be inevitable . . .’2 Indeed, the apparent disparity between the outwardly placid, banal exterior of the modern suburban home and the sheer incongruity therein of any overtly supernatural incident actually renders disturbances of this kind more unnerving than if they had taken place in a damp old castle or picturesque ruin where such an event might have been anticipated. In this chapter, I shall examine the ways in which the suburbs have been depicted in narratives in which the gothic, violent past simply refuses to stay buried, often literally). To that end, I will be discussing Anson’s The Amityville Horror (both the 1977 book and the 1979 ﬁlm), Anne Rivers Siddons’ novel The House Next Door (1978), and the ﬁlm Poltergeist (1982). However, I will begin by brieﬂy outlining the development of the ‘haunted’ house in the American gothic in order to provide an initial framework for my discussion. The most notable conventions of the European gothic form were clearly ill-suited to the moral, intellectual and emotional climate of the New World. The vast wilderness, isolated Puritan settlements and ﬂedgling cities of colonial America would not support the entirely old-world structures of castles, abbeys, ancient ruins and underground passages associated with the European gothic, nor the speciﬁc cultural context under which they had been deployed.3 In order to overcome the inevitable shortcomings of the European formula, the American gothic would have to look to its own landscape to provide substitute settings. Consequently, in the American gothic, the family home replaced the castle as the central locus of terror. The intense, at times overtly claustrophobic, focus upon the family (or pseudo-family) that informs so much of the Suburban Gothic is rooted, as are so many other American obsessions and neuroses, in the nation’s Puritan past. When the Puritans landed in New England during the early seventeenth century, they brought with them more than a strong belief in their own exceptionalism and the conviction that they were God’s chosen people. The intention of those early pilgrims/colonisers was to create a New Jerusalem for a New World, the fabled ‘city upon the hill’ that would stand as both an inspiration and a reproach to the rest of mankind. They perceived their ﬂedgling settlements as part of ‘this great household upon the earth’ – a household in which they, as God’s favoured children, would have both the great privilege and substantial responsibility of creating a perfect society on earth (Anderson, p.8). It is a sentiment which would linger, albeit in rather more secular form, long after the ﬁrst Puritan settlements had been gradually assimilated into mainstream American society. For while the wave of suburban developments which emerged in the post-war era were to a large extent founded

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upon a utopian ideal based more on material aspirations than theological ones, these new suburban ‘colonies’ were likewise seen as a chance to start afresh, and a place in which the core family group could be part of an aspirational lifestyle which represented something much larger than themselves alone. It is no coincidence surely that advertisements and articles on early suburbanites often referred to them as ‘settlers’, as though they’d set out for their new neighbourhoods in colonisation ships or covered wagons. Just as in Puritan times, the strength of familial and local ties was seen as central to the success or failure of this great venture. Camped in their claustrophobic settlements, newcomers to a land they coveted but did not understand, and surrounded by enticing yet deeply threatening swathes of thick forest (in which lurked unsurprisingly hostile native peoples that they regarded as servants of the devil), the Puritans and their descendants must have regarded home and their families (including the wider community) as the only trustworthy elements of a strange new world. As a result, ‘a particularly intense degree of insecurity, compressed into a domestic setting, became the hallmark of Puritan experience and writing’.4 The same could be said of the American gothic in general, and of the Suburban Gothic in particular, in which family ‘togetherness’ so often proves claustrophobic and home is seldom the safest place to be. Many of America’s most important writers have deployed gothic excess in order to represent ‘domesticity’s extreme horrors’. In Wieland (1798), Charles Brockden Brown, inspired by a real-life case, told the story of a man urged by mysterious (but rationally explicable) voices to murder his entire family. Theodore Wieland could be said to be a direct ancestor of The Shining’s axe-wielding Jack Torrance, The Amityville Horror’s riﬂe-toting Ronnie DeFeo or The Stepfather’s (1986) psychotic family man Jerry Blake. Nathaniel Hawthorne, also successfully replaced the castles of the European gothic with home-grown surroundings. The House of the Seven Gables (1851) was a claustrophobic romance set in a crumbling mansion. As in many a gothic text before it and since, the plot hinges upon the usurpation of land: the house with many gables stands on stolen ground. The inequities of the past are ﬁnally resolved, in true romance fashion, by the coming together in marriage of the two warring families who dominate the book. We know that true conciliation has come about when the survivors of both families turn their backs upon the diseased house (symbol of all that was wrong and unjust about the past) and decide to live together in pastoral harmony.

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In Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, the link between family and home is rendered even more signiﬁcant by his depiction of a family and a house which actually share a single, indissoluble identity.5 In Poe, as is the case from Walpole to the modern gothic, ‘place and space exhibit a malign inﬂuence and mobility and are mentally stronger than their human counterparts’.6 The relationship between master and house is such that Roderick Usher’s disintegrating sanity mirrors the destruction of the building itself. The use of architecture symbolically to parallel the mental state of those who reside within at work in both Brown and Poe is an approach that would be used again and again in the American gothic, particularly as the genre underwent a profound reconﬁguration during the post-Second World War era. In the Southern gothic, the image of the mansion set in the middle of the plantation would become a central trope. The original title of William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936) was The Dark House – a ﬁtting name for a book concerned to such a large extent with the tale of slave owner Thomas Sutpen, and the mansion for which he had ‘overrun suddenly the hundred square miles of tranquil and astonished earth and drag house and formal gardens violently out of the soundless Nothing and clapped them down like cards upon a table . . .’7 Nothing captured the degeneracy and despair of the post-Civil War South more aptly than the image of the plantation mansion: once a proud symbol of wealth and power built on the exploitation of slaves, latterly the shameful epitome of all that the South felt it had lost in defeat. Flannery O’Connor captured that strange mixture of resentment and longing towards the antebellum mansion in ‘Everything That Rises Must Converge’ (1956).8 We are told that Julian, the arrogant protagonist, ‘never spoke of it [his family’s lost plantation] without contempt or thought of it without longing’.9 In his discussion of the three images that he argued were central to the new American gothic, Irving Malin had this to say about the differences between the ‘old’ and ‘new’ gothic styles: In old Gothic we encounter the haunted castle, the journey into the forest, and the reﬂection. Walpole, Monk Lewis, and Mrs Radcliffe do not use these images in any psychologically acute way: they remain mere props. But the inheritors of old Gothic regard these images as ‘objective correlatives’ of the psyche.10 In other words, in the modern gothic, a house is generally much more than a house: rather, it can be taken to have a direct connection with the

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psychological landscape of the persons who inhabit it. The writer who did more to reinforce this link than any other American writer since Henry James was Shirley Jackson, who wrote her three so-called ‘House’ novels one after the other, producing The Sundial in 1958, The Haunting of Hill House in 1959, and We Have Always Lived in The Castle (her ﬁnal full length text) in 1962. All three Gothic mansions are signiﬁcant within their texts, but Hill House, the most inﬂuential haunted house of the twentieth century, is the most memorable of all: a house ‘born bad’ which functions as a character in its own right. Of Jackson’s house novels, however, only The Haunting of Hill House features overt supernatural incident, and even then, the disturbances which take place are referred to in decidedly ambiguous terms. Indeed, following the publication of Richard Matheson’s Stir of Echoes, suburban hauntings were a rarity for at least a decade. This changed in the early 1970s however, with the biggest horror boom since the 1930s. Ira Levin’s 1967 bestseller Rosemary’s Baby and the successful ﬁlm of the same name provided an early indication of the way in which domestic horror and supernatural horror would so often be combined in the decades to come. The trend accelerated with William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist (1971; ﬁlm 1973). Initially, the disturbances that plague actress Chris O’Neill and her daughter Regan seem like they might be the work of a poltergeist but of course the source of the trouble turns out to be even more sinister: demonic possession. A truly haunted house features in Robert Marasco’s Burnt Offerings (1973). In what would rapidly become a wearily familiar trope, the Rolfes, a family of New Yorkers, strike a deal too good to be true in order to secure a rural mansion for the summer months: the rent is only $900, and all they have to do is tidy the place up a bit and look after the mysterious old lady who lives on the top ﬂoor. So intent are they on even temporarily leaving behind their cramped city apartment that they overlook the mansion’s dilapidated condition and odd landlords, a pair of elderly siblings. A key factor in explaining the Rolfes’ susceptibility to the charms of their new residence lies in the fact that it represents all that they have ever desired. As Dale Bailey puts it, ‘The Rolfes dream of upward mobility and a move to the suburbs’.11 Marion Rolfe spends her days in New York longing for the day when her family can ﬁnally trade up to a suburban idyll of their own. Until that day arrives, then, the Allardyce mansion, (situated, like the Amityville Horror’s DeFeo house, on Long Island) seems an agreeable stopgap. As in The Haunting of Hill House, the gnawing desire for a home of one’s own leads to disaster and death. By summer’s end, most of the family are dead, killed by a kind of

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psychic vampirism; the house has mysteriously been restored to pristine perfection; and Marion ﬁnally has her house in the country, but at a terrible price. Her desire to advance socially and economically has cost her everything of real importance. As we shall see, it is a pattern that is repeated again and again in the suburban haunted house story. While Stephen King has rarely set any of his novels or short stories in an explicitly suburban locale, the terrifying spectre of the so-called ‘Bad Place’ as he calls it in Danse Macabre (1981) does arise time and again in his work, be it in the form of the vampire-infested Marsten house in Salem’s Lot (1975) or the Overlook Hotel in The Shining (1977).12 The latter is, of course, another novel in which a lower-middle-class family with dreams of economic advancement get to stay in a luxurious property with sinister secrets. King’s occasional co-author Peter Straub has made regular use of the more upscale suburban setting. Ghost Story (1979) is set in an afﬂuent Connecticut suburb terrorised by a vengeful Manitou which takes the shape of a beautiful but strangely repulsive young woman named Eva Galli. In Floating Dragon (1984), another wealthy suburb is terrorised by a devastating supernatural entity from the past: in this case, a demonic founding father named Gideon Winter whose return coincides with the accidental release of hallucinogenic nerve gas from a nearby defence plant. Only a couple of years later Stephen King’s IT (1986) would employ a very similar plot. Clearly, at least as far as the most successful type of commercial horror ﬁction was concerned during the 1980s, there was hardly a wealthy suburban neighbourhood or small New England town out there that wasn’t being menaced by an ageless supernatural evil of some kind or another. The most famous haunted house story of the decade was Jay Anson’s The Amityville Horror (1977). Anson’s book gained notice not because it was particularly well written (it isn’t) but because it purported to be true. As the hyperbolic blurb put it, this story was ‘more hideously frightening than The Exorcist because it actually happened!’13 So despite the fact that rather large holes began to appear in their story almost as soon as it was publicised, the Lutz family’s dubious tale of supernatural horror is almost as well-known today as it was thirty years ago. In the following section, then, I shall discuss the novel and the ﬁlm which followed in relation to the Suburban Gothic.

‘The home they always wanted’ Keith Thomas has noted that in past times, ‘tales of haunted houses might be put about by tenants to keep down their rent’.14 In hindsight,

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the evidence would seem to suggest that the so-called ‘Amityville Horror’ arose from rather similar motives. The veriﬁable facts are fairly straightforward. On 13 November 1974, six members of the DeFeo family were slain in their home at 112 Ocean Avenue, Amityville, Long Island. Eldest son Ronald ‘Butch’ DeFeo, then twenty-four years old, was arrested shortly after the murders and later sent to prison for life. On 18 December 1975, newlyweds George and Kathy Lutz and their three children moved into the DeFeo house, only to leave just twentyeight days later, allegedly in fear of their lives. The Lutzes later claimed that during their time in the house they had been subjected to a terrifying succession of supernatural incidents, from plagues of ﬂies to the appearance of a red-eyed demonic pig creature. Their dream home had apparently become the very stuff of nightmares. It has since been alleged by some commentators that the ‘haunting’ was a scam cooked up with the aid of DeFeo’s lawyer, with whom the Lutzes were also allegedly in contact long before the story broke. Indeed, at his trial, DeFeo would later claim that demonic voices emanating from the house had urged him to kill his parents, a detail some have alleged comes from Anson’s book, rather than personal experience.15 While the real story surrounding the alleged haunting at Amityville is therefore at least as interesting as the supposed events themselves, I am more concerned with discussing the reasons why the book and its subsequent ﬁlm adaptations (1979; 2005) struck such a powerful chord with the American public. In its obsession with issues of money, and the powerful economic and social anxieties of the 1970s, the Amityville ‘haunting’ also provides a suitable introduction to the kinds of preoccupations which thrive within the apparently unlikely setting of the suburban haunted house. As Stephen King rightly put it in his lengthy discussion in Danse Macabre, Amityville is a prime example of ‘the horror movie as economic nightmare’.16 Perhaps unsurprisingly, the book opens with details of a ﬁnancial opportunity too good to pass up. The Amityville house is seemingly an extremely desirable home in an exclusive area with notoriously high property taxes (so high, in fact, that after the reports of paranormal incident came out many wondered just how George Lutz had ever hoped to pay them). It has been on the market for a year, at an unbelievable price. Naturally, George can hardly believe his ears. ‘Eighty thousand dollars! For a house like that described in the listing it would have to be falling apart, or the typist would have left out a “1” before the zero’.17 Signiﬁcantly, even though the real estate broker supposedly tells them ‘without hesitation’ that the house was recently the site of a bloody mass murder,

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the Lutzes’ desire for the house and for the better way of life that it represents blinds them to its unsavoury history. As Anson puts it, ‘The tragic history of 112 Ocean Avenue didn’t matter to George, Kathy, or their three children. This was still the home they had always wanted.’18 The Lutzes even buy their bedroom furniture and dining room set from the DeFeo estate rather than spend good money on new furnishings (this may explain why the worst of the many Amityville sequels revolves around a supposedly haunted clock).19 As Dale Bailey has noted, ‘The Lutzes are the stereotypical middle-class family. They have the children, the expensive, ego-stroking toys, even a dog named Harry. All they need is a house. And they get that in spades’.20 Of course, like the crooked real estate company in Poltergeist, and Charles Beaumont’s Mr Aorta, George and Kathy will soon learn the hard way that one should never forget the history of the land on which one lives. There is also the vexed question of the extent to which it can be said that the Lutzes truly own the property. As Michaels notes Anson brieﬂy mentions early in the book that as sole surviving member of the DeFeo clan, Butch had supposedly inherited his parent’s estate, but that because of certain legal impediments, the Lutzes never actually got clear title.21 Therefore the Amityville property is a subject of contested ownership. But this is by no means the only ﬁnancial question mark to hang over the property, nor is the burden of repeatedly ﬁxing up the place after the latest spot of paranormal vandalism: the ﬁnancial implications of the haunted house are [not] limited to the actual repair costs of the physical damage done by the ghosts. Think of the plight of the Amityville couple as investors in real estate: having risked everything to get themselves into the spectacularly inﬂationary market of 1975, they ﬁnd themselves owning the only house on Long Island whose value is declining.22 George is willing to spend money on an unaffordable new home, motorboat, truck and motorcycle despite his company’s precarious ﬁnancial position – in other words, he repeatedly associates the accumulation of material possessions with happiness – despite the fact that as young adults during the mid-1970s, he and Kathy are part of the ﬁrst generation of Americans to face the prospect of doing worse than their parents did.23 George’s proﬂigate spending habits bring to mind Jimmy Carter’s infamous address to the nation in July 1979, when he blamed the nation’s troubles not on economic and foreign policy considerations, but on a ‘preoccupation with self’ and a ‘mistaken idea of

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freedom’ that had led Americans to lose their moral bearings.24 As Carter put it: ‘In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close knit communities and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self indulgence and narcissism.’25 Having grown up in a climate of apparently unstoppable economic progress believing, as millions upon millions of Americans of the previous generation did, that a home of their own in a quality neighbourhood was nothing more than their due, George and Kathy Lutz buy into the suburban dream without fully considering whether they can actually afford to do so, and without giving more than a moment’s thought to the reasons why the house is for sale in the ﬁrst place. As most of the critics who have discussed the Amityville case have acknowledged, it is this powerful economic undertow which lurks just below the unlikely accounts of supernatural activity which helps explain just why the book and ﬁlm were so popular in the ﬁrst place. As King put it, ‘the picture’s subtext is economic unease’.26 The apparently limitless economic growth of the post-war era had come grinding to a halt by the early 1970s, as the 1973 oil embargo heralded the end of ‘the era of cheap oil and gas which had fuelled the American way of life and leisure’.27 The result was a profound economic and psychological crisis for millions of ordinary Americans like the Lutzes for whom, in the words of one historian: With endless resources and an inexhaustible potential for growth, there had always been room for upward mobility, always faith in the chance for a new start. According to the American creed, every individual was free to maximise his or her own talents, to secure a decent education, to gain access to the political and economic mainstream. Now, the very underpinning of that faith had been eroded. Instead of growth, there were limits. The economy seemed stagnant, and despite the creation of some new jobs, high unemployment was seemingly endemic. Through automation and technology, countless positions were permanently lost. An international energy crisis – apparently unsolvable – crippled America’s chance for continued growth and expansion.28 As a result, the spectre of looming bankruptcy is more compelling than the alleged paranormal activity described. Things are further complicated by the fact that there seem to have been tensions within the Lutz family dynamic even before they bought the Amityville house. George is not father of the Lutz children: Kathy was a widow when

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they met, and the couple are not long married. Therefore, many of the mood swings described by George could just as easily be put down to the enormous changes this young man (aged 28 at the time of the incidents described in the book) has experienced in a short space of time. In addition to the new wife and the fact that he has become stepfather to three young children, he has just purchased a huge house he can ill afford. To make matters even more stressful, George has just taken over the running of his family’s construction ﬁrm which is on the verge of bankruptcy. As Anson writes at the beginning of the story (most of which is written from George’s supposed perspective) ‘he considered what he had got himself into – a second marriage with three children, a new house with a big mortgage’.29 It is all enough to keep any man up at night, even without those pesky ghosts. Then there are the personality changes allegedly experienced by the family during their time in the house. These include the fact that George and Kathy argue a lot; George grows a beard – just like Butch DeFeo! – and doesn’t shower as much as he used to (he also chops a lot of wood, which partially explains why the conclusion of both ﬁlm adaptations of Anson’s book play out like low-rent versions of The Shining); the Lutz kids start sleeping on their stomachs – just like the murder victims! – and, best of all, little Missy gains an imaginary friend named ‘Jodie’ who turns out to be a demonic pig with glowing red eyes. Yet despite all this, and as seems to be the case with most suburban hauntings, the Lutzes by and large deal with the disturbances themselves. Everything must, it seems, be sorted out within the conﬁnes of the family. That’s not to say that there is no attempt on Anson’s part to add a little extra drama. A paranormal researcher supposedly witnesses strange happenings, but we are told that because he went to the house in an unofﬁcial capacity, none of his observations can be scientiﬁcally ratiﬁed. A psychic senses danger as well, but she’s of no practical help. In addition, perhaps in order to cash in on The Exorcist, Anson’s book (and the ﬁlm adaptations) go back and forth between events happening in the Amityville house and the physical and spiritual battle being experienced by the ﬁctional ‘Father Frank Mancuso’. Father Mancuso barely steps over the threshold before a booming male voice tells him to ‘Get out!’ Because Father Karras in The Exorcist was a noted psychiatrist as well as a man of God, we are told here that Father Mancuso, not to be outdone, is both a lawyer and a psychotherapist. Despite his impressive (if unlikely) credentials, the good Father proves spectacularly useless. He contracts a bad case of the ﬂu just after his visit to the house (his illness is supernaturally induced, of course),

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and spends most of the rest of the book queasily clutching his stomach, and holding debates with himself about the nature of the battle between good and evil. Father Mancuso isn’t the only one to suffer in this way from his exposure to the house: George Lutz too spends much of his time running back and forth to the bathroom, and Kathy’s Aunt Theresa (an ex-nun) barely has time to set foot in the house before she too suffers from a severe gastrointestinal upset. Even a cop recounting what happened on the night of the DeFeo murders feels queasy. By the end of the book, the reader isn’t in the slightest bit surprised then when the family dog also begins to vomit. It’s as if the supernatural were repeatedly manifesting itself in the form of a bad case of the stomach ﬂu. The queasy obsession with bodily functions seen in The Amityville Horror also surfaces brieﬂy in The House Next Door, in which, among the many toe-clenchingly embarrassing scenes of social humiliation described in the book, there is an incident in which a little girl who is suffering from a severe bowel disorder inadvertently ruins her socialclimbing father’s cocktail party. It’s also a scene rather similar to the one in The Exorcist in which the ﬁrst real indication that something is terribly wrong with Regan comes when she urinates on the carpet in front of her mother’s understandably horriﬁed guests. She spends the rest of the novel spewing bile in the direction of unfortunate clergymen. In the 1970s, then, it seemed that any self-respecting supernatural incident had to be accompanied by uncontrollable bodily functions. In addition to the digestive upsets supposedly undergone by many of those unlucky enough to be exposed to the Amityville house, the toilets ﬁll up with black goop; a plague of ﬂies appears in one of the rooms; George is ‘attacked’ by a porcelain lion; and a secret room, discovered in the basement, ‘smells like blood’. The impact of every supernatural incident is relayed to us via liberal use of exclamation marks. For example, we are told that George has seen a face in the plywood wall of the basement, and that: ‘In a few days, George would realise that it was the bearded visage of Ronnie DeFeo!’30 Anson also describes the infamous plague of ﬂies in this manner: ‘On this window, clinging to the inside of the panes, were literally hundreds of buzzing ﬂies!’31 Best of all, is the observation that: ‘The odour of human excrement was always associated with the appearance of the devil!’32 Not content with merely blaming it all on the bloody events of just a year previously, Anson also comes up with a not very convincing variation on the most clichéd explanation of all: the house is built on the site of an Indian burial ground. After the obligatory visit to the library to look through old archives we are informed that the Amityville house’s

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dark past goes back even further than the audience had previously assumed, despite the fact that it was only built in 1928: It seems that the Shinnecock Indians used land on the Amityville River as an enclosure for the sick, mad and dying. These unfortunates were penned up until they died of exposure. However, the record noted that the Shinnecocks did not use this tract as a consecrated burial ground because they believed it to be infested with demons.33 And not only that: in addition, the house is also the burial site of the notorious warlock John Ketchum, expelled from Salem for practising witchcraft, who set up residence ‘within 500 feet of where George now lived, continuing his alleged devil worship’.34 So, to recap: not only is the house the site of a recent mass murder, it is also (allegedly) the place where the Indians left the weak members of the tribe to die, a spot where devil worship was carried out, and the ﬁnal resting place of a warlock. No wonder the real estate agents set such a low price. The reader is unsurprised therefore when the basement rather abruptly becomes an entrance to hell (like the closet in the children’s room in Poltergeist).35 Like a bad liar shoring up a dodgy alibi, Anson cannot resist adding detail after detail to his unlikely story. Even the medium who brieﬂy visits the house declares that ‘the house is built on a burial ground or something like that’.36 The situation in Amityville, however unlikely, does bring to mind an observation made by Reneé Bergland in a discussion of Stephen King’s Pet Sematary (1983) which links that novel to Indian land claims in Maine during the 1970s: ‘the story evokes current white anxieties about Indian possession and repossession of land. It also draws on white guilt about Indian dispossession, and white fear that they themselves might be possessed by the vengeful spirits of the dispossessed’.37 As he further elaborates, ‘the history of European relations with Native Americans is a history of murders, looted graves, illegal land transfers and disruptions of sovereignty.’ In other words, ‘the land is haunted because it is stolen’.38 It is all the more suggestive, then, that despite the remarkable catalogue of domestic disasters which constitutes the latter half of Anson’s text – which includes green ooze creeping down the walls, a devastating ﬂood, an evil windowsill and a front door which blows off its hinges – George still resists Kathy’s understandable pleas that they move until the last possible minute: because, as he puts it ‘I’ve got too much invested here to give it up just like that!’39 Still, it ultimately becomes too much for the family to cope with, and they ﬂee. Even here, though, Anson focuses on the material

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consequences of their abandonment of the house. He states in the Afterword that the most compelling evidence in support of the Lutzes is the fact that they were willing to leave behind their possessions. Who in their right mind, he suggests, would do such a thing without good reason? After all: ‘It takes more than imagination or a case of “nerves” to drive a normal, healthy family of ﬁve to the drastic step of abandoning a desirable three-storey house, complete with ﬁnished basement, swimming pool, and boathouse, without even pausing to collect their personal belongings’40 (my italics). The very possessions which were once the source of such pride – the swimming pool, the boathouse, the motorbikes – are irrevocably tainted by their proximity to the house which they should not have bought anyway, given their already precarious ﬁnancial position. This detail is an important one. Whereas earlier haunted house novels usually featured a protagonist who is tied to the house in question by familial, historical or, latterly, psychological bonds, here (as will often be the case in the suburban hauntings of the 1970s) the connection is viewed from the outset in largely material terms. Anson’s argument is as follows: if money and status mean a great deal to the Lutz family, then only something as irrational and threatening as the intervention of supernatural forces would force them to give up all of this. Mind you, this contention is rather undermined by fact that the Lutz family gained both fame and wealth once their story was repackaged for public consumption. It’s not all bad though: they can always buy more stuff once they’ve sold their story. So whereas the protagonists of ﬁctional haunted house stories of the same period – Eleanor Vance, the Rolfe family, the doomed psychic investigators who enter Richard Matheson’s Hell House – are consumed and destroyed by the very houses they enter, this so-called ‘real life’ haunting becomes a chance for consumption of a very different sort: as fodder for the media and for the entertainment industry.

‘People like us’: Anne Rivers Siddons’ The House Next Door In The House Next Door (1978), the ﬁerce attachment to material possessions and markers of status so associated by some with the 1970s baby boomer lifestyle also becomes a matter of baleful signiﬁcance.41 In some respects, Walter and Colquitt Kennedy are striking ﬁctional analogues of George and Kathy Lutz, not least in the fact that both couples go to the media in order to publicise their claims. However, while Walter and Colquitt tell their story from humanitarian motives, readers of Anson’s

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book could decide for themselves whether the Lutz family may have had other factors in mind when they broke the news of their own ‘experiences’. Unlike many of the more obviously showy supernatural horror novels of the 1970s, Siddons’ novel has never been ﬁlmed. Perhaps this is because Siddons’ episodic, naturalistic story has more in common with The Road Through the Wall than The Amityville Horror. In Siddons’ novel, the supernatural elements are of a decidedly more ambiguous nature than those which allegedly drove the Lutz family from their home. The source of the haunting is also a great deal more nebulous than the mass murder and burial grounds which supposedly lie beneath the DeFeo house. For Siddons, the juxtaposition between her upscale, contemporary suburban setting and the supernatural was key: It seemed to me that in this age of pragmatists and materialists, a conventional spectre would almost be laughable; in the suburb that I envisioned, the people do not believe in that sort of thing; it is almost improper. A traditional ghoulie would be laughed out of the neighbourhood. So what would get to my quasi-sophisticated suburbanite? What would break relationships and crumble defences and penetrate suburban armours? It would have to be different in each case. Each person has his own built in horror button. Let’s have a house that can isolate and push it, and then you’ve really got a case of the suburban willies.42 As in Jackson’s novel the relationships between the people who live in such close proximity is of paramount importance. Unlike as in Amityville, communal bonds – and their violation – are extremely important, as we shall see. The opening lines of Colquitt Kennedy’s ﬁrst-person narrative immediately highlight the disparity between the supposedly reasonable nature of the people involved in the story and the decidedly unreasonable sequence of events which is about to be related to us. ‘People like us don’t appear in People magazine’, she coolly announces, letting the reader know from the outset that she and her husband are certainly not the types to make a fuss without good reason. The couple are afﬂuent, well-bred young professionals, who own ‘a good house, but not a grand one, in a better neighbourhood than we can really afford’ in an upscale suburb of Atlanta seemingly populated entirely by white faces.43 This is deﬁnitely the moneyed, afﬂuent new South of the 1970s, rather than the more obviously gothic milieu of earlier regional writers such as Faulkner

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and O’Connor. Although Colquitt plays down their wealth – it is, after all, vulgar to talk about money – it soon becomes obvious to the reader that she and Walter certainly belong to the very comfortably well-off middle classes, as do their friends. They live in a place in which ‘people are homogenous in terms of race, class, and social value; they are all concerned with the surface of their lives, with appearances and class markers, with a way of living that is almost purely self-referential’.44 The Kennedy’s privileged lifestyle and self-consciously graceful mode of living brings to mind Pierre Bourdieu’s observations in Distinction (1979) on the characteristic of ‘bourgeois dynasties’. Walter and Colquitt have that same ‘sense of belonging to a more polished, more polite, better policed world, a world which is justiﬁed in existing by its perfection, its harmony and beauty, a world which has produced Beethoven and Mozart and continues to produce people capable of playing and appreciating them.’45 It is these tastes, aversions and sympathies which, as he puts it, ‘forge the unconscious unity of a class’. In contrast to the social-climbing Lutzes (Kathy is the ﬁrst member of her family to own her own home) whose tenure in Amityville is characterised by ﬁnancial insecurity, Walter and Colquitt have from the outset ﬁtted in to their upper-middle-class neighbourhood. Theirs is an inherited sense of privilege: they were even given the money for their deposit on their house as a wedding gift. They belong in their home in a way that the Lutzes – recently and precariously elevated from the working classes – do not. Whilst the Kennedys have ‘the elegant self assurance of inherited wealth’, the Lutzes are ‘poor relations, striving to live beyond their means; one thinks of the child in D.H. Lawrence’s story “The Rocking-Horse Winner” who hears throughout the house and even in his bedroom, an incessant whispering: “There must be more money”’.46 The true horror in the Amityville story lies, as previously noted, in the material repercussions of the alleged haunting: the repair bills, the huge mortgage, the business that goes under and the possessions left behind. Ultimately, it is as if the Lutzes are being ejected from a milieu they were categorically unsuited for (in terms of both class and ﬁnancial reach) in the ﬁrst place. It is highly signiﬁcant therefore that the problem for the Kennedys is not actually with their own home (a Dutch Colonial, just like the DeFeo residence) but rather, as the title suggests, with the house, and with the people, next door. This must be one of the very few haunted house stories written from the perspective of a neighbour rather than an inhabitant of the residence in question. As we shall see, each of the three couples who move next door to the Kennedys is in some way deeply unsuited to ﬁtting in with the delicate

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social balance of Siddon’s suburb. The narrative could easily have been subtitled ‘there goes the neighbourhood’. There are therefore two tightly interwoven narrative threads being followed in the novel: the haunted house thread, in which the malevolent effects of the ‘Harralson place’ gradually become horribly apparent, and the thread in which this terrible knowledge slowly causes Colquitt to come to the realisation that she must violate the unspoken codes of her social circle if she is to do anything about the former. This is as much an indictment of suburban narcissism and insularity as it is a tale of the supernatural intruding into the everyday. Walter is an ad executive and Colquitt a part-time PR woman, who works only three days a week and pursues her own (generally house-related) interests the rest of the time. Their only real talent, Colquitt suggests, is a small one for ‘living fairly serenely and well most of the time’. They have chosen to remain childless because they like their lives the way they are. That serenity is violently disrupted by the intrusion of dangerous forces beyond rational understanding, forces which have rendered necessary a course of action that would once have seemed entirely unthinkable. Prior to the construction of the ‘Harralson house’ on the lot next to theirs, they were very much a part of the privileged, upper-middle-class milieu of their pretty suburban neighbourhood. But their decision to try and prevent the house from ever being lived in again by seeking the attention of the outside world will render them outcasts in their own street, for they have ‘believed the unbelievable and spoken the unspeakable’. As Colquitt acknowledges, she and Walter have, to this point, led sheltered lives, lives in which ‘We know we have built a shell for ourselves, but we have worked hard for the means to do it; surely we have the right to do that’.47 Their insulation from all the bad things in the world is violently disrupted from the moment that the Harralson house is ﬁrst built, in an effect analogous to the impact upon the residents of Jackson’s Pepper Street when the news comes that the wall which separates them from the rest of the world is about to be demolished. For Colquitt especially, the ‘idyllic’ wooded lot next door, the last vestige of natural growth left in the entire neighbourhood, had been ‘a buffer, a grace note’, which provided her with the soothing illusion that she was in the midst of the countryside.48 Even before the house next door is erected, therefore, she ﬁnds it invasive, for, ‘no matter how well done, [it] would stare directly into the core of our living’.49 Colquitt’s worst fears come true when the lot is bought by the blustering Matt Gladney as a wedding gift for his daughter ‘Pie’. She and her husband Buddy commission a gifted young architect named

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Kim Dougherty to build them their dream home. Colquitt is initially horriﬁed by news of the development and by the Harralsons themselves, but her opinion begins to soften when she sees the plans: It was magniﬁcent. I do not as a rule care for contemporary architecture, ﬁnding it somehow sharp and intrusive and demanding . . . This house was different. It commanded you, somehow, yet soothed you. It grew out of the pencilled earth like an elemental spirit that had lain, locked and yearning for light, through endless deeps of time, waiting to be released.50 Like Jackson’s Hill House therefore, the Harralson house, even when it exists only in the form of an architect’s sketch, somehow gives the impression of being alive. As Colquitt puts it, in words which cannot but bring to mind the fate of the Rolfe clan in Burnt Offerings, ‘You wouldn’t maintain a house like that, you’d feed and water it. You’d need to give it nourishment and love to keep it alive and healthy.’51 Fascinated by his work, Colquitt and Walter soon strike up a solid, if rather complex relationship with Kim Dougherty, with whom she converses in a manner that is half ﬂirtatious, half maternal. Kim is the adopted scion of a wealthy Boston family eager to get his ﬁrst major project off the ground even if his clients are rather nouveau riche. We are told that upon meeting the young Harralsons, Kim ‘showed her [Pie] some sketches and working drawings from school and told her I’d build her a house that would put Daddy in his grave’ – a rather unfortunate choice of words, as it turns out.52 Sure enough, no sooner have naïve Pie and her husband Buddy moved in than things start to go wrong. First, a mother possum and her babies are mysteriously torn apart: then Pie’s red setter puppy is brutally killed. The mysterious animal deaths are only the ﬁrst hint of disquiet here: Pie falls down the stairs and miscarries, while affable Buddy becomes close friends with a handsome co-worker named Lucas Abbott. It is at the Harralsons’ housewarming, the ﬁrst of many communal gatherings in the novel which go horribly wrong, that Colquitt ﬁrst begins to suspect that something isn’t quite right. Even before these events, however, Kim voices misgivings: ‘there’s something wrong with the house’.53 Siddons excels at dramatising the exact moment when a social gathering suddenly falls apart (and there are many such instances indeed in this novel). As Colquitt puts it in reference to the housewarming which had at ﬁrst seemed to be going so well, ‘Something seemed to creep into the evening just then. Afterwards we could not isolate what it was.

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“It just went sour,” Claire said. “Everything got . . . too much” ’. Though she doesn’t yet know it, for Colquitt, at this moment all the unpleasantness and chaos which she had tried to prevent from seeping into her life with Walter comes rushing over the barricades and starts lapping round her feet. What actually happens is a breach of social etiquette so extreme that in the wrong hands, it would be unintentionally humorous rather than, as here, effectively melodramatic: Buddy and Lucas are caught, in ﬂagrante delecto in the coat room, by horriﬁed Pie and her parents, as well as Buddy’s bosses from the law ﬁrm. As if that weren’t enough to contend with, Matt Gladney drops dead at the sight of his son-inlaw cavorting with another man. Within a couple of paragraphs, the Harralsons have ﬁled for divorce, and the house goes up for sale for the ﬁrst time. The realtor who makes these arrangements sums up the prevailing attitude amongst the neighbourhood: ‘I’m just sorry it had to happen here in front of all of you. But it’s not as though they were us – I mean you all didn’t really know anything about them or their people, did you?’54 Though sympathetic towards Pie, the residents like Walter and Colquitt, are appalled by the unpleasantness they have unwittingly brought into the community, ‘shocked and stunned by the ugliness, the sheer dreadfulness of that ghastly, frozen moment in the Harralsons’ downstairs bedroom’.55 It is only Kim who blames the house. The second part of the narrative focuses on the next pair to move into the house, Buck and Anita Sheehan. They are a middle-aged couple trying to recover from the death of their only son in Vietnam. For Anita, who has just been released from a mental hospital, the move represents the chance to make a fresh start. Though already suffering from compassion fatigue, Walter and Colquitt still adhere to the delicate system of social protocols which are considered important in the neighbourhood, and form a tentative friendship with their new neighbours. At ﬁrst, Anita manages to hold herself together, although her fragile mental state does cause a few awkward moments. When another neighbour comments on this, Colquitt, who had been harbouring feelings of mild resentment towards the unintentionally difﬁcult new couple herself, is quick to jump to Anita’s defence: ‘We’re so insulated and fat and happy over here we’ve forgotten that there’s real pain and trouble in the world’.56 Still, she knows in her own heart that she’d be happier if the Sheehans left: Anita’s grief is simply too raw, and her neediness too acute to bear comfortably, all the more so because Colquitt belongs to a social set which sincerely believes that ‘in distance there is decency.’57 Anita and Buck are walking reminders of the fact that suffering and hardship

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come even to the privileged – a fact that Colquitt and Walter will soon ﬁnd out for themselves. When a delicately cheerful Anita announces that she ‘didn’t know I could love anything inanimate as much as I love my house’ we know that trouble isn’t far off. It’s a suspicion intensiﬁed when we are told that the Sheehan’s housewarming party is imminent. Sure enough, even before the party can take place, Anita sees a vision of her son’s death on the television set – not the last time, as we shall soon see, that the box in the corner becomes a conduit for supernatural activity in the suburban home. While the rest of the community attributes the incident to Anita’s unstable mental state, Colquitt knows different, for another neighbour, the rational, kind-hearted Virginia Guthrie, has seen a glimpse of the same scene on the Sheehan’s TV. Still, Anita is brieﬂy taken away for further psychiatric treatment, and Colquitt, despite her sympathy, is secretly relieved. Typically, it is her rather selfish best friend Claire who voices sentiments she had been experiencing herself: I truly am fond of Buck and Anita, but I’m beginning to feel like we’ve paid our dues with trouble for a while. If it was an old house, I’d almost think it was haunted, but who ever heard of a haunted contemporary less than a year old? Maybe there was an Indian burial ground on the property once, and the natives are restless.58 Claire’s inability to believe that the Harralson house could be haunted because it is so new echoes almost exactly the sentiments expressed by Tom Wallace in Matheson’s Stir of Echoes, while her half-joking invocation of the clichéd old ‘Indian burial ground’ explanation reminds us again of the extent to which the American gothic relies upon this trope. The scene ultimately reinforces Siddons’ originality, for the reason why her house is haunted has nothing to do with burial grounds or stolen land at all. It is the history of the people associated with the house which provides the horror here instead.59 Colquitt truly begins to fear the house when it almost causes a double murder. Soon after Anita’s breakdown, Kim and Colquitt go next door to water the plants and suddenly kiss, but are interrupted by the usually mild-mannered Walter, who almost kills them in a murderous rage. It is only when Kim drags them both out of the house that they are all able to think clearly again. The house seems to derive its effects from the dangerous exaggeration of existing tensions and emotions. As Kim, the ﬁrst one openly to voice his fear of the house, suggests, ‘It’s a greedy house. It takes. You said once, Col, that it would bring out the best in

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whoever lives there. You were wrong. It takes the best.’60 Unfortunately for the Sheehans, Kim’s warnings are not acted upon, and shortly thereafter, their residency in the house comes to a dramatic close, terminated by yet another unsanctioned sexual encounter between Buck Sheehan and the previously ladylike Virginia Guthrie. Even though Colquitt is the only neighbour who knows exactly what happened, she and Walter cannot bring themselves to tell the rest of the street: their code forbids it. It is at this point that a wedge develops between the Kennedys and their friends. Though she does her best to warn Claire about the danger posed by the house, without being able to cite the speciﬁc reasons why she believes this to be the case, Colquitt cannot convince her. Claire simply cannot and will not believe her when she says that the house is haunted, for it threatens the very foundations of all that she believes in: Don’t you see that I can believe in anything but that? Anything – bad luck, ﬂaky neighbours, magnetic ﬁelds, noxious vapours, what ever god awful accident of natural laws and physical phenomenon that might explain some of that stuff over there . . . But not that there is a malign intelligence working in a house that’s less than a year old, on this street, in this neighbourhood. Colquitt, if I believed that then I could not function in this world anymore.61 And so, an irreparable rift develops between them, and only deepens when Claire strikes up a strong friendship with the downtrodden female half of the next unfortunate pair to move into the house next door. This section of the book is the one in which the snobbishness and insularity of the neighbourhood in which the story is set – and indeed of Colquitt herself – becomes most obvious. As with the Harralsons at the beginning of the novel, it soon becomes clear that newcomers Norman and Susan Greene will simply never quite ﬁt in. For a start, they ﬁll the house with overly ostentatious furniture, a sure sign to Colquitt and the others, who can detect the nuance of social rank in a millisecond, that the Greenes are certainly not ‘one of us’. As one commentator has noted, ‘this awareness of the unwritten rules of afﬂuence may be the Kennedys’ most important possession. They prefer the Mercedes to the Cadillac, and as a result they possess a genuine, if intangible social status in their community’.62 Norman Greene is an arrogant, unpleasant man, obsessed with climbing the social ladder, who mercilessly bullies his downtrodden wife. As Linda Holland-Toll has noted, there is a deﬁnite whiff of covert

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anti-Semitism here: Norman’s lack of social graces and overbearing ways are at least partially explained in the book by the fact that he is Jewish, and longs to pass as a WASP. As she goes on to argue: ‘his unpleasantness does not cancel out either Claire’s or Colquitt’s covert anti-Semitism. He may, after all, be the world’s most abusive husband and father without his Jewishness having anything to do with it. Claire’s commentary, implying as it does that he would be different if his name were Lodge, reeks of both class and race biases which cast a new light on this supposedly pleasant community’.63 Inevitably, their ﬁrst party in the house goes wrong when the lights suddenly go out, and Norman takes it all out on his wife. At this point, Walter and Colquitt decide that they cannot stand by and watch as more lives are destroyed. Walter goes next door and does his best to explain their concerns. Norman takes the news that his lovely new home is haunted as a threat rather than a neighbourly warning, and the social exclusion of the Kennedys begins, courtesy of Claire’s gossip-mongering. It is only when she sees evidence of the house’s malign power for herself that she changes her tune. Her eldest son, bound for the Ivy Leagues, impregnates his girlfriend while they are babysitting for the Greenes, and drops out of school. Claire blames the house and accepts Colquitt’s story, but will not back her up in public for fear of social ruin. In a novel in which markers of class and taste are seen as vitally important, we know how terriﬁed Claire is because she forces her family to move to a gaudy condo in a decidedly unclassy part of town. The reader rightly suspects at this stage that any social gathering in the house next door will end in disaster. Sure enough, Norman throws a lavish party for his neighbours and colleagues. The trouble is, the invitations never go out, even though Susan swears that she has posted them, and so turnout is low. Norman is already in a vicious mood when the Greenes’ little girl totters downstairs and helplessly defecates all over the kitchen ﬂoor. During the bitter argument which ensues it transpires that the child isn’t his at all. Susan became pregnant out of wedlock by another man, and that Norman married her for her money and social standing. After the guests leave, Susan fatally shoots Norman, the child and herself. It is at this juncture that Colquitt and Walter resolve to make a stand. They cannot allow anyone else to move into the house next door. Typically, Claire refuses to help, fearing that she will be somehow tainted by association. It is an unﬂattering portrait of suburban insularity taken to callously self-serving extremes. The most interesting section of the novel then plays itself out, as Walter and Colquitt ﬁnd themselves ostracised from the neighbourhood that once meant so

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much to them. Their decision to go public and to bring the media (the lowbrow media, at that) into the neighbourhood means social death. To their former friends, the violation of the unspoken social codes by which people like them live is even more disturbing than the obvious malevolence of the Harralson house. It doesn’t help matters that the article in People prompts legions of slack-jawed ‘have-nots’ to come and gawp at the neighbourhood. As the ever-snobbish Colquitt notes, ‘The women wore polyester pants or shifts, and some had fat plastic curlers in their hair’. What’s more, the ‘sly, faded people’ who traipse round the neighbourhood in a steady stream for weeks evince what she describes as a ‘primal, hunting joy’ at the prospect of viewing a genuinely haunted house, and in trespassing into a neighbourhood in which they do not belong. The ﬁnal reckoning comes with the news that Kim and his new bride have bought the house. Kim has changed his mind dramatically about his creation, and is enraged by the Kennedys’ decision to go to the media: ‘There is nothing wrong with that house! You are both crazy, and there is nothing wrong with my house!’64 It is only during their ﬁnal, fraught conversation with Kim, during which they hear for the ﬁrst time about the ill-fated projects he had undertaken prior to building the Harralson house, that it becomes horribly apparent that the real problem lies not so much with the building as with its architect. As Colquitt frantically explains to Walter: ‘It’s not just in the house,’ I said. ‘It’s in him ﬁrst. In Kim. That’s where it starts. It was born in him. He’s a carrier, some type of terrible carrier, and he doesn’t even know it. It will be in everything he ever builds for as long as he lives and he’ll never know it.’65 Their solution is brutal but practical. They kill Kim, carry his body down to the basement next door and decide to set the ﬁre to the place. The main body of the narrative ends as Walter and Colquitt sit quietly on their front porch, bravely awaiting their fate, aware that the house next door will never let them live. The impact of the conclusion is diluted somewhat by an unnecessary epilogue which suggests that yet another naïve young couple have fallen in love with Kim’s plans, and that the evil has not yet been contained. The haunting which takes place in Siddons’ novel is thus dealt with in an entirely secular manner. No priests, mediums, or psychic researchers ever cross the threshold and no burial grounds lie beneath its elegant ﬂoors. There are no ghosts, as such (save perhaps for poor Anita’s son), only the suspicion that a

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talented young man has unwittingly managed to poison his own creation, and built a house that somehow manages to bring out the very worst in all who live there. Of course, that is if we take the entire story on face value, and believe that Colquitt is telling us the truth the whole way through. For, just as many of the events attributed to supernatural activity in The Amityville Horror could easily be interpreted as mere coincidence so too should the reader of Siddons’ novel consider what they’ve been told about the house next door carefully, at least for a moment. As Linda Holland-Toll put it, ‘Is this a house in which a series of unfortunate but natural events have taken place, or is Colquitt responsible? She narrates the whole tale, after all, starting at almost the end and recounting everything . . . . Can we trust Colquitt, or can we not?’ If she is reliable, this is ‘a heroic but understated account of attempts to save her community. If not, it is the tale of a spoiled and self-centred neurotic, perhaps the victim of an obsession, who brings her ostracisation on herself, and ruins her life and her husband’s life for no good reason’.66 Whatever the reader might decide, for Siddons herself, Colquitt and Walter’s actions are uncomplicatedly heroic: ‘I knew that Colquitt and Walter Kennedy, whom I really liked very much indeed, would be destroyed by the house they in turn destroyed at the end of the book, but to me there was a very real gallantry in the fact that they knew this themselves, and went ahead anyway’.67 Certainly, while the reader may not ﬁnd Siddons’ protagonists quite as likeable as the author does, they are somewhat redeemed by their willingness to forsake the social standing and the material status that had once meant so much to them in order to face the house next door head on. Walter and Colquitt have built for themselves the perfect suburban paradise, a place of friendly and carefully regulated social transactions, of neatly mown lawns and two cars in every driveway. After the Harralson house is built, however, the narrative is ‘virtually a catalogue of topics our mothers taught us not to talk about at the dinner table’.68 In this respect, events taking place in Colquitt’s neighbourhood only mirror those unfolding in the rest of the nation. In the 1970s, there was both a sense that family life was falling apart, and ‘a new openness about formerly taboo topics, from homosexuality to abortion to incest – that could now be openly discussed. Family violence was “discovered”: child abuse and battering became important topics for research as well as signiﬁcant public issues’.69 The house next door ultimately acts as a catalyst which brings all of these kinds of issues rushing to the surface, a palpable reminder of the fact that, while humans may seek beauty and

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order in their surroundings as in their lives, chaos and ugliness seldom lie far from the surface.

‘They’re here!’ Poltergeist, Monster House and the contemporary suburban haunting If the upwardly mobile Lutzes and the self-centred Kennedys are an apt reﬂection of the narcissistic 1970s, then the Freeling family in Tobe Hooper’s 1982 ﬁlm Poltergeist epitomise the family-centred, conservative 1980s. The Freelings are the perfect Reaganite family: father Steven is a successful real-estate salesman, wife and mother Diane stays at home to mind the kids, and they have three bright, cute children. They even have the quintessential family dog: a golden retriever. As Arlene Skolnick has noted, President Reagan came to power promising to reinvent the American family of the 1950s, with its breadwinner/housewife family structure, stable economy, and Cold War consensus. Though the parents here may occasionally get a little stoned and say ‘shit’ from time to time, the family we see at the beginning of this movie could have stepped straight from a Republican Party recruiting poster, as could their beautifully situated, idyllic looking suburban neighbourhood, Cuesta Verde (Green Hill).70 But as Skolnick goes on to note of Reagan’s manifesto, and of the desire to recreate the 1950s, ‘the attempt to resuscitate that strange decade was doomed to fail’ (p.183). Similarly, while the Freelings may seem to have it all, beneath their very feet dark forces are waiting to strike. Their dream home is built upon a cemetery. As one critic has put it, ‘Poltergeist has all the ingredients: a nice family, a possessed child, and, most important, the ever-menacing danger of unholy spirits and the “beast” lurking just beyond the reality of the bucolic suburbia of Cuesta Verde’.71 Though considered a rather lightweight entry in the horror stakes by many critics (Kim Newman has described it as ‘little more than a made-for-TV haunted house story with an added light show’), in many respects Poltergeist is far more interesting than it ﬁrst seems.72 Cuesta Verde is clearly a place where people come to live the good life, a fact reinforced by the consistent use of gentle, chime-laden music during the opening part of the movie. It is a sunny, idyllic-looking suburb set amidst the mountains of southern California (the state which Reagan governed before becoming President, of course), ﬁlled with neat and well-maintained homes, and hordes of happy kids running safely up and down the streets, so stereotypically Spielbergian that one half expects to see E.T. or the Goonies ambling across the lawn at any moment.73 The

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advertisement which informs us that the new phase of the development is about to begin also reminds us that the homes here are of recent vintage. In fact, the Freelings live in a former show home, and Steve, a realtor, has sold more homes here than anyone else. Like Siddons’ Walter Kennedy (who works in advertising) and his wife Colquitt (a PR woman), both of whom ‘facilitate the culture of consumption they are devoted to’, Steve’s job is to sell the suburban dream to others.74 The ﬁrst crack in this idyll comes when the Freelings’ young daughter Carole Anne’s canary dies (this may be a tongue-in-cheek reference to the old ‘canary in the coal mine’ axiom). Diane is crestfallen for it means that she may have to confront her youngest child with the reality of death. She’s about to ﬂush the little corpse down the toilet (postponing the inevitable for the time being, but also showing us that she lacks respect for the dead) when Carole Anne walks in. A hasty funeral is arranged in the back garden, in which the rituals of burial are closely observed: the bird is carefully laid out in a cigar box, and provided with a photograph of the family to ‘keep him company’. But Tweety, like the other corpses beneath their feet, won’t stay buried for long. In the scenes which follow, we begin to get some sense of who the Freelings are as people. Although their eldest daughter is 16, we are told later in the ﬁlm that Diane (JoBeth Williams) is only 32 – according to this arithmetic she was a teenage mother, although this is never referred to. Indeed, eldest daughter Dana (Dominique Dunne) barely seems like part of the family at all: she’s always on the phone, or out with her friends, and the two younger children get much more screen time. Steve (Craig T. Nelson) is at least a decade older than his wife. Theirs is nevertheless a very ‘traditional’ family set up despite their pot-smoking pretence at anti-authoritarianism and cringe-inspiring use of words like ‘dude’. Steve is even seen reading Reagan: The Man, The President. That night, Carole Anne (Heather O’Rourke) is drawn to the TV, but a clearly vicious electric hand strikes out at the sleeping family, and a minor earth tremor follows. This is the point at which things start to wrong for the Freelings: as Carole Anne says, in the ﬁlm’s most famous line, ‘They’re heee-re!’ In the next scene we see Tweety’s cofﬁn being unearthed by the bulldozer which is clearing ground for a new swimming pool. Clearly, in Cuesta Verde the dead do not rest in peace for very long. Though Carole Anne prattles on about the ‘TV people’, her parents ignore her. It is ﬁtting that the spirits seeking revenge in Poltergeist should strike out at a suburban family though the television set. In the words of Carole J. Clover, ‘in Poltergeist, the “fatal television” story enters the mainstream.’75 Television and suburbia have been closely

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connected with one another since the early days of both, rendering the means by which Carole Anne is abducted oddly appropriate. After all, television and the suburbs both developed during the post-war era, and some critics have persuasively suggested that ‘cultural shift in the importance given public life versus privacy, community versus family’ caused by mass migration to the suburbs was reﬂected in, and enhanced by, the growing popularity of the television set.76 In addition, ‘on television . . . all the “normal” families moved to the suburbs in the 1950s.’77 There were those who feared that television’s growing importance within the American family home would be harmful, and particular opprobrium was reserved for parents for whom the television served as a convenient ‘babysitter’ for their children.78 Indeed, ‘Study after study from the late 1950s through the 1970s constructed a discourse that distinguished between the negligent lower-status parent who did not monitor TV use and the responsible higher-class parent who did’. However, the logic underlying the negative valuation of television viewing was based upon questionable assumptions ‘common to all the literature on children and television, scholarly and popular, past and present . . . . Television . . . was constructed as an ever present menace that might ensnare any child and that parents must guard against, regardless of the child’s personality. In this context, discussion of parental control of this “beast” was all the more loaded with signiﬁcance’ (my italics).79 While the ‘beast’ in Poltergeist may even be Satan himself, the fact remains that here too television is seen as a seductive and harmful presence, leading youngsters astray and even threatening the sanctity of the family itself. The televisions (there are at least three) in the Freeling household seem permanently to be switched on, whether programming for the day has ended or not. Later, communication with Carole Anne will only be possible via this conduit to the other side. It is when mother and youngest child are left alone that the ﬁrst, unmistakable sign of poltergeist activity manifests itself: the chairs stack themselves on the kitchen table. Diane is initially charmed by this sudden intrusion of supernatural activity into the domestic sphere. As Clover has noted, the poltergeist activity in the ﬁlm is presented in distinctly gendered terms. It is a little girl’s receptiveness to otherworldly forces which drives the narrative: it is also Diane who ﬁrst believes Carole Anne’s story about the ‘TV people’ and ﬁgures out that it must be connected to the strange events unfolding in her kitchen: ‘Indeed, Diane immediately sets about domesticating the supernatural occurrences: “It’s just another side of nature”, she says to her husband Steve, that evening, as she demonstrates its workings to him. And of

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course, the parapsychologist, Dr Lesh, and the medium are middleaged women’.80 Signiﬁcantly, the manifestation, which initially seems so benign and endearing, only becomes sinister after Steve arrives on the scene. He has been at work trying to sell a house to a couple who voice the usual reservations about the suburban lifestyle (‘Honey, I can’t tell any house from the other’); when he returns home, he seems more concerned than enchanted. As is so often evident in the haunted suburb, fear of ridicule prevents the Freelings from fully explaining the situation to their neighbours. Steve announces: ‘We’re gonna keep this thing in the family. In the morning I’ll call somebody.’ That night however, Carole Anne is pulled into another dimension via a possessed closet. From then on, she exists only as a disembodied voice emanating from the television. As several critics have since pointed out, the premise resembles that of Richard Matheson’s Twilight Zone episode ‘Little Girl Lost’ (aired in 1962). Poltergeist 2 (in which the action is largely relocated to the Arizona desert) borrows from another Twilight Zone episode, ‘Long Distance Call’, written by Charles Beaumont and William Ideson. This aside, the most interesting thing about the sequel is the fact that the Freeling family are now bankrupt because their insurance company won’t compensate them for the outright disappearance of the family home at the climax of the ﬁrst ﬁlm.81 The Freelings report the disappearance of their child not to the police, nor the local clergyman, but to the parapsychology department of the local university. These investigators, led by Dr Lesh, are similar to Shirley Jackson’s Dr Montague, who roams about Hill House hoping scientiﬁcally to prove the existence of ghosts. Self-consciously competent and laden with equipment, the three investigators are completely unprepared for what they ﬁnd in this unremarkable-looking suburban home. Mysterious objects – dirt-encrusted watches, jewellery, cuff links – fall out of nowhere (they belong to the inhabitants of the graveyard beneath the house); a maggot-infested steak crawls across a kitchen counter; and, in the ﬁlm’s most gruesome scene, a technician has a hallucination in which he believes that he is tearing off his own face. There are in fact hundreds of spirits in the Freeling house, some benevolent (like the spirits that moved the chairs), some jealous and evil, in particular their ringleader, ‘The Beast’ – whether he’s actually Satan or just a very powerful spirit is never explained. However, the sequel identiﬁes ‘The Beast’ as an evil cult leader who holed up his followers in a cave on the site thus completely contradicting the ﬁrst ﬁlm. It is only when Steve’s boss, Teague, visits to ﬁnd out why his star employee (‘The best Rep we’ve ever had!’) has been missing work that we

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get the ﬁrst hint as to why the Freeling house has been targeted. As the two men stand on a hilltop overlooking the suburb Teague explains that Cuesta Verde was once the site of a rural cemetery supposedly relocated once construction began. Thus, as Michaels has noted, the movie essentially ‘centres on what is in effect a title dispute between a real estate development company and the corpses who inhabit the bulldozed cemetery the developers build on’.82 As we have seen in earlier chapters, suburban developers during the 1950s and 1960s were often accused of allowing their construction sites to spread relentlessly over the countryside, ruthlessly bulldozing the past in order to build a rash of affordable, identikit homes; Adam Rome’s study of suburbia and the rise of the environmental movement is even called The Bulldozer in the Countryside.83 In Poltergeist, however, as in ‘Free Dirt’, this contempt both for the past and for the dead will not simply be forgotten. Teague has placed money above respect for the dead and he will pay the price, as will Steve, who has done so much to unwittingly perpetuate this injustice. With the arrival of diminutive medium Tangina (Zelda Rubinstein), of whom it is said, ‘She’s cleaned many houses’ (again effectively domesticating the supernatural), scientiﬁc investigations are replaced by vague New Age spiritual pronouncements such as ‘There is no death. There is only a transition to a different sphere of consciousness’, and ‘This house has many hearts.’ We’re even asked to feel sorry for the spirits haunting the Freeling home, who are repeatedly characterised as children, innocents led by ‘The Beast’ who has entrapped Carole Anne. In this sense ‘The Beast’ functions as a kind of supernatural paedophile who wants to lure children into his otherworldly lair, a suspicion that is reinforced by the fact that while middle child Robbie is attacked (ﬁrst by a tree, and later by an evil clown doll), older daughter Dana, who is posited as sexually active, remains completely unmolested by the supernatural forces. One can’t help but wonder if, at 16, she’s simply too old to interest them. Tangina makes it clear that only family togetherness can defeat the dark forces threatening the family, and so it makes sense, then, that Carole Anne should be rescued from the great beyond by her mother, as Steve holds on to them both with a rope; it is also he who wakes them both up when they emerge from the supernatural maw covered in pink goo in a scene which is ‘a virtual swamp of reproductive themes and images’.84 It isn’t over yet, though, despite Tangina’s assurances. Carole Anne has been restored to her family (making this a kind of supernatural variation on the Puritan captivity narrative), but the dead have not yet been appeased. Once their helpers from the wider world disappear, and the Freelings begin to pack for an understandable move to another

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neighbourhood, things take a turn for the worse. The children’s room again becomes a portal to hell; Diane is thrown about the ceiling;85 (Dana and Steve are both absent), and rotting corpses – many still in their cofﬁns – start popping up all over the place. It becomes abundantly clear that the house is built on a mass grave. In Vampires, Burial and Death, Paul Barber suggests that it is actually more difﬁcult to keep a body safely underground than one might think, and notes that ‘in New Orleans, when the ground water is high, heavy rains or a storm would cast newly buried, half decomposed cadavers to the light’.86 While the cofﬁns in Poltergeist surface for supernatural rather than practical reasons, it is worth noting that the climax takes place in heavy rain, and that the swimming pool becomes a muddy charnel pit ﬁlled with grinning corpses. It has also been suggested that ‘the ghostly ﬁgures who invade the Freeling home look very much like Indians’,87 and while this may be stretching it a bit, the fact that Poltergeist is in many respects a suburbanised update of the hoary old Indian burial ground trope does make sense.88 After crying ‘God help me!’ Steve pulls his wife and youngest children out of danger. As in The Amityville Horror, neighbours here are completely useless: they refuse to help rescue the children at all, and seem more interested in themselves than in the situation faced by the Freelings. When Teague arrives in time to see the house crumple up like a used Coke can and vanish, Steve screams in his face ‘You only moved the headstones! Why? Why?’, although the answer is pretty obvious: to save time and money. The family piles into the station wagon, stopping on the way to pick up Dana (who had been absent from the house at the time of its destruction), and speed to safety as the street erupts into chaos, with windows blowing out and manholes exploding in a scene replicated in other suburban-set ﬁlms such as The ’Burbs (1989), Terror Tract (2000) and the beginning of the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead. The ﬁnal shots of the movie show the family entering a motel room, only for Steve to re-emerge a few moments later and unceremoniously push the television set outside. One suspects that the Freeling family will be playing a lot more board games in future. As we have seen, Poltergeist is by no means the only narrative in which the suburban home is an unsanctioned burial ground. The DeFeo house is allegedly built on the site of both an enclosure for dying Indians and the last resting place of an infamous warlock. In Stir of Echoes, we ﬁnd out at the end of the novel that a murdered woman has been buried in the main character’s basement, and that it is she who has been haunting him. In the uneven black comedy The ’Burbs, a neighbourhood

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much like that seen in Poltergeist is populated by xenophobic oddballs who consider themselves ‘All American’, and who begin to suspect that their foreign new neighbours, the Klopeks, are up to no good. Led by burnt-out everyman Ray Petersen (Tom Hanks), the self-appointed neighbourhood watchmen place the Klopeks under surveillance. For much of the ﬁlm, it seems as though this is a comic if interesting take on suburban xenophobia run amok. Indeed, towards the end of the ﬁlm, after Ray and his pals have accidentally blown up the Klopek place during their investigations, he screams ‘We’re the lunatics! Us! It’s not them!’ However, the insularity he and his cohorts have displayed is vindicated a few moments later when it transpires that indeed the Klopeks really are a family of serial killing-ghouls. The persecution of those who look different, speak with an accent, and happen to live in a rather ramshackle house has been more than justiﬁed after all. It leads one to wonder how much more daring this ﬁlm would have been if the real source of horror here had come from within rather than from outsiders who plainly do not belong from the outset. More recently, in the animated movie Monster House (2006), another atypical and obviously ‘gothic’-looking house, this time inhabited by a crazy-seeming old man, Mr Nebercracker, disrupts a child-centred suburban idyll. The ‘Monster House’ is alive, and when trespassers get close, it swallows them whole (thereby vividly dramatising the tropes of consumption that so often surface in American haunted-house narratives). A trio of pre-adolescents must team up in order to defeat this enemy in their midst. It turns out that Mr Nebercracker was once married to a giantess, Constance, who dropped dead and fell into the still-wet cement in the foundations of the house many years previously. Taunted mercilessly during her tenure as the fat lady of a local circus, and again mocked by youngsters just before her death, Constance’s still-angry spirit has taken up residence within her half-ﬁnished home, giving a whole new meaning to the term ‘housewife’. As her long-suffering husband puts it, ‘She died but she didn’t leave!’ Towards the end of Poltergeist, Robbie Freeling looks out the back window of the family station wagon, and cries, ‘The house is coming!’, but whereas the Freeling house collapses in on itself, the Nebercracker house actually does pursue its victims. The house pulls itself out of the foundations, and runs around the neighbourhood on a wrecking spree, before being blown up by the dynamite-wielding youngsters. Alice Sebold’s bestselling 2002 novel The Lovely Bones features another suburban home which serves as a repository for the remains of the unquiet dead. Child murderer Mr Harvey’s house has a crawlspace ﬁlled with animal

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bones: each set of remains was a substitute for a child he longed to kill. In recent years the suburban haunting has tended to take the form of a compassionate, all-seeing voice from beyond the grave rather than the more traditional type of apparition. The ﬁrst harbinger of this trend came in American Beauty (1999). At the beginning of the narrative unhappily married corporate man Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) isn’t actually dead yet. But as his rueful voiceover tells us, he doesn’t have have long to live: ‘This is my neighbourhood, this is my street, this is my life. I’m 42 years old. In less than a year I’ll be dead. Of course, I don’t know that yet. In a way I’m dead already.’ Sure enough, after experiencing an epiphany-laden midlife crisis Lester meets his maker. The fact that we have known that he will die from the outset, thanks to the Sunset Boulevard-style narration, lends his otherwise fairly standard suburban misadventures a weight that they may not otherwise have had. In a sense, the viewer is haunted by the ghost of a man who is not yet dead. Someone who is unmistakably dead from the outset of a narrative is Mary Alice Young (Brenda Strong), the otherworldly narrator of the successful television drama series Desperate Housewives (2004– present), whose mysterious suicide opens the ﬁrst episode. The sonorous voiceover which accompanies every episode allows the show’s writers to take a bird’s-eye view of Wisteria Lane. Just as the characters in the show are unable to rest easy until they’ve ﬁgured out why their friend would suddenly take her own life, so too is the viewer constantly reminded by the voiceover and occasionally illuminating pronouncements that all is not as it seems. Another otherworldly narrator is Susie Salmon, heroine of The Lovely Bones. Following her brutal death at the hands of psychotic next-door neighbour Mr Harvey (he of the bone-ﬁlled crawlspace), Susie ascends to her own personalised heaven. Helpless at ﬁrst to do anything but impotently watch those she cares about try and come to terms with her terrible fate (her body is never found, although both Susie and the reader know where it is hidden), she becomes a kind of ghost that no one but the reader knows even exists, never very far either from her loved ones or from the man who cut her life so devastatingly short. As in Desperate Housewives and American Beauty, the novel’s employment of a disembodied, ghostly narrator becomes the means by which we experience an expansive, access-all-areas view of the suburban neighbourhood and the families and individuals contained within. Along with The House Next Door, these more recent excursions into haunted suburbia demonstrate that a house does not necessarily need to be built on a burial ground for otherworldly forces to emerge.

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Aside from the overblown climax of the straight-to-DVD horror anthology Terror Tract (2000), which features one predictable ghost story, the suburban haunted house has become a genuine rarity in recent ﬁlm and ﬁction, perhaps because supernatural horror in general has been supplanted by the gore-laden psychological thriller. It may also be that Poltergeist’s ﬁnale, in which grinning corpses pop out of the very woodwork like jack-in-the-boxes ﬁnally made the trope of the oldfashioned burial ground so much of a cliché that it could no longer be essayed unless, as in The ’Burbs, one were playing for laughs. As we shall see in Chapter 5, one is much more likely to meet a serial killer or psychotic mass murderer in suburban-set horror ﬁlms of the later 1980s and 1990s than encounter a house that is haunted in the traditional sense. It is an extension of a process that has been taking place in American horror since the 1950s and 1960s, and which is perhaps most strikingly illustrated in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, a process in which the kinds of familial and psychological conﬂicts which would once have been dramatised within the setting of a haunted house are now transferred to the inhabitants themselves. The Bates residence may look like a traditional haunted house from the outside, but there are no ghosts here: the real threat comes from the nice young man at the reception desk. Similarly, while Michael Myers may lurk in an abandoned suburban home in Halloween, he’s no ghost, but something much worse. This may explain why suburban hauntings in recent years have been vague and tangential rather than overblown and obvious, as in the era of The Amityville Horror and Poltergeist: Americans have become more afraid of the people next door – or in the next room – than the dead that lie beneath their feet.

5 Don’t Go Down to the Basement! Serial Murder, Family Values and the Suburban Horror Film1

The American horror ﬁlm since 1960 has consistently used suburbia as a setting for narratives in which the concepts that allegedly lie at the very heart of the national psyche – the privacy and safety of the home, the sanctity and inherent moral worth of the nuclear family, and the superiority of the capitalist, consumption-driven way of life – are systematically (and at times) gleefully deconstructed. The threat in these ﬁlms almost always comes not from without, but from within. As we shall see, suburbanites in American popular culture are seldom menaced by a terrible ‘other’ of alien origin: instead, they tend to be violently dispatched by one of their own, often a murderous family member. The notion that the family itself can be a powerful locus of horror, ﬁrst expressed in classic early American gothic tales such as Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798) – signiﬁcantly subtitled ‘An American Tale’ – was maintained in the work of mid-twentieth-century authors such as William Faulkner, Shirley Jackson, Flannery O’Connor and Richard Matheson, and found further expression in ﬁlms such as Psycho (1960), The Night of the Living Dead (1968) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). However, this trend reaches its apotheosis in the form of an intriguing series of horror ﬁlms which have appeared over the past 40 years or so, in which the apparently mundane suburban locale repeatedly becomes the spawning ground for a very human kind of evil. In these ﬁlms, the fraught relationship between parents and children becomes a frequent starting point for narratives in which the notion of familial ‘togetherness’ comes to take on a much darker perspective than originally intended. I will begin by discussing three ﬁlms in which the all-American boy next door becomes a ﬁgure of fear: Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), 136

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Peter Bogdanovich’s 1968 Targets, and John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), the ﬁlm which almost single-handedly spawned the muchmaligned slasher sub-genre. Next, I will discuss the career of Wes Craven, perhaps the most popular American horror director of the past three decades, whose oeuvre has from the very beginning more often than not dealt with characters and with preoccupations of a suburban nature. Finally, in the third section of this chapter, I will discuss the ﬁlms The Stepfather (1987) Parents (1989), and Serial Mom (1994), in which the suburban family unit itself becomes a murderous, deeply repressive, and at times even a cannibalistic entity.

The bogeyman next door: Psycho, Targets, and Halloween When a middle-aged bachelor named Ed Gein was arrested for the kidnap and murder of a shopkeeper named Bernice Worden in Plainﬁeld, Wisconsin, in November 1957, few could have anticipated that he would prove to be responsible for some of the most ghoulish crimes of the decade and that his legacy would inspire some of the most famous horror ﬁlms of the next half century – including The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Silence of the Lambs (1991). The most famous ﬁlm version of Gein’s exploits was, of course, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, one of the most inﬂuential horror movies of all time, as well as the ﬁrst ﬁlm to be discussed here in which something very nasty lurks in the basement of a family home. Psycho was based upon the 1959 pot-boiler of the same name by Robert Bloch, a contemporary of Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont, who claimed to have realised ‘as a result of what went on during World War Two and of reading the more widely disseminated works in psychology, that the real horror is not in the shadows but in the twisted little world inside our own skulls’.2 In Bloch’s writing, then, the ‘dark corners of the human mind generally supplant the supernatural’.3 Norman Bates was by no means a one-off: Bloch had been writing about deranged killers in novels such as The Scarf (1947) for almost a decade before the ﬁlm version of Psycho brought him widespread (and lasting) prominence. At ﬁrst, it may not seem as if the ﬁlm version of Psycho has much to do with suburbia. After all, the ﬁlm’s ﬁrst 30 minutes or so are set in a city (Phoenix, Arizona), while most of the remainder of the ﬁlm takes place in and around the Bates Motel, a run-down rest-stop around 15 miles from Fairview, California, the nearest town (it is worth noting here that Desperate Housewives is also set in a ﬁctional town named ‘Fairview’ and that the iconic Bates house overlooks the set in which the show is shot).

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And yet, as Kendall R. Phillips has observed ‘Psycho can be read as a critique of the veil of normalcy drawn around American suburban culture. In particular, Psycho resonates with many of the prominent characteristics in suburbia and suggests a deep anxiety underlying America’s apparent conﬁdence and progress’.4 As Phillips states, suburban culture deﬁned itself through conspicuous consumption. The suburban home was founded on its separation from the world of work and from the world of others, and the massive growth in car ownership reﬂected both the drive to elevate one’s status through material possessions as well as the way in which the growth of the highway system and parallel development of suburban settlements was rapidly changing American culture and society. The motel culture of the United States could also be likened to suburbia in that like the typical suburban home, the motel offered uniform dwelling spaces kitted out with standardised furnishings and ﬁttings ready for people to move in to (albeit on a temporary basis). The ﬁlm’s ﬁrst half, in which thirty-something secretary Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) impulsively steals $40,000 dollars from her employer in a desperate attempt to buy into the suburban dream of house, husband and family draws audiences into Marion’s story, to make them sympathise with her crimes and desires, so that this sympathy can be brutally and shockingly exploited in the infamous shower scene.5 As an employee in a busy real estate ofﬁce, Marion presumably helps make the dream of suburban settlement come true for others, but, until she steals the money, she is unable to do anything to help further her own dearly held ambitions. Her boyfriend Sam Loomis is saddled both with alimony payments and debts incurred by his late father, and is therefore unwilling to marry her, despite her protestations that money isn’t everything. When sleazy old oilman Mr Cassidy (who is reminiscent of doting father Matt Gladney in The House Next Door) comes into the ofﬁce with a bundle of cash so that he can buy his 19-year-old, newly-wed daughter a house, Marion unwisely seizes the chance fate presents her, ironically throwing a lifetime of honesty to the wind so that Sam may at last make a ‘respectable’ woman out of her. Marion ﬂees down the highway and towards her rendezvous with death. It is when she reaches the Bates Motel that Philips has rightly noted further striking similarities with the suburban way of life. As he writes, ‘In important ways, Norman Bates is a clear example of the emptiness of prosperity. Norman has achieved the kind of isolated, protected life commended by the suburban vision, and he is a clear example of the post-suburban man. His work is empty and meaningless, his life

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is conﬁned to his private property, and he spends his time pursuing leisure’.6 The Bates Motel may not be a suburban tract home, but its corrosively isolated position is a direct result of suburban expansion: as Norman sadly tells Marion when she checks in, ‘They moved away the highway’. The strange sense of kinship evident between the two of them during the long sequence in which Norman sits with his guest as she eats her supper may also have much to do with the fact that they are both outsiders in the deeply conformist and domestically orientated atmosphere of their time. Norman, is, after all, an underemployed young man in his twenties who still lives in the family home and clings unhealthily to his (deceased) mother, while Marion is an unmarried working woman in her mid-thirties, supposedly the age at which she should be well settled into married life and motherhood. Each of them must share a home with a family member: Norman with Mother, and Marion with her sister Lila, who also seems to have a career of her own. They are both deeply unhappy about their situations in life, in their own ‘private traps’ as Norman says. The crucial difference between them, of course, is that Norman’s circumstances have driven him completely insane, and that Marion will pay the terrible price once she steps into the shower. As David J. Skal puts it, ‘Her murder . . . became a powerful image of the collapse of basic social contracts and human relatedness: like us Marion Crane wants advancement, security. She makes a mistake, but plays by the rules and seeks forgiveness/acceptance, only to have her cleansing transformation turned into a bloody sacriﬁce. There is no God, it seems – at least not a just one. The disturbing scene became one of the most inﬂuential images in ﬁlm history with good reason: it undermined all expectations and formulas’.7 Another outwardly polite, clean-cut young man in his twenties commits shocking and bloody crimes in Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets, which, like Psycho, is again loosely based upon a real life case, in this instance that of Charles Whitman, who shot dead 14 people and wounded 31 others during a shooting spree at the University of Texas in 1966. The ﬁlm sets Byron Orlock, an ageing and washed-up horror movie star (Boris Karloff) against Bobby Thompson (Tim Kelly), a young, blonde, apparently well-adjusted young man whose very name oozes wholesome American family values. Like other ﬁctional spree killers such as Kevin Khatchadourian in Lionel Shriver’s 2002 novel We Need to Talk About Kevin, or real-life mass murderers such as Columbine shooters Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, Bobby hails from a perfectly ‘normal’ suburban neighbourhood.

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‘The world belongs to the young – make way for them, let them have it!’ a disillusioned Orlock cries after seeing the rushes for his latest movie, recognising that he is representative of a decidedly old-fashioned brand of terror that has no real place in the present. He may be known by his fans as the ‘King of Blood’ and ‘Mr Boogeyman’, but Orlock knows that his day is done, for as he says, ‘My kind of horror isn’t horror anymore’. He is replaced by troubled young men like Bobby, who we ﬁrst see cheerfully choosing his weapons of choice in a Los Angeles gun store. The fact that he and Orlock are on a collision course from the very start is established by the fact that Orlock is one of the passers-by Bobby places in the sights of his riﬂe before deciding to buy it. As with Norman Bates, his dangerous immaturity is indicated both by the fact that he still lives in the claustrophobic and conﬁning family home and that he eats lots of candy. He even brings a Coke and a sandwich to the tower from which he begins to snipe at cars passing on the highway below. Bobby may be married and have a job (in insurance), but it is obvious that he is still very much a child in many respects. Bobby and his young wife Eileen, who works nights as a telephonist, live with his Mom and Dad in a hideously lurid suburban house in which grace is said before every meal and the television always seems to be blaring in the background. Bobby calls his overbearing father ‘Sir’, and the two of them ominously bond over a spot of target-shooting in the wilderness. Bobby is a crack shot, perhaps because he has been in the military (as a brieﬂy glimpsed photograph of in him in fatigues would seem to suggest) and the ﬁrst real indication of what might motivate his killing spree comes in the chilling moment when he puts his unwary father in his sights, albeit without actually ﬁring a shot. He makes a faltering attempt to communicate his increasing psychological distress to Eileen, telling her, ‘Sometimes I get funny ideas’, but she fails to understand what he means and cheerfully dismisses his confession. The importance that ﬁrearms have in the family is further testiﬁed to by the fact that a rack of hunting riﬂes is mounted on the wall of their horrible lilac-coloured bedroom, which is ﬁlled with tasteless mass-produced furniture. The morning after his abortive conversation with Eileen, Bobby sits down to type out a chilling statement of intent: ‘To Whom It May Concern: It is now 11:40 A.M. My wife is still asleep, but when she wakes up I am going to kill her. Then I am going to kill my mother. I know they will get me, but there will be more killing before I die.’ Interrupted by his wife, he shoots her dead, and then murders his mother and a grocery boy. After taking the time to put his mother and wife in their beds and tidy away the boy’s corpse in a closet (as though trying to restore order

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to the domestic space), Bobby drives to a water tower overlooking a busy highway, from which he begins to shoot and kill passing motorists, in a scene that is all the more chilling for being shot from his detached perspective. It also cannot help but recall the circumstances of the Kennedy assassination ﬁve years earlier. As in Psycho, travel on the nation’s new network of highways leads to sudden, random death. Mobility and ease of travel between the suburbs and the major metropolitan centres was a key facet of the suburban boom: Bobby Thompson, like Norman Bates, makes a direct assault upon this freedom of movement. Old horror confronts new horror when Bobby, now a fugitive from the police, ends up hiding behind the drive-in screen on which the premiere of Orlock’s new ﬁlm is being projected. When shots begin to ring out and strike the crowd, who think themselves safe and protected in their cars, Orlock is the ﬁrst to realise where they are coming from and bravely confronts the young gunman, striking him with his cane. When the gun is knocked out of his hand, Bobby’s bravado instantly vanishes and he crumples to the ground, cowering in fear, like the disturbed little boy that he really is. It’s a pathetic yet chilling sight, and one to which the ever-digniﬁed Orlock responds, ‘Is that what I was afraid of?’ As Kim Newman has noted, ‘In the ﬁnal moment, Karloff towers above the killer but in a sense he loses; Bobby Thompson takes his place as the face of horror’.8 While we are provided with a lengthy, if not exactly satisfying, explanation for Norman Bates’ murderous behaviour at the conclusion of Psycho, no such easy answers are provided here, only subtle hints as to the motivations for Bobby’s killing spree. Again, it seems as if the ultimate horror most likely lies within the family home, and in the dysfunctional nature of the ostensibly average suburban family. Presumably for ﬁnancial reasons, Bobby and his wife are forced to live with his parents, in a home where they are still treated very much as children. Bobby’s relationship with his macho father may initially seem grufﬂy good-natured and wholesome but there is also a barely concealed undercurrent of competitiveness and resentment which comes to the fore in the aforementioned target-shooting scene. Bobby’s rampage is at least partially due to the fact that he is unable to tell anyone in his family about how he really feels: communication with them on anything but the most basic level is impossible. At a time when parents all over the country were becoming more concerned about the increasingly permissive and politically radical lifestyle and attitudes of their children, a character like the polite, well-spoken, gainfully employed and inherently suburban Bobby Thompson may

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seem almost too good to be true, and of course, he is. Released in 1968, Targets is also very much a product of the time when the ﬁrst indications that nice boys just like Bobby were getting up to no good in the fetid jungles and rice paddies of South East Asia began to emerge. Indeed, given his probable military experience, it is even just about possible that he has been there himself. At the very least, the training he would have received in the military no doubt helped make him a crack shot: his ﬁnal words to Orlock before the police take him away are ‘I hardly ever missed, did I?’ Along with Psycho and Night of the Living Dead (which was released in the same year) Targets signalled the emergence of a new mood in American horror ﬁction and ﬁlm, a mood founded upon the realisation that, as the ﬁlm itself makes clear, the old terrors – usually symbolised by obviously monstrous-looking ‘others’ – have lost much of their power. Instead, they have been superseded by the very real threat posed by disturbed individuals and malevolent entities which most often come from within rather than without, and are more likely to be found in neat, modern suburban neighbourhoods than in the ancient dank castles and ruins of old. The establishment of suburbia as a valid site for narratives in which apparently inexplicable and random acts of violence take place was completed in 1978 with the release of John Carpenter’s Halloween. The ﬁlm opens in what appears to be the idyllic community of Haddonﬁeld, Illinois, on Halloween night 1963. In the opening sequence of the movie, we watch through the killer’s eyes as he creeps upstairs, butcher knife in hand, and brutally stabs a teenage girl to death, the stabbing hand and glinting knife naturally arousing memories of Psycho’s most famous scene. The twist comes with the revelation that ‘Michael’, the murderer, is no stranger, but actually a deeply disturbed six-year-old boy who has just killed his own sister in the family home. Michael’s age means that he was most probably born in 1957 – which means that he is both a product of the post-war baby boom which fuelled the growth of suburbia and that, appropriately but probably coincidentally, he entered the world in the same year that the real life Ed Gein’s grisly crimes were uncovered in Wisconsin, the state which borders Illinois. Although Rob Zombie’s 2007 remake spends almost half the ﬁlm’s running time painfully establishing the reasons why Michael Myers becomes a mass murderer with a penchant for William Shatner masks (his mom’s a stripper, his sister is sexually precocious, his leering stepfather is an abusive drunk . . .), the original doesn’t provide us with any spurious explanations for his murderous nature. Carpenter’s Michael

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simply is what he is, a monstrous aberration destined to bring chaos and death to the neatly manicured neighbourhood from which he has been spawned. As more than one critic has pointed out, he is to suburbia what the shark in Jaws was to the sea: a remorseless killer who cruises his natural element with motivations we can never fully fathom because he isn’t entirely human in the ﬁrst place. As John Muir has put it: ‘Myers is a ruthlessly efﬁcient killing machine, but exactly what need or pleasure is consummated in the act of killing remains unknown to us. Would a rabbit understand why a hunter pursues it, or the mechanism of the riﬂe used to end its life? Probably not, and nor do we understand Michael Myers or his motivations’.9 Myers is a blank slate upon which all the worst fears of the suburban parent can be projected. On the one hand, he is the violent and unstoppable predator who stalks the community’s teenagers: that most clichéd of urban-legend interlopers, the escaped mental patient. Simultaneously, though, he is also the boy next door gone terribly wrong, the ultimate juvenile delinquent, still only twenty-one years old when he returns home to resume his murderous ways by violently attacking teenagers only a few years younger than himself. The fundamental impossibility of ever truly knowing what motivates the mass murderer previously seen both in Psycho (despite the singularly unconvincing psychiatrist’s explanation at the conclusion) and in Targets is here reﬁned even further, in the form of a killer of whom we know virtually nothing save his name, age and suburban origins. Halloween’s basic storyline may be simplistic – a masked lunatic stalks and kills several teenagers before one of his victims manages to turn the tables – but the ﬁlm is elevated far above the level of the many slasher ﬁlms that would follow by dint of John Carpenter’s understanding of the importance of the story’s setting. As he would later explain: A lot of horror ﬁlms in the past were set in a haunted house or some dark environment to begin with, so that you’re immediately alerted to the fact that, oh, this is going to be scary. Well, the harder thing to do then is to take a horror movie and put it into a suburban atmosphere, with a nice little row of houses and beautiful manicured lawns and some place that you can assume is very safe. Because if horror can get there, it can get anywhere . . . Suburbia is supposed to be safe. Your house is supposed to be a sanctuary. Nowadays, maybe because of conditions beyond our control, there is no sanctuary. And I think that is in the audience’s mind. So a ﬁlm maker, if he plays with that, can create fear. Lots of fear.10

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There’s a sinister poetry in the dreamy, languid manner with which Carpenter shoots the streets of his ﬁctional suburb in the scenes leading up to Halloween night. As original ‘ﬁnal girl’ Laurie Strode (played by Jamie Lee Curtis, whose mother Janet Leigh portrayed the doomed Marion Crane in Psycho) and her friends stroll down the familiar neighbourhood streets, the camera dogs their steps like an unseen stalker, making even the most innocuous scenes seem weighted with foreboding. Carpenter achieved this effect by using a Panavision widescreen format and 35mm ﬁlm to shoot the movie, both of which were considered unusual to use for a low-budget horror ﬁlm.11 The wide lenses and frequent use of long, slow-tracking shots all helped him accomplish his goal of shooting suburban America ‘from an angle that gives it a sense of doom’.12 In addition, the time Carpenter spends establishing the geography of the neighbourhood in these early scenes, in chronicling the relationship between the various houses, streets and spacious backyards also sets up ‘the special dynamics that will become important as the horror escalates’.13 In many respects, Myers’s static, ﬂeeting appearances here, when he embodies the latent potential for violence, are more frightening than the scenes in which he is actually seen committing violent acts later on. Like Myers, we ﬁrst see Laurie Strode when she walks to school on Halloween morning. As played by Curtis – who was the only genuine teenager in the entire cast – Laurie is immediately a sympathetic character, whose air of shy hesitancy makes her a great deal more likeable and authentic than most of the other ‘ﬁnal girls’ who would follow in her footsteps. As mentioned in my previous chapter, the appearance of estate agents in the suburban horror ﬁlm is almost always a bad sign, whether they are making a brief appearance to sell a house that seems too good to be true (as in The Amityville Horror, The House Next Door, and Terror Tract) or taking a leading role (as with Poltergeist’s realtor Steve Freeling). It is all the more appropriate, then, that Laurie should ﬁrst be placed into danger because her realtor father wants her to leave a key under the mat of the old Myers place, abandoned since little Michael’s antics 16 years previously. On her way there, she encounters Tommy Doyle, the little boy who she babysits, and also, signiﬁcantly, the only other person apart from her who actually sees Michael Myers before he begins his killing spree that night. Standing out like a rotten tooth amidst the rest of the houses on the street, the Myers place is extremely dilapidated and run down: presumably, Laurie’s father would have been trying to sell it on for quite some time. ‘That’s the spook house!’ Tommy cries, and he’s right, for as Laurie leaves the key we get to see from Myers’

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perspective: he’s inside the house watching them both. As the tag line for the ﬁlm put it, he really has come home. The eeriness of the ﬁlm’s ﬁrst half is further enhanced by the fact that Haddonﬁeld’s streets seem strangely empty, ‘virtually deserted day and night save for Laurie, her friends, and her stalker, who remains at once a looming threat and elusive wraith’.14 As in Psycho and Targets, the act of watching is a precursor to violence: Norman Bates gazes at Marion Crane through a peephole in the wall of her motel room, while Bobby Thompson uses the telescopic sight of his riﬂe to pick out his targets. Michael Myers, who simply roams around town watching his future victims for much of the ﬁlm’s running time, is even more brazen. This sense of unreality is further reinforced by Carpenter’s hypnotically repetitive score, and by the fact that no one else seems to notice the presence of a tall man, dressed in black and wearing a white mask strolling about during the middle of the day. One of the most striking things about Carpenter’s depiction of this suburban killer is the fact that he is treated onscreen as though he were a ghost, rather than a conventional human being. Indeed, Carpenter has noted in interviews that Jack Clayton’s 1963 ﬁlm The Innocents (the famous adaptation of The Turn of the Screw) was a major inﬂuence in this regard, particularly in these early scenes in which he simply appears and stands perfectly still, only seen by those whose lives he will shortly impact upon. Myers’ vaguely supernatural aspect is further emphasised in an exchange between Sheriff Brackett and the Ahab-like Dr Loomis,15 in which Brackett notes, upon seeing the half devoured corpse of a dog in the Myers place: ‘A man wouldn’t do that.’ ‘This isn’t a man’ the doctor gravely responds. Instead, Myers is, at least according to Loomis, ‘purely and simply evil’, and his inevitable return home will bring death and disorder to the quiet streets of Haddonﬁeld – ‘and if terrible things can happen in this generic suburban town, they can happen anywhere . . .’16 As the sheriff explains to Dr Loomis: ‘Doctor, do you know what Haddonﬁeld is? Families, children, all lined up in rows up and down these streets. You’re telling me they’re lined up for a slaughterhouse.’ While her friends Annie and Linda hang out with their boyfriends and do all the things that teenagers marked for death in the typical slasher ﬁlm generally indulge in – drinking, smoking, having sex – bookish Laurie gravely fulﬁls her responsibilities and stays at home to babysit Tommy Doyle and Annie’s charge Lindsay instead. Aside from Annie’s ineffectual father, Sheriff Brackett, the total absence of adults is striking. Laurie – who wears an apron, knits, makes popcorn, and looks after her youthful charges in a warm, affectionate manner – is the closest

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thing to an actual parent we see onscreen. Thus, when Myers attacks Laurie, after ﬁrst murdering Annie, Linda and Linda’s boyfriend Bob, she only has herself to rely upon, at least until Loomis shows up at the last minute. One of the most striking scenes in the ﬁlm is that in which the wounded Laurie desperately screams for help as she runs down the street. ‘Oh God help me!’ she cries, as she limps to a nearby house and raps on the door, at which point the porch light goes on. But after a moment, the light goes off, and no one answers her frantic pleas for help. She has no choice but to stagger back to Tommy’s house and plead for the terriﬁed children to let her in, which places them all in further danger. The sequence has unmistakable echoes of the infamous Kitty Genovese case, in which 38 bystanders did nothing despite hearing the cries of a young woman who was being stabbed to death in the courtyard of their New York apartment complex. The inspiration for many newspaper articles, as well as Harlan Ellison’s famous story ‘The Whimper of Whipped Dogs’, this incident was taken by many contemporary commentators as symptomatic of the callousness and reluctance to get involved which supposedly epitomised big-city life. In Halloween, Carpenter transposes this occurrence to the welcoming, familiar streets of Haddonﬁeld, and in doing so implies that ‘although everyone seems to know one another, no one can be called upon in a time of crisis’.17 Any illusion of safety and suburban community has been fatally compromised by this refusal to help our heroine, whether it is due to the fact that Laurie’s neighbours suspect that her screams are merely a prank, or because they fear for their own safety and security. Therefore, it is signiﬁcant that, even at the end of the ﬁlm when Loomis ﬁres six shots at Myers from point blank range, Carpenter’s speechless cipher isn’t conclusively defeated, just vanquished for a while. After falling from a balcony he simply disappears into the night, like the personiﬁcation of roving evil that he is meant to be. Thus, in Halloween, the murderous boy next door completes his evolution into the horror ﬁlm bogeyman of the late twentieth century, and the suburbs once again become the perfect setting for narratives in which the safety and security of both the family unit and the community at large are decisively undermined from within.

Invitations to hell: Wes Craven’s suburban nightmares From the very beginning of his career, Wes Craven’s horror movies have depicted narratives of brutality and horror at the heart of the modern

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suburban family. His family units typically seethe with violence and hypocrisy. Perhaps more than any other American director he has consistently undermined the notion that the suburban milieu is somehow a particularly safe place for families, and in particular, children and teenagers. Indeed, the threat facing his protagonists most often comes from within the home itself, or indirectly arises from attitudes and actions frequently associated with the so-called ‘suburban’ mindset. The Last House on the Left (1972), Craven’s horror debut, remains the most controversial ﬁlm of his career. Filmed in the prototypically suburban town of Westport, Connecticut, which, as previously noted, has long been a popular choice for ﬁlm-makers looking for an attractive suburban every-town, The Last House on the Left is a gory update of Ingmar Bergman’s medieval-set drama The Virgin Spring. The ﬁlm is about a comfortable, prosperous middle-class couple, John and Estelle Collingwood (Gaylord St. James and Cynthia Carr), whose complacent, afﬂuent existence is suddenly violated forever by a brutal act of violence which prompts them to commit terrible acts of their own. On her seventeenth birthday, the Collingwoods’ sheltered daughter Mari and her wrong-side-of-the-tracks pal Phyllis (Sandra Cassel and Lucy Grantham) leave behind the safety of the suburbs and head into the city to see a rock concert by their favourite band, ‘Bloodlust’. However, while buying marijuana the girls naïvely fall into the clutches of the ﬁrst of Craven’s soon-to-be characteristic anti-families, a gang of escaped convicts led by the sadistic Krug Stillo (David Hess). The girls are menaced and then sexually abused by the gang in a grimy innercity tenement, before being bundled into the boot of a car and driven to a wooded area, which, by coincidence, happens to be only a short distance from Mari’s home. Phyllis makes a desperate bid for freedom, but is soon recaptured, and in one of the most disturbing scenes of the ﬁlm is stabbed repeatedly as she tries to crawl away. Mari tries to plead for her life, but is raped and then shot dead. Perhaps even more shocking than the physical violence onscreen, which is here depicted in a notably realistic fashion, is the psychological torment and humiliation undergone by the girls at the hands of Krug’s gang of misﬁts. Even the murderers themselves look sickened by what they have done when the violence subsides: there are unmistakable echoes of similar real-life atrocities such as the Mai-Lai massacre perpetrated by US troops in Vietnam in 1968 or the murders committed by the so-called Manson ‘family’ in 1969. Interspersed by dire folk tunes written by Hess such as ‘The Road to Nowhere’ and supposedly ‘comic’ scenes featuring the misadventures of two bumbling small town cops on the trail of the gang,

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the ﬁlm is nevertheless still a gruelling, unpleasant viewing experience in which ﬁrst the city, then the woods, and then the suburban home itself become sites of torture and murder. In an ironic twist taken from Bergman’s original, Krug’s gang, now stranded in the forest due to car trouble, decide to seek help from the nearest house, and end up on the Collingwoods’ doorstep. By now concerned about their daughter’s prolonged absence, Mari’s parents are initially quite hospitable, but are soon made suspicious by their guests’ odd demeanours and unconvincing attempts to behave in a ‘civilised’ manner. Suspicion crystallises into vengeance when they recognise a peace medallion in the possession of one of the killers as one they had given to Mari just a few hours earlier. The formerly sedate, wellmannered suburbanites decide that it’s time to get their own back. The last 40 minutes of the ﬁlm consists of a gory game of cat and mouse in which the Collingwoods violently kill their daughter’s murderers one by one. For the ﬁrst, but certainly not the last time in Craven’s work, the supposedly civilised, logical and moral middle-class family carries out acts of great savagery the moment they are threatened. As Kim Newman has further noted, ‘Craven wittily has the carnage stem from each group’s desire to emulate its mutual enemy. Krug’s maniacs try to pass themselves off as plumbers/insurance salesmen and coo over expensive furnishings, while the middle-aged, well-off Collingwoods prepare to slaughter them’.18 By the end of the ﬁlm, which freeze-frames on an image of the blood-spattered Collingwoods and their ravaged living room, the boundaries between revenge and cold-blooded murder, savage and suburbanite have become well and truly blurred. The white, middle-class suburban family unit again meets its ‘uncivilised’ double in Craven’s equally visceral follow-up to Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes (1977). In what is essentially a modern take on the supposedly true story of Scottish murderer Sawney Bean and his large, inbred family of cannibalistic bandits, a smug family of afﬂuent suburbanites, the Carters, decide to travel into the yucca ﬂats of the Californian desert in their all-mod-cons-equipped trailer.19 They ﬁnd themselves under attack from their opposite numbers, a vicious pack of irradiated, inbred desert-dwellers who murder several members of the family (including racist former cop ‘Big Bob’ Carter) and abduct its youngest member, a baby girl named Katie, with the intention of eating her. It is then up to the baby’s rather wimpy father to ﬁght for his child’s life, and so another bloody, protracted battle between the supposed representatives of civilisation and those of primordial savagery is waged.

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Both families are in their own way products of the cultural and political contexts of 1950s America. The Carters have lost any real sense of connection with the world around them. As many critics have noted, their trailer serves as a kind of suburban home on wheels, stocked with all the accoutrements of late-twentieth-century life. The fact that they are camped in the middle of the desert doesn’t seem to change their behaviour at all: as John Muir puts it, ‘instead of adapting to their new landscape, they try to tame it’, something which could also be said of the history of white settlers in America in general.20 Furthermore, it brings to mind the rhetoric of the Eisenhower era, which explicitly linked the rapid expansion of suburbia to the growth of the West, and described those willing to leave the cities in favour of this new way of life as ‘pioneers’. The Carters’ sheltered, house-centric existence and conﬂict with savage mutants recalls the situation faced by Robert Neville in I Am Legend. Their hermetically sealed, regulated existences and dependence upon ﬁrearms make them only too vulnerable to the attacks of the cannibalistic desert dwellers whose home turf they have unintentionally violated. Yet Jupiter, Mars, Pluto, Ruby and the rest of the mutated desert folk are also in some ways products of the 1950s: their home is an Air Force atomic test site, and their regressive behaviour and deformities are at least partially due to radiation poisoning (as well as incest, which makes their existence a kind of queasy extension of the familial ‘togetherness’ so prized during that decade). The Carters implicitly beneﬁted from the economic and technological advances of the Cold War era: their enemies obviously did not, although their very freedom from the constraints and assumptions of conventional society (and the status quo which Big Bob, as a former cop, protected for many years) is what makes them so dangerous. Like the Viet Cong, they wage war in an unconventional fashion and as a result bring the representatives of an apparently greater power to their knees. Signiﬁcantly, as in Last House on the Left, the suburbanites’ victory comes through brutality and animal-like cunning: ‘It is only when they [the Carters] forsake the tools of twentieth century life that they begin to succeed in defending themselves. They only defeat Jupiter once they stop seeing their trailer as a shelter, a mobile representation of suburban safety and instead use it as a weapon’.21 As is also the case in 1950s Matheson novels such as I Am Legend and The Shrinking Man, survival against great odds is only possible when the trappings of everyday society are adapted for one’s own ends, and civility and morality are exchanged for aggressive masculinity and extreme violence.

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Following the relative success of The Hills Have Eyes, Craven directed a number of TV movies in which he again touched upon his characteristic preoccupation with the dark side of the American family. Stranger in Our House (1978) starred a post-Exorcist Linda Blair as an afﬂuent, contented teenager whose life is gradually taken over by her cuckoo-inthe-nest cousin, an orphaned witchcraft-practising girl from the Ozark mountains. In what is perhaps the only sustained discussion of Craven’s television work, Muir (2002) has noted that like his big-screen work, it too revolves around issues generally related to the suburban, middleclass American family. Stranger in Our House also marks the beginning of Craven’s sustained interest in young women and teenagers from this milieu in particular, and in exposing hypocrisy and deceit at the heart of the ‘All American Family’. It could be argued, then, that the inherently domestic concerns of his television movies – all of which deal in some way or another with dysfunctional family units – made them particularly appropriate for the small screen. Helen Wheatley, for instance, has suggested that ‘television is the ideal medium’ for the gothic genre, because the gothic is so deeply concerned with the domestic, and with ‘writing stories of unspeakable family secrets and homely trauma large across the television screen’.22 Thus, it may well be that, in addition to the ﬁnancial incentives which prompted Craven’s television work, part of him recognised the medium’s suitability for showcasing his own domestic preoccupations, and for bringing horror directly into the home, just as Alfred Hitchcock had done during the 1950s and 1960s with Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Indeed, even Craven’s work for cinema has consistently made reference to television’s important role within the middle-class American home. In A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), Glen Lanz (Johnny Depp) is killed by Freddy Krueger while dozing in front of his portable television; and Shocker (1989) features a serial killer who worked as a TV repair man in life and can travel through people’s television sets after his death. The television constantly plays in the background of the house of horrors in The People Under the Stairs (1991), and during a climactic sequence in Scream (1996), pop-culture savvy but fatally vulnerable teenagers loudly comment on the onscreen travails of Laurie Strode in Halloween while a real killer prowls about in the background.23 As well as continuing his interest in the dark side of the American family, Craven’s other television movies of the 1980s also took less than subtle aim at the growing yuppie culture of the early 1980s. Chiller (1985) was a morality tale about an ambitious young businessman cryogenically frozen by his grieving mother and accidentally resurrected

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several years later. As is usually the way in horror movies, playing God brings with it a terrible price: our hero now lacks a soul, and while this means that he cold-bloodedly murders the odd old acquaintance, it also turns him into the perfect corporate raider. An even broader take on the materialist values of the decade could be found in Invitation to Hell (1984). This featured Robert Ulrich as an engineer who accepts a post at a powerful new technology ﬁrm. As he starts work on a spacesuit that is meant to facilitate exploration work on Venus, his wife and kids excitedly settle into their new home in suburbia and gratefully accept an invitation to join the new country club. But here, as in The Stepford Wives, exclusive clubs are not a good thing: in actuality, their fellow suburbanites are all soulless devil worshippers and, as foreshadowed in the title, the country club is nothing more than an entrance to hell, through which Ulrich’s character must descend in his new heat-proof space suit in order to rescue his family. It’s a minor entry on Craven’s CV, but like the other television movies, it contains, albeit in watered-down form, most of the preoccupations present in his big-screen movies. Finally, Deadly Friend (1986) once more located horror within the boundaries of the nuclear family itself: the ﬁlm was about a teenage girl, murdered by her abusive, drunken father, who is then resurrected by the boy next door as a life-like robot. Needless to say, as in Chiller, resurrecting the dead again turns out to have unfortunate consequences. Craven’s most famous ﬁlm of the 1980s, A Nightmare on Elm Street, was perhaps the most signiﬁcant suburban-set horror ﬁlm since Halloween six years previously, and also focused upon teenagers sorely let down by the adults around them. Here, the wrongs of the adult population are paid for by their teenage children, who are stalked and murdered one by one by a vicious and supernaturally gifted killer. As in Last House on the Left, the decision here made by otherwise ‘civilised’ and conservative suburban parents to take the law into their own hands has devastating consequences. The main difference here is that while the Collingwoods had already lost their child, and take bloody revenge for that very reason, the vigilantism undertaken by the residents of Elm Street was aimed at preventing such an outcome. Freddy Krueger is that most feared and hated of suburban bogeymen: the murderous child molester. Halloween’s Michael Myers was, at least initially, a child who kills, and Krueger is a killer of children: but the actions of both strike at the very heart of what the afﬂuent suburban neighbourhood is supposed to represent. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that the spectre of the suburban child-murderer/abuser recurs fairly often in the Suburban Gothic, particularly in literary depictions

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of the milieu. Susie Salmon, the narrator of Alice Sebold’s 2002 novel The Lovely Bones, is raped and murdered by her next-door neighbour Mr Harvey. The release of a convicted child molester and suspected murderer in Tom Perrotta’s novel Little Children (2004) leads to violence and vigilantism, while an innocent man is hounded out of a Washington suburb in Suzanne Berne’s A Crime in the Neighbourhood (1997) because his unmarried status makes him a ﬁgure of suspicion. As discussed in Chapter One, Shirley Jackson’s The Road Through the Wall (1948) is the earliest depiction of the suburban community as lynch-mob, one which again seeks to avenge the death of a child. In an article on ‘Crime, Contemporary Fiction and Suburbia’, Linden Peach discussed Berne’s novel in particular and observed that ‘child murder undermines the fundamental premise upon which the ideal of suburbia is constructed, that the suburban neighbourhood is a safe environment in which to bring up children’.24 It stands to reason, then, that the child murderer should pose such a threat and that the lynch mob is frequently invoked in order to rid the community of this ‘monstrous’ aberration. What makes matters worse in Craven’s ﬁlm is that vigilantism represents not the conclusion of the narrative, but rather the starting point. When school janitor and suspected child murderer Krueger was exonerated on a legal technicality, the community decided to take matters into their own hands.25 Burned to death in his own boiler room, Krueger’s evil lives on: he returns as a kind of vengeful ghost, intent on striking at those who killed him in the cruellest way possible, by slaughtering their children. His most original power is also his most unsettling: Krueger can enter the dreams of his victims and murder them while they sleep safely tucked up in their beds (or in one memorable scene, a cell at the police station). Craven’s leading character here is a teenage girl named Nancy Thompson (Heather Lagencamp) who realises long before everyone else the true nature of the threat facing her and her friends. Nancy is a resourceful, practical heroine who takes an even more active role in battling her would-be murderer than Laurie Strode in Halloween. Following the gory deaths of friends Rod, Tina and Glen, Nancy is determined to ﬁnd out why her steadily dwindling peer group has been targeted in such a manner. Her faith in the ability of the grown-ups around her to counter Krueger’s threat is shaky even before she discovers the real reason for his vengeful murders. Like Annie Brackett’s father in Halloween, Nancy’s father too is the local sheriff: similarly, despite his status as appointed protector of the community he can do nothing to help his daughter (although, unlike Annie, Nancy survives). Furthermore,

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while her mother initially seems solicitous and caring, she’s actually a guilt-stricken alcoholic. While Nancy proactively takes steps to save her own life (such as reading up on booby traps and anti-personnel devices: she is perhaps the best equipped ﬁnal girl of any 1980s slasher movie), her booze-addled mother’s misguided efforts to protect her only make matters worse. She cuts down the trellis under Nancy’s window and erects bars on all the windows and doors, which means that when Nancy begins to ﬁght Krueger on her own terms, and drags him into her reality, she’s left to battle him alone. Even the cop stationed outside her bedroom window following Glen’s bloody death sees that she is in some sort of trouble but chooses to ignore it. The parents of Elm Street may have aroused Krueger’s wrath, but it is ultimately up to Nancy to face him alone. Unlike Laurie Strode, she doesn’t even have a last-minute rescue by a Dr Loomis ﬁgure to look forward to. As Tony Williams has observed, the ineptitude and hypocrisy of Elm Street’s adult population makes their children all the more vulnerable to Krueger because: Unlike Elm Street’s parents he can discipline and deﬁnitively punish his teenage victims. The ﬁlm also indicts the adult world, presenting parents as weak, manipulative and selﬁsh. Nancy angrily reacts to her father, Sheriff John Thompson (John Saxon) who uses her as a decoy to help capture Rod. He never responds to her appeals for help against Freddy and puts her behind bars at home. Nancy’s mother, Marge (Ronee Blakeley) withholds crucial information from her daughter until it is too late. She resorts to alcohol to conceal guilty feelings over her role in Freddy’s murder, and she morbidly preserves his knives. Nightmare on Elm Street emphasises the dangerous nature of parental silence. On many occasions it indirectly aids Freddy.26 The dangers of poor parenting and adult hypocrisy become even more obvious in Craven’s next suburban-set horror movie, The People Under the Stairs. Here, Craven deals with issues of class and racial politics in his most explicit manner yet, by setting the residents of a poor, yet decent black underclass of a decaying inner-city tenement against their deranged, hypocritical and greedy white landlords, the Robesons. The ﬁlm’s fairytale-like structure is obvious from the outset, in which a bright 13-year-old known as ‘Fool’ (Brandon Williams) and his destitute family are evicted from their miserable home by the Robesons, who want to demolish the building and build condos for ‘nice, clean people’ – that is, whites – instead. Not only do they house tenants in

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substandard accommodation, the Robesons also own the ghetto liquor store as well – thus feeding the addictions that have helped bring the community to its knees. When a petty thief named Leroy (Ving Rhames) suggests that Fool help him carry out a burglary at the landlord’s house (which is rumoured to contain gold coins), he feels that he has no choice but to comply. From the moment they arrive at the house, which is a large former funeral home in a creepy but recognisably suburban neighbourhood, things start to go badly wrong. ‘Mommy’ (Wendy Robey) and ‘Daddy’ (Everett McGill), as they call themselves, rank amongst Craven’s most bizarre and memorable characters. They are, we later discover, a pair of deeply disturbed siblings who live together as man and wife in a family arrangement that is obviously meant to parody the George Bush Senior era notions of traditional family values.27 The fact that the 1991 Gulf War perpetually ﬂickers on television screens in the background helps make the association obvious. The Robesons are white, religious and wealthy property owners who are obsessed with the security of their home, the moral ﬁbre of the neighbourhood, and with preserving their God-given right to bear arms. They even say things like, ‘It’s as if we’re the prisoners and the criminals roam free!’ and ‘Children should be seen and not heard!’ just to ram home their conservative credentials. Once Fool, dressed as a boy scout, makes contact with ‘Mommy’ (who dresses in a style vaguely reminiscent of the early 1950s), he tries to sweet-talk his way into the house, but the viewer will already have suspected from her odd demeanour and the barred windows (and locked cupboard doors inside) that all is not well. It soon turns out that the couple have a sorely abused ‘daughter’ in her early teens named ‘Alice’, who they dress in frilly white frocks and ribbons and lock in a nurserylike room in which all the furniture is clearly meant for a much younger child (indeed, it rather brings to mind Norman’s room in Psycho). A cross is prominently displayed on the wall as well. Her entire existence – forever trapped in the house with doting, deranged and abusive ‘parents’ who never want her to grow up – is even more difﬁcult than Fool’s, for he at least has a caring family to return to. Even more disturbingly, the Robesons also have at least a dozen starved, terribly mutilated ‘sons’ caged in a pen in the basement. The boys are even fed the remains of both their dead brethren and of intruders like Leroy, and so the ceaseless consumerism of the Robesons becomes even more reprehensible. As we shall further see in the concluding section of this chapter, the suburban basement is frequently a place in which unspeakable horrors lurk in the modern horror ﬁlm. As Gaston Bachelard noted of the symbolic

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signiﬁcance of cellars, the space is ‘ﬁrst and foremost the the dark entity of the house, the one that partakes of subterranean forces. When we dream there, we are in harmony with the irrationality of the depths’.28 Similarly, basements in the Suburban Gothic are invariably associated with murder, the concealment of terrible crimes and illicit burial. When Leroy is shot dead by ‘Daddy’, Fool ﬁnds himself trapped in the house, and the ﬁlm becomes an amusing succession of ultra-violent and cartoonish cat-and-mouse scenes in which he scrambles through the unforgiving corridors. While doing so, he is aided ﬁrst by Alice, and then by a skeletal mute boy named Roach, who has managed to escape from the basement and now lives in the walls of the house. Together, the three youngsters scramble to escape ‘Daddy’, now dressed in a leather gimp suit and brandishing a shotgun. Particularly galling to the Robesons is the fact that a black boy from the ghetto has been in contact with their precious Alice: ‘He’s in there right now, with our little angel!’ As in Halloween and A Nightmare on Elm Street, the powers that be are of little help. Roughly halfway through the ﬁlm, Fool manages to scramble outside to freedom, but Alice and the injured Roach remain behind in the nightmarish house. Fool returns to the tenement with enough gold coins to cover the family’s rent, but he cannot rest until he has saved his friends too. It is at this point that his grandfather tells him that the Robesons are actually brother and sister, the ﬁnal, twisted scions of a family in which ‘Every generation was more insane than the next’, and that they have long been suspected of being child snatchers. Fool anonymously contacts the police but when the authorities visit the house they are completely fooled by the veneer of middle-class respectability exuded by the couple and leave: appearances are everything to them. It is up to Fool himself to creep back in and rescue Alice and ‘the people under the stairs’ (the boys in the basement). In this he is aided by his own family and by the rest of the local community, who assemble in a show of communal solidarity outside the Robeson house and demand the return of their stolen children and an end to their economic exploitation by the corrupt landlords. The ﬁlm ends as Alice ﬁnally breaks free of her chains and stabs her supposed ‘mother’ while the boys in the basement burst into the open, in a scene that evokes Night of the Living Dead. Fool blows up the house with some handy dynamite, and in the ﬁnal moments a radical and long overdue redistribution of wealth takes place as the Robesons’ money ﬂoats into the hands of those upon whom they had fed for so long. In addition, the obvious friendship between Alice and Fool brings with it the hope that the next

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generation will not be divided on the same rigidly unequal racial and economic lines as the one before. The People Under the Stairs is that rarest of 1990s American horror ﬁlms: one which is eager to engage with the economic, political and (most of all) racial contexts of the time in which it is made. The suburban fortress and twisted, but recognisably middle-class, existence of the Robesons is built upon the exploitation of the poor black community which encircles their privileged enclave. They fear the understandably resentful economic underclass which surrounds them, but as Craven wryly demonstrates, the underclass has much more to fear from them (a dynamic much like that revealed at the end of Matheson’s I Am Legend, as we have seen). The ﬁlm brings to mind observations made by Avivia Briefel and Sianna Nagai in their essay on one of the few other horror ﬁlms of the 1990s actively to engage with issues of race and class, Bernard Rose’s Candyman.29 They suggest that in slasher ﬁlms, being frightened is paradoxically a sign of empowerment and privilege: the victims are, after all, consistently white, middle-class suburbanites who are themselves owners or future inheritors of property. In their words: The genre itself presents owning a house in particular as a form of proprietorship that automatically entitles the buyer to the experience of fear, as if fear itself were a commodity included with the total package – just as sophisticated alarm systems and security guards have become standard components of the purchase of an upscale home or condominium.30 Similarly, while the Robesons live in a secure suburban fortress, this is as much to keep the horrors inside from spilling out into the open as it is meant to exclude outside threats. Their fear of intruders, in other words, stems from the fact that they have a great deal to lose, not because of any existing economic or social vulnerability. Given Craven’s interest in horror within a suburban setting, and speciﬁcally within the conﬁnes of the nuclear family, it is entirely consistent that the twist in his most successful ﬁlm since A Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream is that the masked killer (or rather, killers) who have been murdering the community’s youngsters are spoiled local adolescents themselves and that a conﬂicted parent–teenager relationship has some part to play in the killings. One of the boys, Billy Loomis (another Psycho reference), is aggrieved with ﬁnal girl Sydney Prescott because her mother’s adulterous affair with his father destroyed his family.31 One of the killers in Scream 2 is actually Billy’s vengeful mother and,

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similarly, in the ﬁnal ﬁlm of the trilogy, Scream 3, the villain is Sydney’s half-brother, conceived when her mother was raped many years earlier. The only entirely positive depiction of suburban parenthood in Craven’s work comes in his post-9/11 thriller Red Eye (2005). While most of the ﬁlm takes place on the commercial airliner in which hotel manager Lisa Resiner is held hostage by a devious hit man, in the ﬁnal 20 minutes the action moves to her childhood home in the suburbs, and follows the familiar cat-and-mouse chase structure of the slasher movie. Though Lisa’s inventiveness thwarts the terrorist’s plot (indeed, her resourcefulness calls to mind that of both Nancy Thompson and Sydney Prescott), the hit man, ‘Jackson Ripner’ is ﬁnally killed by her caring and protective father. Unusually for Craven, a parental act of vigilante justice here turns out to have positive rather than negative results, perhaps because in this instance the father’s actions are directly responsible for saving his daughter’s life, rather than an act of vengeance carried out after her death. As such, they are understandably proactive rather than brutally reactive. It is probably also no coincidence that Ripner’s abortive attack upon the head of Homeland Security should culminate in an assault upon a middle-class suburban home itself: even international terrorism has consequences for the nuclear family in Craven’s universe.

‘Don’t go into the basement!’ or, the parent trap In this ﬁnal section, I shall brieﬂy discuss three ﬁlms in which serial murder is even more directly associated with the suburban family unit and with twisted parental ﬁgures in particular: The Stepfather, Parents and Serial Mom. The Stepfather is an effective psycho-thriller featuring a memorable performance from Terry O’Quinn as the title character, a man so obsessed with the desire to be patriarch of an ‘ideal’ family that he is willing to kill in order to satisfy his deeply unrealistic expectations.32 In many ways, the ﬁlm can be seen as a not particularly subtle comment on the kind of ‘Father Knows Best’ ethos of sitcoms such as Leave it to Beaver and The Brady Bunch (a comparison explicitly referenced in the ﬁlm itself when rebellious stepdaughter Stephanie notes that ‘It’s like having Ward Cleaver for a Dad’). ‘Jerry Blake’ – the bland, wholesome name is a fake, just like everything else about him, save his old-fashioned dedication to the ‘good’ things in life, like marriage, family and white collar job – insinuates himself into the life of one needy single mom after another, seeming to offer companionship, order and ﬁnancial security. Fittingly, he always

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seeks work as a realtor, someone who, like Poltergeist’s Steve Freeling, sells the suburban lifestyle to others. As he tells a pair of clients, ‘What I sell is the American dream’. While perhaps the most representative occupation of suburban fathers in the 1950s and early 1960s is that of the ad man, it would seem that the 1980s is the age of the real estate agent. The ﬁlm opens with a long, overhead tracking shot of a tree-lined suburban street which leads us into an average looking tract house. Inside, it is clear that a scene of considerable horror has recently taken place. O’Quinn’s character methodically tidies up before having a shower and changing his appearance. He then takes the papers establishing his new identity out of a hiding place, walks past the dead family in his living room and blithely moves on to the next town, and to his next set of victims. As we have seen, the family massacre has turned up in the Suburban Gothic before, most notably in Targets, The House Next Door and The Amityville Horror but the crucial difference in The Stepfather is that the leading character’s actions are no one-off, but rather a consistent pattern of behaviour that is all part of his futile search for a family ‘perfect’ enough to live up to the warped ideal he has picked up from television programmes and advertisements. As Patricia Brett Erens has noted: Much is made in the movie about the perfect family – families from sitcom dramas like Father Knows Best, Leave it to Beaver, Mr Ed and The Waltons. In TV Wonderland, parents and children work together with perfect trust and love, without any deep-seated problems . . . unfortunately for Jerry, life does not imitate television.33 The next scene, set one year later, introduces us to mother and daughter Susan and Stephanie, who are happily playing in the front yard of their home when the fun is interrupted by the arrival of Susan’s new husband, ‘Jerry Blake’. She is clearly besotted, but her teenage daughter is wary. Stephanie, who has been misbehaving at school, sees a therapist, to whom she tries to explain the reasons for her mistrust of Blake. Stephanie says of her mother’s relationship with Blake that, ‘She doesn’t see’ – in other words, her infatuation has blinded her to the fact that Blake’s behaviour is controlling and domineering rather than caring and solicitous. In other words, Susan is in many respects almost as deluded as her new spouse, for she has been conditioned into thinking that his innate conservatism and controlling behaviour are reﬂections of his trustworthiness and solidity rather than danger signs.

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As well as Stephanie’s suspicions, there is an even bigger threat to Blake’s façade, and that is his own increasing inability to maintain his civilised, paternal, sane disguise for much longer. He has an alarming tendency, which intensiﬁes as the ﬁlm unfolds, to mix Susan and Stephanie up with his previous victims before realising what a slip he has made and backtracking. What makes Blake’s obsession with family and appearance all the more ironic is the fact that he seems to have little or no real interest in Stephanie, or indeed, any of his previous stepchildren, and is unable even to maintain his interest in Susan for very long. Rather, he targets single mothers because of their assumed vulnerability and because, as he puts it, ‘It’s not a family without children’, and in such instances he gets a ready-made family unit without the bother of having actually to father anyone. It is also possible that the ﬁlm’s focus upon a step-parent as a malevolent force reﬂects the rising levels of family breakdown which took place in the 1970s and 1980s and the increasingly complex family units which resulted, as well as a variation upon the ‘wicked stepmother’ trope present in many fairytales. The ﬁlm’s explicitly suburban setting also reﬂects Blake’s twisted desire to embrace ‘normality’ and domesticity at all costs: Visually and symbolically, The Stepfather utilises several familiar icons . . . Most prominent is the house itself, a large wooden structure that seems to typify post-war America in the way that Psycho’s Gothic mansion typiﬁed a previous era. Like Bates, Blake (note the similarity) is associated with birds. Jerry works for the American Eagle realty company, a name that resonates with predation, national pride, and patriarchal power.34 Like the wannabe 1950s father-ﬁgure that he is, Jerry even spends much of his time within the house sequestered in the basement, where he makes birdhouses that are an exact scale replica of his own new abode.35 Inevitably, as in all his other relationships, he ﬁnds it impossible to cope when reality does not live up to his idealised vision of family life, and his behaviour towards the women becomes increasingly controlling, paranoid and violent, inevitably leading to murder – ﬁrst the counsellor to whom Stephanie has conﬁded her fears, and ultimately an inevitable climactic assault upon his wife and stepdaughter which leads to his own violent death at Susan’s hands. By the ﬁlm’s end, the cosy mother–daughter status quo has been restored, albeit at a high cost. Susan has been sorely punished for her poor judgement and willingness

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to place her own desires before those of her daughter. It is an oddly chastening conclusion that has much in common with the denouement of another, much more recent suburban-set serial killer ﬁlm in which a single mother’s desire for companionship brings her teenager into mortal danger: the 2007 release Disturbia. While The Stepfather pays homage to Hitchcock’s Psycho (as Erens has noted), Disturbia is a adolescent take on Rear Window (1954) in which a voyeuristic boy named Kale Brecht (Shia LeBouef) (who, like Stephanie, is traumatised by the recent death of his father) becomes convinced that the middle-aged man next door is a serial killer.36 Ultimately, Kale must save his lonely mother from the new neighbour’s homicidal intentions. This scenario is made all the more unlikely by the fact that Kale’s mother is played by the not particularly vulnerable-seeming Carrie Anne Moss, recently seen participating in epic shootouts and martial arts battles in the Matrix trilogy (although she did play a 1950s housewife in the suburban-set zombie movie Fido). Here, the notion of the suburb as a site of hidden violence is made even more explicit by the climactic revelation that the murderer’s innocuous-seeming home secretly has a basement and unlikely network of tunnels ﬁlled with corpses (the question of how he did all the digging necessary to create such a lair without arousing suspicion is of course left unanswered).37 As is the case in The Stepfather, a rebellious teenager’s objection to their mother’s decision to seek the attentions of a new man is entirely vindicated by the ﬁlm’s end. Furthermore, in both movies, as in the work of Wes Craven, the adult world’s refusal to entertain the paranoid suspicions of an insightful adolescent who can see beyond the surface of things leads to terrible consequences. A similar dynamic occurs in Bob Balaban’s visually striking, genuinely witty ‘cannibals in 1950s suburbia’ movie Parents, which is a gory satire on sanitised, nostalgic representations of the decade and of the cultural and consumerist implications of the suburban existence in general. The movie’s tongue-in-cheek approach is apparent even from the opening sequence, in which an overhead shot of 1950s suburbia is accompanied by the faux-big-band-style track ‘Meat Loaf Mambo’. Ten-year-old Michael (Bryan Madorsky) is the sickly-looking only child of Nick and Lily Laemle (Randy Quaid and Mary Beth Hurt), who seem on the surface to be as average a middle-class couple of their time as any other. His sweater-wearing, authoritarian scientist Dad likes to golf and his Mom loves to cook: they live in a spacious, luridly furnished tract house in a new neighbourhood and drive a brown Oldsmobile. Like Kale Brecht in Disturbia, little Michael is a voyeur, and his intensely subjective child’s

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eye view provides us with the ﬁlm’s narrative focus, as well as much of its most disconcerting moments. Indeed, the ﬁlm is in many respects really about a child’s worst nightmares about what his parents really get up to when he goes to bed at night. As the new girl at school tells him ‘They change when they’re alone.’ What concerns him most is the fact that his Mom and Dad love to consume vast amounts of red meat, the exact source of which they are notably cagey about. As they sit round the dinner table, Michael turns to his mother and asks what they are eating. She cheerfully replies: ‘Leftovers, Honey.’ ‘Leftovers from what?’ he continues. ‘The refrigerator!’ she exclaims, and begins to laugh.38 Here, the conspicuous consumption of the 1950s, a time when American refrigerators and supermarkets contained a wider array of foodstuffs at cheaper prices than ever before, becomes the stuff of nightmares. The parental exhortation to ‘eat your meat’ takes on a deeply disturbing resonance because in this instance, meat really is murder, and suburban appetites are presented in the darkest, and most literal, possible light. As the ﬁlm progresses, the tone and imagery increasingly come ever closer to that of little Michael’s blood-spattered, deeply Freudian nightmares. At ﬁrst it seems as though his doubts about the food on the table are all merely a result of his growing awareness of adult sexuality – early in the ﬁlm, he accidentally intrudes on his parents while they’re having sex and the trauma this causes resonates throughout the rest of the narrative. As time goes on, though, their relentless insistence upon maintaining order, routine and the everyday becomes increasingly oppressive. Adding to the steadily escalating air of unease which pervades the narrative is the fact that Nick Laemle works at the ‘Toxico’ plant, making Agent Orange-style defoliants for use against enemy combatants (‘48 hours and this jungle is mulch’). Much like Michael’s father, the Toxico plant has a blandly pleasant exterior which hides considerable horror within. Chief amongst these is the ‘Division of Human Testing’, into which Michael sneaks one day, only to ﬁnd a morgue stocked with fresh corpses. What makes matters worse is the later realisation that this is where his daily dinner comes from: literally, his father brings home the ‘bacon’ and his mother cooks it. Furthermore, the suburban basement yet again becomes the household space in which terrible acts take place, the site where the skeletons in the family closet literally lie. Amongst other suggestive clues, the Laemle basement has a barrel ﬁlled with wet clothes, a meat cleaver lying on a chopping board, and a row of glistening meat hooks hanging from the ceiling: at one point we see a human leg hanging on one of them like an

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oversized joint of lamb. When Michael ﬁnally convinces his sympathetic guidance counsellor that something terrible really is going on, she, like Stephanie’s therapist in The Stepfather, goes to the family home to suss out the situation for herself, only to be violently dispatched by a homicidal parent. Once more, outside authorities, even the sympathetic ones, are categorically unable to protect a child from dangers which emanate from within the suburban home because the veneer of middleclass respectability erected by guilty parental ﬁgures has blinded them to the real danger they pose. The climax of the ﬁlm plays like a queasy, hallucinatory take on every fussy eater’s worst nightmare, as Michael, now bound and placed at the dinner table, is presented with a plate of glistening, bloody raw meat (the remains of his counsellor) and forced to eat by his deranged parents.39 A struggle ensues, during which the house is set on ﬁre. In order to protect her son, Michael’s mother attacks her husband with a carving knife. Michael is sent to live with his paternal grandparents in their rural home. But of course, the horror doesn’t end there, for this is fundamentally a ﬁlm about the way in which dysfunctional, violent tendencies are passed down from parent to child: the last shot in the ﬁlm is of an oozing, bloody sandwich made for Michael by his grandmother, out of which she encourages him to take ‘Just a bite . . .’ We are left in no doubt, therefore, about the reasons why Michael’s father had such a strong taste for human ﬂesh, and of the fact that there can be no escape for him: cannibalism is nothing less than a family tradition. It also seems to suggest that the Laemles’ bloodthirsty proclivities aren’t really all that more offensive than some of the other things that were happening during the deceptively placid decade bookended by the horrors of the Second World War and those of Vietnam respectively. Writer/director Balaban’s largely satirical intent here is only reinforced by the fact that the end credits are done in the style of a 1950s/early 1960s sitcom, as the cast grin stifﬂy and wave for the camera. The suburban ‘ideal’ is similarly satirised in John Water’s Serial Mom (1994) in which Kathleen Turner stars as housewife and mother Beverley Sutpen (the name of course brings to mind ‘Sutpen’s Hundred’ in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom (1936)) whose belief that ‘life doesn’t have to be ugly’ leads her to the conclusion that the murder of those who unwittingly violate her strict code of neighbourly conduct is perfectly acceptable. The Sutpens live in a large, luxurious home within an afﬂuent Baltimore suburb: husband Eugene (Sam Waterston) is a dentist and kids Misty (Ricki Lake) and Chip (Matthew Lillard, soon to play

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a serial killer himself in Scream) are lively teenagers. Beverley is a proud housewife dedicated to family and home who won’t allow gum in the house, cooks a perfect breakfast, and belongs to the PTA. But like Jerry Blake in The Stepfather, Beverley is compelled to murder those who violate her 1950s-inspired sense of order and propriety. The difference is that in this case, the violence is directed at almost everyone except the nuclear family. Indeed, Beverley even goes out of her way to eliminate those who have slighted her offspring, such as a teacher who disapproves of Chip’s love of gory horror movies and a boy who stands Misty up on a date. This being a John Waters movie, in the second half of the narrative, when Beverley’s murderous activities are uncovered and she is put on trial, there are plenty of pot-shots at some of the more ridiculous excesses of 1990s America: the obsession with celebrity trials, political correctness and the exploits of ‘famous’ serial killers. Beverley’s kids even market a line of T-shirts with her face on them, and the so-called ‘Serial Mom’ becomes a national celebrity. In addition, the credibility of one witness is destroyed on the witness stand when she reluctantly admits that she doesn’t recycle: disrespecting the environment, it seems, is a greater crime than cold-blooded murder. Ultimately, alone of all the other murderous parents in this section, Beverley gets off scot-free, and returns home to be with her loving, if terriﬁed, family (having murdered a juror on the way home).40 While The Stepfather, Parents and Serial Mom are perhaps the most obvious mainstream representations of suburban parents as monstrous serial killers, there has been at least one other, much more recent, and decidedly more low-key and determinately realist take on this trope: the low-budget 2007 pseudo-documentary Head Case, written and directed by Anthony Spaddacini. The ﬁlm purports to be assembled from the home movies of a middle-aged couple named Wayne and Andrea Montgomery, who, in addition to living seemingly normal middle-class lives in suburban Delaware and raising their two children, are also ruthless serial killers who have tortured and murdered countless innocent victims over the years. As so often in the suburban-set serial killer movie, much of the movie’s resonance comes from the contrast between the apparently ‘normal’, even bland lives of the murderous protagonists and the nature of the terrible acts they carry out behind closed doors and (predictably) within the secrecy of their basement. Here, the fact that the entire ﬁlm is presented to us as a series of jerky, grainy and unremittingly sadistic home movies made by the killers themselves and supposedly edited together by the police after their discovery makes their crimes seem all the more repellent.

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The concept of the murderous suburban family is also explored, albeit with a supernatural twist, in another low-budget horror ﬁlm from 2006, The Hamiltons, which is much indebted to the maudlin 1990s TV series Party of Five, albeit with the addition of several murders. Unlike as in the other ﬁlms discussed in this section, parents and parental ﬁgures are absent, and the serial-killing protagonists are a squabbling quintet of orphaned siblings who move from suburban neighbourhood to suburban neighbourhood, leaving a trail of mutilated bodies behind them. As the ﬁlm progresses, we get lots of not particularly subtle hints as to why murder seems to be such a vocation amongst the family (such as a lot of talk about ‘doing what we need to do to survive’ and ‘feeding’), and ominous hints as to the nature of a mysterious creature named ‘Lenny’ who is kept (you guessed it) in a crate in the basement and occasionally fed the odd teenage girl. It ﬁnally transpires that the Hamiltons are actually modern-day vampires whose bloodthirsty proclivities violently kick in with the onset of puberty (hence Lenny’s conﬁnement to the basement until he learns some self-control). It’s a predictable and lamely supernatural variation on the kind of ‘outsiders/aliens trying to hide in suburbia’ plotline seen in 1990s comedies such as the witty Meet the Applegates (1991), and rather less successful Coneheads (1993) and Suburban Commando (1991). The best depictions of iconic horror ﬁgures amidst a suburban setting remain the blackly comic Canadian ﬁlm Ginger Snaps (2000), in which a deeply misanthropic teenage girl transforms into a werewolf and terrorises her bland neighbourhood, and Tim Burton’s charming variation on Frankenstein, Edward Scissorhands (1990), a quirky, gothic-inﬂected suburban fairytale, complete with angry lynch mob and a castle on a hill. As we have seen, then, more often than not, the suburban-set American horror ﬁlm tends to be about killers who hail from that milieu themselves. While occasional narratives, such as the Thomas Harris adaptation Manhunter (1986) (remade in 2002 as Red Dragon) may have as their villain a resentful, decidedly non-local outsider who vents his own inadequacies upon innocent suburbanites, it is much more common for the killer in suburban-set narratives to be a suburbanite themselves, and to prey upon friends, neighbours and even their own family. Interestingly, while ﬁlms made before 1980 tend to focus upon murderous suburban or pseudo-suburban boys next door gone wrong (such as Norman Bates, Bobby Thompson and Michael Myers), from that date onwards, the friendly neighbourhood serial killer becomes more and more associated with deranged parental ﬁgures who conceal their violent tendencies beneath an unstable façade of middle-class

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respectability. This is most likely, at least in part, a reaction to the resurgent emphasis upon conservative ‘family values’ promoted by the Reagan and Bush administrations as a reaction to the perceived excesses of the 1970s. It is within the supposedly sacred boundaries of the nuclear family then, that the horror in these ﬁlms generally emanates: be it as an understandable, but extreme reaction to terrible provocation (as in The Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes and A Nightmare on Elm Street); the product of unrealistic standards derived from cultural propaganda of the 1950s (The People Under the Stairs, Parents, The Stepfather and Serial Mom); or an apparently random compulsion to commit terrible acts of murder (Halloween, Targets, Head Case, Scream, Disturbia). To return to the quotation from Stephen King which I referenced at the beginning of Chapter 1, this truly is ‘horror in the house down the street’ taken to its logical conclusion. The trend is at once both a return to the domestic unease of the literary American gothic, from Charles Brockden Brown to William Faulkner and, more speciﬁcally, a further riposte to the notion of the family orientated suburban utopia promoted so vigorously during the 1950s and early 1960s. If cinema is the collective unconscious of the modern age, then, as J.G. Ballard has suggested, the suburbs really do dream of violence, and the fact that most of this on-screen violence is perpetrated by suburbanites themselves tells us a great deal about how Americans see both themselves and their neighbourhoods.41

6

‘Ah, But Underneath . . .’ Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Desperate Housewives

The pilot episode of Marc Cherry’s immensely successful television show Desperate Housewives (2004–) begins with a literal bang and with an opening sequence which immediately gives the viewer a strong indication of the direction which will be taken by the rest of the ﬁrst season.1 ‘My name is Mary Alice Young’, our initially unseen narrator tells us, as the roving camera comes to a halt outside a picture-perfect suburban home, complete with mandatory white picket fence. ‘When you read this morning’s paper, you may come across an article about the unusual day I had last week.’ There follows a brief montage in which we see Mary Alice, a serene-looking and immaculately groomed housewife in her late thirties, carry out a number of everyday tasks. It is, it seems, a day much like every other day for our narrator, one which she spends ‘quietly polishing the routine of my life until it gleamed with perfection’.2 Her next act does deviate from the normal routine: she takes a gun out of a closet and shoots herself. The show’s precisely calibrated opening teaser is yet another take on what we have already seen is an immensely familiar scenario in American popular culture: the depiction of suburbia as a placid and privileged locale beneath which terrible secrets and irrational forces lurk, waiting their chance to erupt violently into the open. Like the opening murder in Halloween, the supernatural abduction of little Carol Anne Freeling in Poltergeist, or even the disproportionately disturbing delivery of the wrong couch in Todd Haynes’s Safe, Mary Alice’s suicide, the mysterious act which furnishes the principal narrative hook of the ﬁrst season of Desperate Housewives, is the ﬁrst unmistakable sign that something is rotten in the deceptively placid state of yet another ﬁctional suburb. 166

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Another scene from another television show, this time, the ending, rather than the beginning: as a suburban town quickly collapses into a vast underground crevasse which was once an entrance to hell itself, Buffy Summers, a young woman in her early twenties, races across the crumbling roof tops with superhuman speed and agility, barely managing to outpace the seismic cracks which are swallowing the buildings around her. With a ﬁnal burst of energy she leaps on to the roof of the school bus which will carry her to safety. Once they have exited the danger zone, the bus stops, and the battle-scarred group of survivors – who have, after all, just saved the world, and not for the ﬁrst time – pauses for a moment to consider the smoking crater that was once their home town with decidedly mixed feelings. ‘All those stores gone . . . The Gap, Starbucks, Toys ‘R Us . . . who will remember these landmarks unless we tell the world of them?’ one of the group remarks wryly, in a reminder of the fact that had Sunnydale, California, not rested upon a conduit to hell, it would have otherwise been a wholly unremarkable middle-class town. The group gradually assembles behind its youthful leader, who has been silently gazing at the smouldering ruins, which come complete with an ironic ‘Welcome to Sunnydale’ sign perched on their rim. The others wait for Buffy to say something, until younger sister Dawn ﬁnally speaks for them all. ‘Buffy? What are we gonna do now?’ The viewer never gets to hear the answer, and Buffy The Vampire Slayer’s ﬁnal season instead concludes with a close-up of its heroine’s gradually widening smile, as she realises that whatever the future holds, at least it presents a great many more options than have ever been open to her before. This suburban apocalypse has had a happy ending, of sorts. In this, my ﬁnal chapter, I shall begin by discussing two of the most prominent examples of the televisual Suburban Gothic in recent times: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) and Desperate Housewives (2004–). As Douglas Mezzio and Thomas Halper have noted in their useful 2002 essay on the suburb and its representation in the American movies, during the mid to late 1990s, the milieu became something of a ﬁxation for directors and screenwriters, with ﬁlms such as The Ice Storm (1997), Happiness (1998), Apt Pupil (1998), American Beauty (1999), Crime and Punishment in Suburbia (2000) and The Virgin Suicides (2000) all presenting by this time stereotypically bleak representations of the locale and its inhabitants.3 Given the regularity with which recurrent tropes in cinema tend to surface again on contemporary television screens a few years later it is hardly surprising that recent years have seen the emergence of a raft of suburban-set television shows, several of which have a notably gothic bent as well as a strong awareness of the

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pre-existing audience expectations aroused by their locale. In Buffy the Vampire Slayer 4 and Desperate Housewives we can see reﬂections of the two principal (and inherently related strands) of the gothic: the supernatural and non-supernatural. In BTVS, the heroine battles all manner of supernatural foes drawn to her town by the so-called ‘Hellmouth’ which lies beneath Sunnydale’s prosaic exterior. Here, suburbia is a place only ever a few moments away from violent disorder, and death and disruption are embedded in the very fabric of the community. In Desperate Housewives, the overt supernaturalism and apocalyptic tendencies of BTVS are avoided in favour of a wry depiction of the suburban locale as a place of quiet desperation and festering secrets which, once revealed, are rapidly replaced by yet more darkly enthralling secrets for our quartet of heroines alternatively to investigate and conceal. As we shall see, besides the fact that a suburban setting features prominently in both shows, what is also important about them is the way in which in both the very idea of suburbia becomes more important than the physical space itself. Notably, in both, black humour and a wryly post-modern self-awareness play an important role in the way in which they relate to the audience. In other words, the characters themselves, as well as the audience, are conscious that they are participating in a text which is all too aware of its own place in the pop-culture continuum, whether that fact is overtly or covertly referenced. These are suburban-set texts in which the protagonists (and writers) frequently remind us of their place amidst the long line of similar narratives. Buffy Summers and the ‘Scooby Gang’ (as her friends and comrades in the war against demonic evil have knowingly dubbed themselves in a reference to the classic cartoon Scooby Doo) are the most obviously self-aware characters in this regard. As Anne Billson has noted: ‘The Scoobies’ conversation is peppered with references to cult TV shows and ﬁlms: The Wild Bunch, The Exorcist, Godzilla, The Shining, Spider-Man, Star Trek, Lost in Space, The Untouchables, Superman, Sabrina the Teenage Witch are just some of the titles casually dropped into season one. And the namedropping is not just limited to quotes . . . but twisted into adjectives and verbs’.5 Similarly, Desperate Housewives is generally wryly aware of the debt owed to previous ﬁlms and television shows: overtly gothic and fantastical productions such as Twin Peaks and The Stepford Wives as well as slightly more mainstream fare such as the ﬁlms of Douglas Sirk, the 1960s small-town pot-boiler Peyton Place and glossy 1980s and 1990s soap opera Knots Landing which was similarly set in a suburban cul-de-sac (and also featured peripheral desperate housewife Nicolette Sheridan).

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In fact, the hybrid generic nature of both is a key factor in their popularity and attraction for critics. BTVS is most obviously a supernatural horror but it is also an angst-ridden female bildungsroman, a superhero show (for Buffy, like many a geeky teenage boy before her, is a gifted ‘chosen one’), and a teen-orientated melodrama with strong comedic elements. Similarly, Desperate Housewives combines familiar soap opera tropes with obviously gothic elements, as well as utilising aspects of the murder mystery in the ﬁrst season arc in which the reasons behind Mary Alice’s suicide are investigated. As in BTVS, humour – particularly morbid black comedy and slapstick – also plays an important role in the show. In other words, both shows combine a number of different generic elements, something which in itself isn’t all that unusual: as Helen Wheatley has noted, ‘Television genres are notoriously hybridised and are becoming more so’.6 BTVS and Desperate Housewives are, as I have indicated, by no means the only notable suburban-set American television shows of recent years. One other such show is the ironically titled Big Love (HBO 2006–), a dark domestic drama about a successful businessman and family man named Bill Henrickson (Bill Paxton) who belongs to a fundamentalist offshoot of mainstream Mormonism. Henrickson secretly has three different wives and families, a fact he must conceal from the community at large in order to escape prosecution. His respective families live in three adjoining houses which he has secretly connected together so that they may live as one group. In addition, his former cult and family members back in the settlement constantly pressure him to return home to the run-down and repressive religious compound in which he was raised, which is led by his tyrannical father-in-law Roman, and it is this contrast between Bill’s seemingly normal suburban life and the secrets which he and his family must conceal from mainstream society which provides one of the main conﬂicts of the show (alongside the often fraught relationship between his various wives). Another signiﬁcant suburban-set show is the comedy-drama Weeds (Showtime, 2005–) which was often, at least initially, compared to Desperate Housewives because it focused upon the travails of a dysfunctional housewife living in an upscale middle-class neighbourhood. However, as the show progressed, it became clear that Weeds differed signiﬁcantly from its better-known predecessor. Here, Mary Louise Parker stars as Nancy Botwin, a resourceful, perpetually shell-shocked-looking young widow who becomes a marijuana dealer in order to maintain the privileged lifestyle to which she and her children have become accustomed. Everyone in her upscale suburb of Agrestic, Southern California is on the

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make in one respect or another: from her corrupt pot-head accountant Doug (who also leads the local council) to her booze-sodden and devastatingly sarcastic best friend, Celia (Elizabeth Perkins), who rules the PTA with a ﬁst of iron, at least until her life falls apart in later episodes. One of the most interesting things about the show is the way in which afﬂuent white suburbia is consistently paralleled with the poorer, but less hypocritical, African American neighbourhood in the city into which Nancy must nervously venture in order to keep her ‘respectable’ clientele supplied. Unlike Desperate Housewives, in which the world outside Wisteria Lane, both literally and metaphorically, is seldom depicted, in Weeds the connections between Agrestic and the poorer, more ethnically diverse communities which surround it, as well the economic, social and political contexts of the real world are a crucial element of the show. Nancy buys weed from the ghetto and sells it to her friends and neighbours, who think of themselves as law-abiding, respectable people, in order to maintain the luxurious home she barely gets to spend any time in. In fact, the more Nancy does in order to maintain her outwardly respectable ‘suburban’ lifestyle and ﬁnancial security for her children, the further she actually gets from it. In later seasons, she becomes increasingly active in the criminal underworld, builds a grow house in the suburbs, has a ‘fakery’ (fake bakery) which she uses as a respectable front for her illicit business and becomes mixed up with criminal elements from a number of ethnic backgrounds. In the third season she even becomes, brieﬂy, the lackey to an aggressive African American drug dealer and gang leader who grooms her as his lieutenant. The third series ends as Agrestic, which has now been absorbed into a larger, super-suburb called ‘Majestic’ (run by business savvy Evangelical Christians), is destroyed by a wildﬁre started deliberately by one of Nancy’s criminal associates in order to wipe out the competition. Signiﬁcantly, Nancy seizes the opportunity afforded by this catastrophe to pour gasoline around the house she has sacriﬁced so much to maintain and burns it to the ground.7 Like Buffy Summers, she then gathers up her family and heads for new climes, having ﬁnally escaped the increasingly onerous demands of the privileged suburban lifestyle. Of course, the move also brings with it a whole new set of problems, foremost among them being the fact that Nancy is becoming ever more embroiled in the criminal underworld which once horriﬁed her so much: she ends up working for a Mexican drug cartel involved in trafﬁcking contraband across the border. In a rather obvious metaphor, the drugs are transported to white America via a secret tunnel constructed under the maternity store which Nancy runs as a respectable front. Even though she has ﬁnally escaped

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the suburbs, therefore, Nancy chooses to remain involved in criminal activities. This dynamic is not entirely dissimilar to that seen in The Sopranos (HBO 1999–2007). The well-known and often parodied opening sequence of the show follows mob boss and series anti-hero Tony Soprano as he drives from New York City to his luxurious home in the suburbs of New Jersey. Like Nancy Botwin, Tony’s wife Carmella, (though not actively involved in her husband’s criminal activities) is nevertheless adept at convincing herself that using dirty money to ﬁnance her family’s upscale lifestyle is ﬁne so long as no one gets caught. As in Weeds, and in many other suburban-set texts, both gothic and non-gothic, upper-middle class suburbia is seen as a place of moral compromise and material entrapment for women, a perspective which is also found, as we have seen, in the likes of Jack’s Wife, Bewitched, The Stepford Wives and Safe. A similar depiction of the locale can be seen in a more recent show set in the early 1960s created and written by former Sopranos scribe Matthew Weiner. In Mad Men (AMC, 2007–) the link between the advertising industry and the suburban housewife which is dramatised in overtly fantastical terms in The Stepford Wives here becomes the basis for a show which traces the commercial and personal intrigues of a successful but emotionally bankrupt Manhattan advertising executive named Don Draper (John Hamm). Draper provides his materially fulﬁlled but emotionally deprived young trophy wife Betty (January Jones) with a large home in the suburbs which essentially functions as a kind of gilded cage. Indeed, she’s the very picture of a Feminine Mystique-era desperate housewife: intelligent, college-educated, attractive and deeply dissatisﬁed with her supposedly perfect life, to the extent that later episodes of the ﬁrst season seem to suggest that she is on the verge of psychotic breakdown. Though it doesn’t fall into the category of the Suburban Gothic, Mad Men is nevertheless a remarkably incisive and bleakly illuminating portrait of the so-called ‘Golden Age’ between the upheavals of the Second World War and Vietnam. Furthermore, in the ﬁgure of Don Draper, the series features one of the most compelling televisual anti-heroes of recent years. Like Bill Henrickson in Mad Love, and Tony in The Sopranos, Draper spends his time attempting to balance a seemingly wholesome family life – wife, kids, a nice house and a big car in the driveway – with an illicit secret life of frequent extramarital affairs and a notably mysterious past. As with Mary Alice in Desperate Housewives, even Draper’s very name is an invention. He literally is a self-made man who adopted another identity during his tour of duty in the Korean War

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and did his best to leave his old, dirt-poor life as a farmer’s son behind forever. It makes perfect sense, then, that a man who has reinvented himself so thoroughly and successfully should make a career out of trying to think of the cleverest way to sell things to other people. Thus, the association between moral compromise and the suburbs isn’t only a feminine trait, as novels by the likes of John Cheever, John Updike and Richard Yates made clear decades before. Suburbia also provides the setting for two of the most popular animated TV series of the past decade: The Simpsons and Family Guy. A signiﬁcant factor in the popularity of both shows is their wry awareness of their own status as modern day versions (and subversions) of the 1960s suburban-set sitcom, as well as their constant stream of references to other television shows, movies, current events and other pop cultural reference points (a trait shared with BTVS and, to a lesser extent, Desperate Housewives). Horror and the gothic intrude in The Simpsons most obviously in the form of the show’s annual ‘Treehouse of Horror’ Halloween special which generally takes the form of three short segments strung together by a framing narrative (for instance, a scary story told at bedtime, or a skit in which Bart Simpson appears as a Rod Serling type-ﬁgure and introduces each tale). The Halloween specials provide an excuse for the writers to spoof wellknown horror ﬁlms, television shows or even, on occasion, to adapt loosely classic gothic texts such as Frankenstein, Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Raven’ or W.W. Jacobs’ ‘The Monkey’s Paw’. Storylines from the original run of The Twilight Zone (1959–1964) have frequently been adapted, with source episodes including Jerome Bixby’s classic story ‘It’s a Good Life’, which was the basis for ‘Bart the Monster’. Interestingly though, given the suburban-related nature of so many of his stories, Richard Matheson-authored episodes seem to be particularly popular: adaptations include ‘Terror at 30,000 Feet’ (the basis for ‘Terror at 5½ Feet’, in which Bart sees a gremlin attacking his school bus), ‘Little Girl Lost’ (as ‘Homer 3D’), and I Am Legend (‘The Hmega Man’), as well as the 1985 New Twilight Zone episode ‘A Little Peace and Quiet’ (‘Stop the World I Want to Goof Off’). Other, nonMatheson sources have included horror movies such as A Nightmare on Elm Street (‘Nightmare on Evergreen Terrace’) David Cronenberg’s The Fly (‘Fly vs Fly’), I Know What You Did Last Summer (‘I Know What You Diddly-Id’), The Island of Dr Moreau (‘The Island of Dr Hibbert’) and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (as ‘The Shinning’). Famously, the Simpson family’s hometown of Springﬁeld, like the ‘Fairview’ of Desperate Housewives, is a ﬁctional suburban town located in a deliberately

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indeterminate state, thus functioning as a kind of ironically universal ‘every-town’. Seth MacFarlane’s Family Guy (1999–), also furnishes the pop-culturesavvy viewer with a near-constant stream of allusions and references to other shows, movies and current events, albeit in rather a less sophisticated fashion. While such allusions are generally woven into the main storyline in Simpsons episodes, much of the running time of each instalment of Family Guy consists of brazen non-sequiturs which do little to advance the main storyline.8 As noted in Chapter 4, Family Guy’s most obvious foray into Gothic territory was in an episode entitled ‘Petergeist’ which parodied Poltergeist in a relatively faithful manner. Both BTVS and Desperate Housewives have been already been the subjects of an unusually high level of critical and academic interest, an indication both of academia’s growing interest in popular culture and of the fact that both shows, in their own way, have managed to engage with the zeitgeist of late-twentieth-century and early-twentyﬁrst-century America in a manner that actively encourages critical engagement and commercial spin-offs. There already exists a rapidly expanding number of critical studies and commentaries on BTVS. Similarly, though only on the air for four years, Desperate Housewives has been the subject of one academic essay collection (McCabe and Arkass, 2006), a surprising amount of Bible-based responses to the show, and, like BTVS, episode guides, calendars, light-hearted responses and even a cookbook, as well as a great many state-of-the-nation-style newspaper articles which have tended to treat the series (at least initially) as if it has something very serious indeed to say about life in the suburbs and the lot of American middle-class womanhood. My discussion of both shows in the following pages will, by necessity, be a rather general engagement with them in relation to issues and preoccupations already discussed in this study. In other words, rather than providing a detailed episode-by-episode analysis of the shows, I will establish the ways in which each represents a repetition and reconﬁguration of the key themes and tropes of the Suburban Gothic at a time when many commentators have suggested that the very survival of suburbia itself is in serious question.

‘From beneath you, it devours’: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the suburban apocalypse Buffy Summers, is, essentially, the ﬁnal girl to end all ﬁnal girls, even if as a blonde, pretty and popular teenager she does (deliberately) seem

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at ﬁrst to have more in common with the typically air-headed victims of suburban-set horror ﬁlms such as Halloween and A Nightmare on Elm Street rather than their intelligent, resourceful, and (usually) brunette survivors ﬁrst clearly deﬁned by Carol J. Clover. Show creator Joss Whedon has said that in creating the character he was determined to upend one of the most characteristic clichés of the 1980s slasher genre: ‘The idea for the ﬁlm came from seeing so many blondes walking into dark alleyways and being killed. I wanted, just once, for her to ﬁght back when the monster attacked and kick his ass’.9 Whedon’s initial script became the basis for the 1992 movie Buffy the Vampire Slayer, directed by Fran Rubel Kuzui, which was about a self-absorbed cheerleader (here played by Kirsty Swanson) whose materialistic and self-centred way of life – largely focused around boys and the local shopping mall – is forever changed by the revelation that she is the chosen one, the sole ‘slayer’ born in her generation – a super-powered champion of humanity destined to defend the world from vampires. Though the movie had an interesting premise and Whedon’s script contained some genuinely witty lines, Swanson was a rather unappealing heroine, the execution and pacing was lacklustre, and as Buffy’s vampiric nemesis ‘The Master’, Rutger Hauer lacked conviction. The ﬁlm was a critical and commercial failure. Nevertheless, Whedon was convinced that if he were allowed to develop the idea himself, it would be a success, and so several years later reconﬁgured the concept as a television show. Apart from the obvious cast change (Sarah Michelle Gellar replaced Swanson as the ubiquitous heroine) and more sophisticated execution, perhaps the most obvious difference between the ﬁlm and the show is in terms of setting. While the original movie had been set in Los Angeles, and gleaned much of its humour from the juxtaposition between Buffy’s vacuous ‘Valley Girl’ persona and her unlikely destiny as a stake-wielding saviour of humanity, the series moved the action to the ﬁctional Southern Californian town of Sunnydale, partially based upon Santa Barbara (Hellmouth aside, of course). We are told in the ﬁrst episode, ‘Welcome to the Hellmouth’, that following her daughter’s expulsion for burning down the school gym (in order to kill the vampires inside) and the breakup of her marriage, Joyce Summers has decided that a major change of scene is in order. Like many a heroine of the Suburban Gothic before her, then, Buffy’s story begins with an unwelcome move from a sprawling urban environment to a much smaller-scale, and ultimately more dangerous, suburban setting. Furthermore, as we soon discover, Sunnydale is not the afﬂuent, placid commuter town that it appears on the surface. Having decided

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that his heroine needed to battle more than merely vampires if her exploits were to provide the basis for an ongoing series, Whedon provided the show’s writers with a convenient explanation for any and all kinds of supernatural shenanigans. Sunnydale actually sits upon a so-called ‘Hellmouth’, a kind of unstable supernatural fault-line situated below the library of Sunnydale High School which attracts (principally) vampires, but also ghosts, demons, werewolves, zombies and, indeed, practically every kind of malign supernatural creature one can imagine. As Boyd Tonkin has noted, in an article which persuasively links the show’s apocalyptic bent to the real-world seismic instabilities of Southern California, and in particular fears of the so-called ‘Big One’ – the long awaited earthquake to end all earthquakes – the show’s ‘regular commuter trafﬁc of monsters and demons surges through the thin crust of the new suburbs to bring mayhem and threaten annihilation’.10 In each and every episode of the show, therefore, ‘normal’ life for Buffy, her friends and the town generally is only ever a few moments away from some sort of violent supernatural disruption caused by proximity to the Hellmouth. Though it may well be the most famous suburban entrance to hell, Sunnydale is, as we have seen already, by no means unique. There is the basement in The Amityville Horror which becomes a portal to hell; the country club in Wes Craven’s TV movie Invitation to Hell which serves the same function; and of course, the cupboard in the children’s room in Poltergeist which similarly becomes a gateway through which malevolent forces intrude. In addition, in an episode of the Buffy spin-off Angel entitled ‘Underneath’, Gunn, one of the show’s main characters, is temporarily sent to a hell dimension, which in this case is a Groundhogday-style version of suburban life in which he is brutally murdered again and again in his basement only to reawaken every morning at the breakfast table and unknowingly perpetuate the unchanging temporal loop. Sunnydale’s predicament also brings to mind that of the town in another, slightly earlier television show in which all manner of supernatural and paranormal activity manifested itself within a suburban setting: the short-lived but intriguing children’s television show Eerie, Indiana (1991–92). As Marshall Teller, the pre-teen hero of the show explained at the beginning of the ﬁrst episode (directed by Joe Dante, who had prior experience with suburban weirdness in The ’Burbs and also served as a creative consultant), Eerie was actually the ‘centre of weirdness for the entire planet’ – a predicament that Buffy Summers could no doubt sympathise with. Furthermore, also as in BTVS, the show begins as the principal protagonist moves from a major city to

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the supposedly quieter environs of suburbia, only to ﬁnd that his new surroundings are actually a great deal more dangerous than his former home. In addition, the opening sequence of the show, in which footage of the mundane goings-on of Marshall’s ‘average’-seeming neighbourhood is doubled in order to convey a sense of all-pervasive strangeness to the viewer, anticipates the title sequence of Weeds, which would do much the same thing. Just as Buffy herself is an inherently modern, hip young girl who also happens to be burdened with grave powers and responsibilities passed down to her over many generations, so too is her new town irrevocably tied to the past because of the paranormal abyss upon which it rests. As we discover during season three of the show, (in which Richard Wilkins (Harry Groener), the superﬁcially charming but evil mayor of Sunnydale becomes Buffy’s principal nemesis), unbeknownst to all but a few, the Hellmouth has shaped the town’s growth and development since the very ﬁrst human settlements were established there. In fact, those in authority – the police, the media, the high school principal, are, as we ultimately discover, only too aware that something is very wrong indeed in their town but choose to keep silent, or, in some cases, actively collude with the forces of evil. These revelations not only make sense in terms of cohering with the show’s internal logic (after all, it would be rather silly to think that no one apart from Buffy and her friends had ever noticed Sunnydale’s unusually high death rate and frequent ‘wild animal’ attacks), but also highlight the fact that the show is yet another example of a Suburban Gothic text in which both local residents and the authorities fail to act upon the fact that something is obviously very wrong in their neighbourhood. One need think only of Dr Loomis’s Cassandra-like failure to arouse sufﬁcient alarm in Haddonﬁeld regarding the escape of Michael Myers; of Nancy Thompson’s similar problem in A Nightmare on Elm Street; or even the refusal of Colquitt and Walter Kennedy’s neighbours to accept that the ‘house next door’ in Anne Rivers Siddons’ novel of the same name brings misfortune and madness to everyone unlucky enough to live there. According to show lore, Sunnydale was originally the site of a mission town known as ‘Boca Del Infeirno’ built by Spanish colonists during the eighteenth century and destroyed by a massive earthquake in 1812 that all but erased all memories of its existence. Another massive tremor, which precipitated a cave in which the lair of ﬁrst series villain ‘The Master’ (an ancient and powerful vampire) occurred during the 1930s. The area is therefore no stranger to mass destruction even before the explosive series ﬁnale. The most recent phase of Sunnydale’s development is

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said to have started in 1899, when the town in its modern incarnation was founded by Mayor Wilkins, who gained power and immortality by promising to found a town upon which the demons and vampires who seeped out of the Hellmouth could feed. There are scattered references to Sunnydale’s ancient history, and to the local Indian tribe who were aware of the Hellmouth’s existence, and ultimately wiped out by the settlers (most notably in the fourth season episode ‘Pangs’), thus making the series in some senses a variation upon the ever familiar ‘built on an Indian burial ground’ trope. What is also interesting is the way in which many of the vampires who constitute Buffy’s most consistent threat are very much associated with Europe, rather than a speciﬁcally American context. As Anne Billson has noted of Sunnydale: Most of the monsters are not homegrown, but ﬁnd their way into town via the portals of the museum, art gallery, zoo or docks. With the exception of Darla (a prostitute sired by the master in a seventeenth-century Virginia colony), all the oldest and most powerful vampires and demons in the series hail from Old Europe. They are not just illegal immigrants without Green Cards; they are corrupters of the New World . . .11 What is also particularly interesting is the fact that males associated with the supernatural in the show almost always have some sort of European connection. Buffy’s main love interest in the series, brooding vampire with-a-soul Angel (David Boreanaz) came from eighteenthcentury Ireland (and unfortunately, both BTVS and Angel have frequent historical ﬂashbacks in which Boreanaz is able to showcase his painfully tin-eared Irish accent), while initial villain, and then unwilling member of the Scooby gang, Spike, another powerful vampire with a violent past, is English. The most prominent Englishman in the show is, of course, Rupert Giles (Anthony Head), the school librarian, who is Buffy’s mentor, guide and, increasingly as the series progresses, substitute father ﬁgure. Giles is a ‘Watcher’, initially appointed by the British-based Watchers Council to guide the training and development of the young slayer, although as Buffy grows more and more conﬁdent of her own abilities she rejects the council’s decidedly authoritarian rule and takes charge of her own destiny. Indeed, this drive against restrictive patriarchal control and desire for female self-determination is something of a constant theme of the series in general, and one which climaxes in the events of the ﬁnal episode, in which Buffy and Willow activate the powers of thousands of other latent slayers all over the world, thus directly

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contradicting the now defunct Watchers Council directive that there can only be one ‘Chosen One’ in each generation. Signiﬁcantly too, all of the European men in Buffy’s life have murderous, violent pasts: as his soulless alter-ego Angelus, Angel slaughtered hundreds of innocent humans in order to satisfy his bloodlust (and during the series, suffers a major relapse into bad habits the moment he experiences one true moment of happiness). Spike, who will also become a love interest for Buffy, is another mass murderer of longstanding, while even the more obviously benevolent Giles dabbled in black magic as a reckless young man and caused great harm to others. The decidedly European, Old World origins of many of the most powerful threats to face Buffy and her cohorts contrasts nicely, of course, with the distinctively modern, Californian, suburban nature of both Sunnydale and Buffy herself. Time and time again, non-North American monsters – generally European, but on the odd occasion South American or African – disrupt the town’s tenuous façade of serenity only to be defeated by the local golden girl and her cohorts. The fact that Buffy and her friends (with the exception of Giles and Angel) are all teenagers helps make the battle between the Old World and the new all the more obvious. Indeed, in the ﬁrst two seasons in particular, it is very much a teenager’s-eye view of the average suburban town: most of the episodes are set in Sunnydale High School, or in other age-appropriate venues such as local teen hang-out ‘The Bronze’ (which is destroyed by evildoers almost as often as Buffy’s home), or even on occasion Sunnydale Mall. During the fourth and ﬁfth seasons, the classrooms and dorms of Sunnydale University (secretly the site of the government-appointed ‘Initiative’, a kind of state-sanctioned paramilitary force assigned to control the town’s more troublesome supernatural menaces, whose underground headquarters ominously evoke the Hellmouth itself) also feature regularly. So, of course, do Sunnydale’s many cemeteries, which, like the Vancouver forests perpetually being trudged through by Mulder and Scully in The X-Files, are virtually omnipresent. While many of the threats with which Buffy and her cohorts are faced have European origins, however, it is the very local and speciﬁcally American Hellmouth which attracts these dangerous outsiders to Sunnydale in the ﬁrst place: hence, horror can once more be said to have begun at home. The general dynamic of the series – in which a group of savvy suburban teenagers must battle against threatening forces that most of the adults around them choose either to ignore altogether, or in some instances actually collude with, is similar to that of Halloween and Wes Craven’s Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream trilogy. We are also left in

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no doubt that it is the young people of Sunnydale who have suffered most at the hands of the vampires and demons which rampage round town on a regular basis. This is made poignantly clear in season three episode ‘The Prom’, in which Buffy is presented with a ‘Class Protector’ award because ‘the class of ’99 has the lowest mortality rate of any class in Sunnydale history’. Once again, therefore, the suburbs are seen as a particularly dangerous place for teenagers and young adults. The most obvious clash between Old World supernatural evil and the decidedly new world, suburban slayer is perhaps that which takes place in the wry ﬁfth season episode ‘Buffy vs Dracula’, in which Buffy must battle the most infamous vampire of all. One of the episode’s funniest conceits is the fact that the Count comes complete with medieval castle. As Billson has observed, therefore, ‘Like the show itself, the town extracts or expands to ﬁt the writer’s demands. Anything goes, so long as they can come up with a workable supernatural pretext.’12 The Summers house, a pleasant if wholly unremarkable-looking suburban home furnished with all mod cons and, naturally, a basement in which terrible things frequently take place, plays an evolving role during the series, as Buffy’s own relation to the house changes. As previously noted, during the ﬁrst series, Buffy constantly has to sneak in and out of the house at night like a clichéd rebellious teen, except most of the time she does so out of duty rather than for her own pleasure. Like a microcosm of Sunnydale itself, the Summers residence is time and time again invaded by monstrous and violent supernatural forces who wish to do harm to those that dwell within. Vampires who are, as in traditional folklore, barred from setting foot in any home they have not been invited to enter try to sweet-talk their way inside on more than one occasion. Indeed, the place is smashed up so often that it becomes a kind of weary joke. Demonic assassins pose as door-to-door salesmen (‘What’s My Line’, Pt 1); a possessed African mask turns party guests into zombies (‘Dead Man’s Party’); a robotic madman attacks Buffy because she won’t submit to his tyrannical demands (‘Ted’); vengeful Indian spirits besiege the place at Thanksgiving (‘Pangs’); no one can leave the house due to a spell cast by Buffy’s troubled little sister Dawn (‘Older and Far Away’). The most disruptive event of all to occur in the Summers house, however, has absolutely nothing at all to do with the supernatural. In season ﬁve episode ‘The Body’, Buffy returns home from another successful bout of super heroics to ﬁnd her mother, who has been recovering from neurosurgery, dead on the couch. From this point on, Buffy’s relationship with 1630 Revello Drive changes utterly. Not only must she cope with the tragic loss of her mother, but she is also now the one

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responsible for raising Dawn (who has understandable issues of her own, due to the fact that she’s really a trans-dimensional key unwittingly disguised as a human being), and for the sole upkeep of the household. Even though the community of close friends and allies she battles evil with play a vitally important role in her life, her mother has always been her emotional bulwark, the one last reminder of normality. Following Joyce’s death, real-world practicalities take on an increasingly important role in the show. Though she’s a college drop-out, Buffy is now the one who must maintain the suburban lifestyle for the last vestiges of the Summers clan (that is, herself and Dawn). Buffy’s inability to juggle successfully her domestic responsibilities becomes something of a recurrent theme during the sixth season. Constantly under attack from demons and vampires, the house is in frequent need of repair, and there are still bills to be paid and accounts to be settled. A degree of economic realism unusual for a genre show became apparent in episodes such as ‘Flooded’, ‘Life Serial’, and ‘Doublemeat Palace’, in which Buffy has to take on various minimum wage jobs in order to try and make ends meet. Like many present day suburbanites suffering from the effects of the global economic recession and the sub-prime crisis, Buffy ﬁnds it increasingly difﬁcult to maintain the lifestyle to which she and her sister have become accustomed. This element of the series also brings it in line with other texts in which issues of class and income (or lack of it) are signiﬁcant, such as Jay Anson’s The Amityville Horror and The House Next Door. The Summers dwelling takes on a new role in the ﬁnal series of the show, in which it becomes a barracks/ﬁeld hospital for the dozens of newly empowered ‘slayer potentials’ who may or may not inherit Buffy’s mantle when she dies (again, having leaped to a heroic death during the ﬁnale of the previous series, only to be resurrected by Willow). This allows the writers to make yet another wry reference to earlier Suburban Gothic texts: during the months in which the real slayer is dead, her friends use the identical-in-appearance but extremely docile ‘Buffy Bot’ to fool foes and the local social services alike into believing that she’s alive and well, in an obvious reference to Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives. By the last episode, therefore, the structure’s original function as a family home has been well and truly usurped, just as Buffy herself has made the difﬁcult transition from happy-go-lucky teenager to general of a rag-tag army destined to defeat the seemingly unstoppable forces of ancient evil. Sunnydale’s climactic collapse into the abyss represents not a defeat, but the culmination of a hard-fought victory. Indeed, one gets the distinct impression that none of the main characters is

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particularly devastated to see their hometown crumble around them. The town’s origins and development were, after all, inextricably linked to the Hellmouth, and it makes thematic sense that with the closure of the demonic portal the community itself – so irrevocably tainted by darkness – should be destroyed (albeit after a massive evacuation of the residents, of course). As in Weeds, then, a little local apocalypse and the destruction of all of one’s possessions and associated social and ﬁscal responsibilities represents an opportunity to make a new start rather than an occasion for regret. Similarly, in The House Next Door, it is only when they have lost everything which once mattered to them – their jobs, their friends and their standing in the community – that Walter and Colquitt Kennedy truly come to realise what they mean to one another and decide to undertake a doomed but heroic act of resistance. It is an interesting contrast to the previously discussed conclusion to The Amityville Horror in which the ﬁnancial ruin and the loss of material goods experienced by the Lutz family as a result of their hasty exit from the house is depicted as by far the most devastating consequence of their supposed ‘haunting’. Furthermore, Sunnydale’s fate – ﬁnally devoured whole by the dark forces which helped establish the community in the ﬁrst place – could also be seen as a suitably ironic counterpart to a growing body of opinion in the real world which holds that American suburbia, predicated as it is upon the availability of cheap energy and natural resources, will soon be undone by the removal of these crutches. In a 2008 online debate hosted by The New York Times, in which various experts and commentators were asked what the suburbs would look like in 40 years, New Urbanist James Howard Kunstler responded: ‘the suburbs have three destinies, none of them exclusive: as materials salvage, as slums, and as ruins.’13 Considered in those terms, the destiny of Buffy’s troubled and decidedly unlamented hometown doesn’t seem all that unlikely after all, nor does the pragmatic migration to pastures new with which the show concludes. As we shall see, the metaphorical signiﬁcance of a show in which a suburban community literally stands on an abyss seems more prescient at the moment than it did during the show’s initial run.

‘It’s the age-old question, isn’t it? How much do we really want to know about our neighbours?’ Desperate Housewives It may be Hellmouth free (so far), but still, who in their right mind would want to live on Wisteria Lane, the ﬁctional cul-de-sac in which Desperate Housewives is set? Yes, it’s true that the sun always shines,

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that the cul-de-sac is undeniably pretty and spacious (if perhaps just a little too perfect looking), and that the houses there are all large, wellmaintained and exquisitely furnished. On the surface at least, the street seems to be as idyllic a suburban neighbourhood as any ad man’s dream. Yet below the surface – and on Desperate Housewives, as Mary Alice’s voiceovers frequently remind us, things are always happening below the surface – things are not what they at ﬁrst seem. Since the show’s debut in October 2004, Wisteria Lane has experienced a cluster of scandals, mysterious deaths and downright catastrophes so comprehensive that all but the most foolhardy prospective tenant would surely think long and hard before putting down a deposit on one of the street’s ill-fated colonials. By the time the fourth season rolled around in late 2007, there was hardly a law, social code or a taboo in existence that hadn’t been broken at some point by at least one of the cul-de-sac’s residents. What’s more, we don’t even have a sorely violated burial ground (as in Poltergeist and The Amityville Horror) or haunted architect (as in The House Next Door) to blame it all on. As has often been noted, Cherry’s inspiration for the show arose from a particularly depressing real-life incident, or, to be more speciﬁc, from his own mother’s revealing reaction to this event: the trial in 2002 of a housewife accused of drowning her ﬁve children in the bath tub. ‘I was horriﬁed by this,’ Mr. Cherry said. ‘I turned to her and said, “Gosh, can you imagine a woman so desperate that she would hurt her own children?” My mother took her cigarette out of her mouth and said, “I’ve been there.” I said, “What?” You have to understand I’ve always seen my mom as the perfect wife and mother, a woman who aspired to being a homemaker. That’s what she wanted and that was her life. And it was shocking to ﬁnd out that she indeed had moments of great desperation when my sisters and I were little and my dad was off getting a master’s degree in Oklahoma and she was alone with three kids, 5, 4 and 3, who were just bouncing off the walls, and she was starting to lose it. She started telling me these stories. And I realized if my mother had moments like this, every woman who is in the suburban jungle has. And that’s where I got the idea to write about four housewives’.14 However, despite the notably grim genesis of the show and the deliberately evocative title, which evokes Thoreau (‘The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation’15 ) and The Feminine Mystique (and which was surely an important factor in securing the show initial critical and commercial

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notice), as the upbeat, slyly witty opening titles and voiceover soon make clear, this is a show more interested in black comedy, melodramatic plot developments and fairly predictable social commentary than in plumbing truly convincing depths of female despair. Indeed, the manner in which each episode manages to juxtapose amusing scenes which recall Cherry’s long stint as a sitcom writer with moments in which the conventions of the gothic and the mystery are strongly evoked is one of the keys to its success. The show is essentially a relatively light and entertaining confection which has pretensions to be something more but seldom manages to achieve genuine pathos. It should also be noted that because the show runs on a mainstream American channel (ABC), its depiction of sex, violence and scenes of an adult nature is a great deal more restricted than it is in shows running on cable networks such as HBO and Showtime. Despite its sensationalist reputation then, Desperate Housewives is actually fairly tame in comparison to the likes of Weeds or The Sopranos. Despite this fact, Desperate Housewives was received by many critics and commentators (at least initially) as a show that had something deeply profound to say about the lot of the modern suburban housewife, described by one commentator as a ‘female zeitgeist series, one of those key mainstream series, where characters and plots are discussed in the wider culture, where the next episode is eagerly awaited, especially by women who ﬁnd the concerns of their own lives reﬂected back’.16 Like Sex and the City, which ended its eleven-season run the same year that Desperate Housewives began (2004), the main protagonists of Desperate Housewives are a quartet of middle-class women aged 30–45 with contrasting hair colours and personalities. Gabrielle Solis (Eva Longoria), the youngest of the main characters, is a frustrated trophy wife who resorts to adultery in order to compensate for her husband’s emotional neglect. She adores the material comforts that her husband Carlos’s success brings but, in an exceedingly familiar twist, ﬁnds that wealth is no substitute for love. As Latinas, she and Carlos are the only non-white family on Wisteria Lane during the ﬁrst season. Eminently WASPish Bree Van De Kamp, ‘The perfect wife and mother’ (Marcia Cross) is a Republican Party supporter and NRA member whose retro-50s pastel-hued clothes are a tongue-in-cheek nod to the colourcoordinated wardrobes of the Sirkian melodrama. Her cool exterior and obsessive, verging-on-psychotic longing for order helps hide a troubled family life. The character’s strong (if scarily ﬂexible) sense of what constitutes right and wrong and tendency to have all the best lines make Bree the most amusing character in the show.

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Susan Mayer (played by Teri Hatcher), is a ditzy, accident-prone divorcee whose relationship with her only child is more sisterly than mother–daughter. Her attraction to Mike Delphino, the mysterious new man next door (who naturally has secrets of his own) is one of the key ongoing plotlines of the series. Susan’s frequent bouts of Nancy Drew-style investigative endeavour also mean that she is the housewife who decides to pursue the truth behind her friend’s death most vigorously. For this reason, Susan tends to end up in situations of physical peril – such as being held at gun point, hiding in other people’s houses, eavesdropping, being warned to mind her own business and so on – of the like commonly associated with the classic gothic heroine much more often than her friends. Stressed out full-time mother Lynette Scavo (Felicity Huffman) has forsaken a high-proﬁle career in the ad business in order look after her young family, although she does return to work at the beginning of the second season. Edie Britt (Nicolette Sheridan) is a predatory, oft-married man-eater who generally functions as a rival to Susan Mayer and is a peripheral member of the main group. She is also a realtor, which makes it all the more ironic that she spends most of the ﬁrst season being homeless after Susan burns down her house. Then there is, of course, Mary Alice Young (Brenda Strong) the show’s narrator and dispenser of platitudes who remains an integral part of the series even after her death in the opening minutes of the ﬁrst episode. As previously noted, Desperate Housewives reworks many longstanding clichés, character types and preoccupations found in previous television shows, novels and movies. As well as evoking previous suburban-set soap operas such as the Dallas spin-off Knots Landing, the melodramas of Douglas Sirk, and Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives (referenced at least three times in the pilot),17 there are some interesting similarities between Cherry’s creation and one of the 1990s most famous gothic television shows: David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. Although, unlike as in his most well-known ﬁlm Blue Velvet (1986), suburbia does not play a part in Twin Peaks (which is set in a working-class logging town), there are some suggestive connections. The most obvious is the fact that both shows begin with the violent deaths of women whose seemingly exemplary lives are soon revealed to be anything but perfect. The ripples which spread out from these initial eruptions of disorder soon change both notably inward-looking communities forever. In Twin Peaks the murder of supposedly clean-cut Homecoming Queen Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) provides the narrative hook for the rest of the series and brings to light all manner of disturbing and fantastical occurrences which would otherwise have remained hidden.

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In Desperate Housewives, Mary Alice’s suicide and the blackmail note which her friends ﬁnd when they’re sorting out her belongings (‘I know what you did. It makes me sick. I’m going to tell’) are the catalysts which encourage the protagonists to delve into their friend’s unexpectedly murky past. In both shows, the character found dead in the opening minutes of the pilot episodes also continues to play an active role in the unfolding narrative: Mary Alice appears in the form of ﬂashbacks, dream sequences, hallucinations and, of course, narrates the show, while Laura Palmer appears both as a doppelganger (Lee portrays Laura’s brunette, bespectacled cousin Maddy who shows up later in the show’s run) and in ﬂashbacks. Adding to the similarities is the fact that a number of Twin Peaks actors have been involved with Desperate Housewives. Laura Palmer herself, Sheryl Lee, was originally cast as Mary Alice before being replaced by Brenda Strong (who brieﬂy appeared in season two of Twin Peaks) during the pilot episode, while Kyle McLachlan, the male lead in both Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, joined the cast of Desperate Housewives during the third season as Bree Van De Kamp’s new husband, a shady dentist who is soon (wrongly) suspected of murdering his ﬁrst wife. Setting aside, there are of course some notable differences as well, the main one being that while Twin Peaks soon proved itself willing to utilise overtly fantastical and paranormal elements, Desperate Housewives (voiceover from beyond the grave aside) does not generally stray into the uncanny all that often, although it does occasionally intrude, albeit in forms that lend themselves to rational explanation, such as in dreams and hallucinations. For instance, in a ﬁrst season episode entitled ‘Guilty’, Lynette, who has been driven to the verge of a breakdown by her addiction to her son’s ADD medication, experiences a vivid drugfuelled dream in which Mary Alice hands her a gun which she then picks up and points at her own head.18 For Lynette, as for her friends, the spectre of Mary Alice – both in the supernatural as well as the metaphorical sense – is a constant reminder of female desperation and unhappiness, and of the fact that even the most ordered, contented-seeming life may in fact be anything but below the surface. Like the mysterious trunk that Paul Young furtively unearths at the end of the ﬁrst episode, dark secrets are always coming to the surface on Wisteria Lane: it’s the kind of show in which skeletons literally fall out closets. Though it never strays into the realms of outright supernaturalism or fantasy in the way that BTVS did week in, week out, therefore, Desperate Housewives, as we shall see, nevertheless belongs squarely in the Suburban Gothic tradition. Indeed, the show conforms fairly closely to the template Helen Wheatley outlines for the classic

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gothic television narrative, which is likely to feature many of the following: A mood of dread and/or terror inclined to provoke fear or disgust in the viewer; the presence of highly stereotyped characters and plots, often derived from gothic literary ﬁction (e.g. the hero or heroine trapped in a menacing domestic situation by an evil villain, or the family attempting to cover up a hidden secret from the past: representations of the supernatural which are either overt . . . or implied, a proclivity towards the strictures and images of the uncanny (repetitions, returns, déjà vu, premonitions, doppelganger, animated inanimate objects and severed body parts, etc), and, perhaps most importantly, homes and families which are haunted, tortured, or troubled in some way. In addition, these narratives are likely to be organised in a complex way, structured around ﬂashback sequences, memory montages, and other narrative interpolations. Gothic television is visually dark, with a mise-en-scene dominated by drab and dismal colours, shadows and closed-in spaces.19 Desperate Housewives does deviate from Wheatley’s deﬁnition in one key respect, most obviously contradicting her contention that gothic television is visually dark. Indeed, apart from the many scenes in which characters creep about the neighbourhood at night, the show’s mise-enscène is notably bright, sunny and cheerful, and everyone on Wisteria Lane lives in a spacious, airy and open-plan house. This aside, though, the show conforms pretty accurately to Wheatley’s description. This is, after all, a supposedly comic television programme which opens with a suicide and is thereafter narrated by a murderous child abductor: Mary Alice and her family are certainly nothing if not tortured. In addition, there are relatively frequent murders, acts of accidental and negligent manslaughter, arson, domestic violence, alcoholism and drug addiction, contested paternity and powerful tornadoes. Indeed, from about halfway through the ﬁrst season, one gets the distinct feeling that the show’s writers have a checklist of clichés that they are going through one by one. These topics range from standard soap opera tropes (Gabrielle’s adultery; the collapse of Bree’s apparently perfect marriage; Susan’s accidentprone pursuit of mysterious new neighbour Mike; Lynette’s cancer diagnosis) to the use of rather darker elements more obviously associated with the gothic. Bags of bloody teeth are found beneath ﬂoor boards. Poison pen letters are sent, with fatal consequences for both

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the author and the recipient. A mentally disabled teenager is chained up in the basement by his mother, who wrongly believes that he is a murderer (in fact, his ‘normal’ brother is the real culprit). A lovelorn pharmacist tampers with his rival’s medication. A suspected paedophile is hounded out of the neighbourhood (the lynch mob is, of course, a common trope in the Suburban Gothic, as we saw in the previous chapter). A psychotic cop (aptly played by Gary Cole, who starred as satanic sheriff Lucas Buck in American Gothic) uses his authority to terrorise his estranged ex-wife. Houses are burned down, accidentally and not so accidentally. Mothers such as Bree Van De Kamp and Betty Applewhite (who moves to the neighbourhood at the beginning of the second season) cover up the terrible crimes of their teenage sons. Behind practically every closed door there lies some element of mystery. If the cul-de-sac in which the show is set looked a little familiar to viewers, it was hardly surprising, for Wisteria Lane is actually Colonial Street, one of Universal Studio’s most famous standing sets: used in ﬁlms such as The ’Burbs and Gremlins, as well as iconic suburban set television shows such as The Munsters and Leave it to Beaver. It was also for many years one of the most famous stops on the Universal studios tourist trail. The iconic house from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho also stands nearby.20 Indeed, the Munster family home would become that of Bree Van De Kamp and her family, and remained so well known from the sitcom that the exteriors had to be extensively reworked during the show’s ﬁrst season so that they were less recognisable. The use of this set does two things: it reinforces the essential artiﬁciality and universality of the show’s setting, and it also links Desperate Housewives to some of the most well-known earlier suburban-set ﬁlms and television shows. In an extra feature contained on the DVD release of the ﬁrst season entitled ‘A Stroll Down Wisteria Lane’, Cherry was asked how he would describe the street. His reply neatly encapsulates the show and the manner in which it repackages long-held preconceptions regarding the suburban milieu: Picture perfect. Wholesome. There’s something just so unrelentingly friendly about it . . . I kind of think of our country that way. We aspire to be that idyllic place. I mean it really is the best of what our forefathers wanted, a place where you can grow up in communities and raise your kids and everyone can be nice to one another. That’s the dream. The reality is there’s a lot of dark stuff going on. Who knows what lies in the hearts of men?21

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Cherry’s comments explicitly recall those of the reluctantly psychic Tom Neville in Richard Matheson’s similarly suburban-set Stir of Echoes, who wonders towards the end of the novel if ‘Maybe we’re all monsters underneath’. For despite its reputation as a show which celebrates the power of female friendship and solidarity, the relationship between the core quartet isn’t always quite as empowering as some have suggested.22 What ultimately stands out even more is the realisation that Cherry’s heroines are in many respects a rather unpleasant group of characters. After all, in episode after episode, the women (and to a lesser extent the men) of Wisteria Lane carry out venal, secretive, vengeful, malicious and at times downright murderous activities in order to further their own agendas, and conceal whatever dark secret they’re trying to cover up that particular week. As noted in a New York Times article which compared the show to the suburban-set ﬁction of John Cheever: ‘On Wisteria Lane, where the desperate housewives live, inhabitants keep hedges high, cultivating – in contrast to other shows about girlfriends – great ignorance about one another’.23 The observation brings to mind an example cited by Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community: ‘When Ethnographer M.P. Baumgartner lived in suburban New Jersey in the 1980s, rather than the compulsive togetherness ascribed to the classic suburbs of the 1950s, she found a culture of atomized isolation, self-restraint, and “moral minimalism”. Far from seeking small-town connectedness, suburbanites kept themselves to themselves, asking little of their neighbour and expecting little in return’.24 Time and time again, therefore, even the core group of supposed friends at the heart of the show keep secrets from one another until circumstances beyond their control ﬁnally force them to come clean. During the ﬁrst season, the biggest secret of all is, of course, the fact that Mary Alice had been lying about almost every aspect of her life: her name, her background and even the true identity of her teenage son Zack (whose true mother was a heroin addict later murdered by none other than Mary Alice herself). Susan hides the fact that she accidentally burned down Edie’s house; Bree struggles to cope with her husband’s sadomasochistic proclivities, the fact that her son is gay and her own alcoholism; Gabrielle’s extramarital affair remains secret until Susan accidentally stumbles on the truth. Lynette hides her cancer diagnosis from her supposed best friends because she doesn’t want to be treated any differently, and her husband Tom conceals from her the fact that he has another child for several episodes.

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In short, almost every episode of the show revolves around the concealment and revelation of secrets both major and minor. Furthermore, by dint of the show’s serial nature, when one mystery is solved, another immediately takes its place. This holds true in individual episodes and in the show from year to year. To give some examples: the ﬁrst season ended with full disclosure of Mary Alice’s past and the reason why she killed herself. Just as this plot strand ended, another family with terrible secrets of their own – the African American Applewhites – moved into the street and became a new focus of narrative complexity. Similarly, the most obviously gothic plotline of the peripatetic fourth season came to a violent climax when new character Katharine Mayfair (Dana Delaney), who had returned to Wisteria Lane after an absence of many years, killed the abusive ex-husband who had been stalking her in an act of self-defence. Yet again, just as this storyline concluded, the show’s writers went out of their way to end the season with a provocative coda which began with the words ‘Five Years Later’ and prompted many more questions than answers. In keeping with its raison d’être as a gothic soap opera, therefore, there will always be something dark and mysterious happening on Wisteria Lane. Desperate Housewives has much in common with earlier depictions of gothic suburbia in which the protection of one’s reputation and image is more important than revealing the truth to one’s friends and neighbours. More often than not, as we have seen, protagonists in Suburban Gothic texts tend to make things even worse for themselves by not actually admitting the existence of a problem or a threat which jeopardises their carefully maintained veneer of happiness and contentment at the beginning of the narrative. In this sense, BTVS, in which the heroine’s survival (and that of the world) depends on more than one occasion on her willingness to conﬁde in her friends and accept their help, is an interesting exception. This variation is perhaps due in part to the fact that the show deals with a much younger age group (teens, and later, young adults) rather than the older protagonists of Desperate Housewives. Furthermore, although they live in a suburb, neither Buffy nor any of her friends is a suburban homeowner (at least not until Buffy inherits the family home following the death of her mother), which means that by necessity their closest relationships would be with people belonging to their own peer group rather than the neighbours. Nevertheless, it is interesting that Buffy’s standing with the other residents of Revello Drive remains almost completely unexplored during the course of the show: at the very least one would have thought that someone would have complained about the frequent vampire and demon incursions.

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While Buffy’s close friendships prove to be a literal lifesaver on more than one occasion, attempts at teen solidarity in other Suburban Gothic texts tend to prove less successful, usually due to the actions of abusive, neglectful, or even overly protective elders (as in Halloween and A Nightmare on Elm Street). In fact, Desperate Housewives is actually one of the most negative depictions of suburban community essayed since Shirley Jackson’s The Road Through the Wall. What the two texts share is an essentially pessimistic, cynical view of human nature (despite frequent protestations to the contrary): the fact that the gothic elements arise solely from psychological and community interaction rather than supernatural happenstance; and the suggestion that the insulated suburban lifestyle somehow brings out the worst in people. Those who move to Wisteria Lane – Mary Alice and Paul Young, Mike Delphino, Betty Applewhite and her sons, Art Shephard (who turns out to be a paedophile) – often do so in a vain attempt to escape some terrible secret or misdeed in their past. In addition, like Jackson’s novel, the show focuses not on one protagonist, but rather on several, and it could be argued that the notably panoramic perspective employed in Road (which employs an omniscient narrative perspective which allows Jackson to comment on the thought processes and foibles of Pepper Street’s arrogant and narrow-minded residents in a notably God-like manner) is rather similar to the use of voiceover in Desperate Housewives. As we have seen, then, the relative openness which characterises the relationship between Buffy and her friends is not all that common elsewhere. The secret being hidden may concern a haunted house (as in The Amityville Horror, Poltergeist, and The House Next Door), the existence of a deranged serial killer (as in Halloween and A Nightmare on Elm Street), child abuse (The People Next Door, Parents), or even magical powers (Bewitched). Whatever the secret, the fact remains that in the Suburban Gothic, the last people to know that there is a major problem with a house in the street are usually those who live alongside it. This dynamic – in which the milieu is associated with a particularly inward-focused, self-obsessed way of life – is, of course, a perception that has existed since the early days of post-war suburban expansion, in which one of the main criticisms being aimed at such developments was that they explicitly encouraged insularity, materialism and narcissism. In 1956, John Keats bemoaned the fact that suburban housing had transformed the personalities of his imaginary suburbanites ‘John and Mary Drone’ by turning ‘Mary into an impossible nag of a wife, and John into a weak, weary imitation of husband and father’

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(Keats, 1956, p.7), while the ﬁctionalised case studies in Gordon et al.’s The Split-Level Trap gave the impression that something particularly corrosive about the suburban way of life reduced vulnerable people to emotional basket cases.25 Becky Nicolaides has noted the manner in which pop culture and literary depictions of suburbia and suburbanites have been irrevocably inﬂuenced by the writings of critics such as Lewis Mumford, Jane Jacobs and William H. Whyte, for whom suburbia was a destructive and soul-destroying milieu.26 It is an argument which also goes some way towards explaining the persistence of certain key tropes and situations in the Suburban Gothic from the late 1940s to the present day. As Nicolaides elaborates: For all the scholarship that has both deepened and complicated our understanding of post-war suburbia, the writings of Mumford, Jacobs and Whyte still resonate powerfully in the public imagination. This derives partly from the nature of public discourse of suburbia in the 1950s and 1960s: the ideas of the critics were adopted by cultural producers of the era, who have even wider public reach through novels, short stories and ﬁlms. Their collective message created a recognisable cultural icon that lives on even in popular culture in our day . . . Suburbia continues to come across as a place of oppressive conformity and shallow lives, a place that stiﬂes creativity and individual human expression and where community is contrived at best. These cultural references owe a debt to writers like Mumford, Whyte and Jacobs, who saw in the suburbs a vision of social hell with little chance for redemption.27 What is also interesting is that the gothic and melodramatic elements present in Desperate Housewives in some senses actually insulate the show from the even more disturbing and destabilising realities of the real world. The street may harbour murderers, kidnappers, and blackmailers, but on the plus side, no one in Wisteria Lane will ever have to worry about the price of gas (which is just as well, given the frequent outbreaks of arson). Unlike in Weeds, to which Desperate Housewives was often initially compared, contentious real-world events – September 11, the War on Terror, the controversial presidency of George W. Bush (whose First Lady Laura famously outed herself as a fan of the show)28 – are never mentioned, although broad social trends such as the pitfalls of political correctness, the problem of balancing work and family, and the medicalisation of unruly children are often wryly referenced, particularly during storylines related to Lynette, the most down-to-earth

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housewife (at least during the ﬁrst couple of seasons). The success of the show remains all the more interesting when one considers that in recent years, suburbia and the suburban lifestyle have been attracting a rash of negative and doom-mongering publicity highly reminiscent of the controversy such settlements initially attracted in the 1950s and early 1960s. As we shall see in the conclusion, the general perception seems to be that the suburban way of life is in a major crisis from which it may not recover, the ramiﬁcations of which may be profoundly damaging for everyone.

Conclusion: The End of Suburbia?

In the past decade there has been a steadily increasingly groundswell of opinion suggesting that suburbia is rapidly heading towards a decline of hitherto unimaginable magnitude. Writing in 2001 about the looming peak in world oil production, geologist Kenneth Deffeyes noted, ‘The experts’ scenario for 2004–2008 reads like the opening passage of a horror movie. You have to make up your own mind about whether to accept their scary account’.1 By the middle of 2008 – as oil prices went sky high, the sub-prime crisis took hold, and a major global recession seemed increasingly likely – it appeared that the horror movie metaphor wasn’t so extreme after all. One of the other major factors in the crisis perceived to be engulﬁng suburbia was worry regarding the increasing dilapidation of the original suburbs, deﬁned as ‘those places which developed ﬁrst after their center city, before or during the rapid suburban expansion right after World War II, and before the newly developing suburbs of today’.2 In their 2007 article ‘The Decline of the Inner Suburbs: The New Suburban Gothic in the United States’, Short et al. critically examined the recent transformation and decline of suburbia, arguing that more recent phases of suburban development have undermined the former advantages of the older suburbs, particularly those built during the 1950s and 1960s. Many of these suburbs are now beginning to exhibit the same symptoms of decline and dilapidation that the inner cities experienced three decades previously.3 In contrast to the boom they identify in the growth of new ‘exurbs’ (the authors were writing before the 2007/8 sub-prime mortgage lending crisis which plunged many such new communities into ﬁscal crisis), ‘decline occurs in older suburbs characterised as communities with slow population growth, few local resources, and declining local economies . . . The infrastructure of 193

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roads, schools and houses in these suburbs is old and decaying, and the residents are aging without a generation to replace them.’4 What is particularly interesting about the article is that the authors speciﬁcally use the term ‘gothic’ to refer to the dichotomy between the new, or ‘outer’, suburbs which are the main sites of new development and investment (see Joel Garreau’s 1992 study Edge City: Life on the New Frontier and Robert E. Lang and Jennifer B. Lefurgy’s 2007 Boomburbs: The Rise of America’s Accidental Cities), and the bleak, desolate and even ‘grotesque’ older suburbs which are struggling to survive in the modern, increasingly decentralised world.5 Of course, there had long been those who claimed that suburbia, predicated as it was upon the notion that those who lived there would have enough money to buy gas in order to get from one place to another, could not be sustained forever. One of the most vociferous present-day critics of the milieu is James Howard Kunstler, who has made a name for himself by critiquing suburbia in the strongest possible terms. In his 1994 book The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape, Kunstler traced the development of American communities from the early days of Puritan settlement to the early 1990s, and in doing so argued that the relentless expansion of post-war suburbia, reckless land deregulation and the almost ‘narcotic’ dependence upon the car which the architects of early suburbia strongly encouraged posed a fundamental threat to the future of the nation. As he put it: ‘America has squandered its national wealth erecting a human habitat that, in all likelihood, will not be usable very much longer, and there are few unspoiled places left to retreat to. Aside from its enormous social costs, which we have largely ignored, the whole system of suburban sprawl is too expensive to operate, too costly to maintain, and a threat to the ecology of living things’ (1994, p.114). Kunstler provided an even more pessimistic take on the future of suburbia, and indeed, of humanity itself, in his 2005 follow-up The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century. Here, he discussed what he saw as the major looming crises which threatened the United States – principally the reliance upon fossil fuels, the impact of the global oil peak, and the devastating effects of climate change, water scarcity and epidemics of disease in notably bleak terms. As he put it in his introduction: ‘Even after the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, that collapsed the twin towers of the World Trade Centre and sliced through the Pentagon, we are still sleepwalking into the future. We have walked out of our burning house and we are now headed off the edge of a cliff. Beyond that cliff is an abyss of economic and political

Conclusion: The End of Suburbia? 195

disorder on a scale that no one has ever seen before.’ He concludes rather grandly, with ‘I call this coming time the Long Emergency’.6 As in The Geography of Nowhere, here too Kunstler argued that the wasteful and resource-greedy suburban lifestyle could no longer be rationalised or maintained, particularly once supplies of cheap oil and gas were depleted. In his analysis, the suburbs are nothing less than ‘the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world’, with a uniquely ‘tragic destiny’ (p.233). Suburbia itself was coming to an end, Kunstler argued, and that ending will not be pretty. Indeed, there was a very real possibility that this collapse would tear the nation apart, both socially and politically. He concludes in notably apocalyptic terms: The gigantic smear of suburbia that runs almost without interruption from North of Boston through Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Baltimore, Washington and Northern Virginia is not going to be a happy place. It will be subject to the most extreme loss of utility and equity value. The suburban portion of what was once called megalopolis may become as much a forbidden zone as the South Bronx in the late Twentieth Century.7 Kunstler’s work helped inspire Gregory Greene’s similarly despairing 2004 documentary The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream, which was also based upon the premise that, as global oil supplies dwindle, the suburbs, and by extension, life as it now exists for countless millions of Americans, will change forever. As the ﬁlm points out, the very rise of the suburbs in the ﬁrst place was made possible by the fact that the nation had access to cheap and abundant supplies of oil and energy. Furthermore, the suburban lifestyle itself, based as it is upon private transportation, the decentralisation of homes, supermarkets and places of employment, and the easy availability of food and of consumer products in general, is also dependent upon these factors. Once this lynchpin is removed from the underpinnings of suburbia, the documentary suggests, everything will rapidly start to fall apart. Indeed, the documentary is in many respects a kind of real-life horror movie in which suburbia itself is the villain, and, like the writings of Kunstler, provides: an apocalyptic vision of the near future of the United States as the days of affordable and plentiful petroleum come to an end: violence will erupt at suburban ﬁlling stations; the price of food, home heating, and household goods will become prohibitive; outer-ring

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suburbs will turn into slums; the middle class will disappear, wars to secure oil supplies will metastasise; remaining civil liberties will be eroded; and back-to-back recessions will turn into an economic depression that will never end. In short, the ‘empire of oil will collapse’. Eerie doomsday music plays throughout the ﬁlm, the narrative structure of which juxtaposes 1950s vintage ﬁlm-clips of modernist optimism about suburbia with contemporary interviews of pessimistic experts in the ﬁelds of petroleum geology, human ecology, energy ﬁnance and urbanism.8 The dire warnings of Kunstler, Greene and other anti-suburban commentators were not of course the ﬁrst time that alarm bells had sounded about the future of an American way of life so dangerously reliant upon dwindling natural resources. The original canary in the coalmine (so to speak) was petroleum geologist M. King Hubbert, who famously predicted at an industry gathering in 1956 the US oil production would peak in the early 1970s.9 In a real-life approximation of the familiar scene from countless bad disaster movies in which a maverick scientist, early on, predicts the catastrophe to come but is ignored by the powers that be because he is telling them something they don’t want to hear, Hubbert’s analysis was initially rejected, and indeed, ridiculed, both within and without the oil industry. It wasn’t until the 1970s, when, as he had predicted, the US production of oil began steadily to decline, that his calculations were vindicated. Hubbert later went on to calculate that world oil ﬂow would peak sometime between 2004 and 2008. By current best estimates therefore, the peak has now passed, and the dire consequences predicated by Kunstler and others should be beginning to manifest themselves. As one analyst stated, in an article in which ‘the inevitable peaking of world oil production’ was discussed, ‘The world has never before faced a problem like this’ and unless ‘mitigation is orchestrated on a timely basis, the economic damage to the world economy will be dire and long-lasting’.10 Indeed, during much of 2008, suburbia and suburbanites did seem to be in the midst of severe crisis, when rapidly increasing oil prices – which at one point in mid-2008 reached the then-unprecedented cost of $147 a barrel11 – ﬁnally made it clear to millions of ordinary Americans that the era of cheap and plentiful energy supplies was under considerable threat, and that the consequences for car-dependent communities would be severe. Indeed, as the price of gasoline increased, expenses for commuting suburbanites, particularly those in the emerging suburbs and exurbs, which were built far beyond the cities and traditional

Conclusion: The End of Suburbia? 197

suburbs, rocketed. As a result, home prices in neighbourhoods with long commutes and no public transportation fell faster than in communities closer to the metropolitan centres.12 It didn’t help that the seemingly inexorable rise in oil prices that characterised late 2007 and the ﬁrst half of 2008 was accompanied by (and indeed, was in part responsible for) an economic crisis that also placed considerable ﬁnancial pressure upon millions of suburbanites who had allowed themselves to become seriously overextended during the housing boom. The phenomena of so-called ‘sub-prime’ lending – in which banks and mortgage brokers fell over themselves to lend money to customers with risky credit ratings – helped make the suburban dream a reality for millions of lower income Americans who would otherwise have been unable to afford their own homes. However, once the housing bubble burst, it became clear that the people who had agreed to such lending terms were suffering disproportionately as interest rates and monthly mortgage repayments rose. As one article on the crisis put it: ‘with home foreclosures and mortgage delinquencies soaring, it is becoming clear that the innovative loans that lenders championed – which in the industry are called the “democratisation of credit” are turning the American dream of homeownership into a nightmare for many borrowers’.13 Indeed, as house prices fell by more in 12 months than in any previous year, even during the Great Depression,14 repossessions and foreclosures rocketed, and the phrases ‘jingle mail’ (the phenomenon by which homeowners decide that since they owe more than their house is worth, they may as well cut their losses, put the keys through the letterbox, and walk away)15 and ‘slumburbia’ entered common parlance, it became obvious that, at the very least, suburban life in the United States was entering a period of instability and transition which may even surpass that of the 1970s oil crisis. The middle classes in America today are treading water, and there is a growing sense that the baby boomers – those born and raised at the height of the initial post-war suburban boom – had it better than anyone else and that the nation had reached a peak of economic stability and international prestige that can never be equalled. So what of the Suburban Gothic then, at a time when the locale is the subject of perhaps even more debate and controversy than during the years following the Second World War? What seems obvious is that many of the most common preoccupations of early Suburban Gothic texts – for instance, fears about the loss of individuality, a ﬁxation upon the damage the insular suburban lifestyle would have upon the nuclear family, the milieu’s culture of materialism and consumerism, the impact

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of the suburban lifestyle on women – have been largely absorbed into the collective unconscious, and supplanted by a new set of concerns which will undoubtedly ﬁnd expression in gothic forms. Critiques written by the likes of Keats, Mumford and Gordon et al. tended to focus upon two main criticisms of the suburban lifestyle – the detrimental effect that such settlements had upon the countryside, and the negative psychological impact that life there would have upon its inhabitants – and while such concerns remain a factor in criticisms of suburbia, they have inevitably been supplemented by a whole new set of anxieties. Chief amongst these, as we have seen, is the suggestion that the environmental and economic cost of maintaining and building new suburban settlements is becoming such that the suburban way of life itself poses a terrible threat to nothing less than the future of the human race. In a sense, there is nothing new in the perception that the suburbs are somehow doomed. As we have seen, from the beginning of mass suburbanisation, there have been doomsayers who considered such new developments nothing less than a catastrophe for the nation itself. The similarities between John Keats’s description of ‘today’s housing developments’ as ‘conceived in error, nurtured by greed, corroding everything they touch. They destroy established cities and trade patterns, pose dangerous problems for the areas they invade, and actually drive mad myriads of housewives shut up in them’ (pp.7–8) and Kunstler’s contention that suburbia represents nothing less than the greatest waste of natural resources in human history, are clear, in that both characterise the milieu in decidedly monstrous terms. The difference between the anti-suburban jeremiads of the 1950s and 1960s and those of the present is mainly in respect of scale. The likes of Keats, Mumford, Whyte and the Gordons focused mostly on the terrible effect the suburban lifestyle had on the people who actually lived there, whereas nowadays, they are frequently characterised as nothing less than a fundamental threat to the future of the very world. Something deep within the American psyche has always loved pondering the end of the world, the worst case scenario, and we should therefore not be all that surprised that, as one of the most signiﬁcant innovations of the past 60 years, the suburb, in all its myriad forms, has attracted more than its fair share of apocalyptically minded criticism. As Zbigniew Lewicki has pointed out, the concept of the apocalypse was one of the predominant ideas of the New World.16 The Puritans had an essentially optimistic view of the apocalypse based on their belief that the destruction of the corrupt old world was a precursor to the establishment of a divine new order. Their faith in the concept was strengthened

Conclusion: The End of Suburbia? 199

by the fact that their apocalyptic beliefs were seemingly replicated in their own journey from a sinful old world – Europe – to a pure, Edenic ‘new’ world – America. In the ever-optimistic exodus towards the suburbs which took place in the years following the end of the Second World War, the echoes of that original movement from the tainted old world of small towns and big cities to the suburbs, a temptingly inbetween space that was fundamentally new, forward-looking and above all attainable, are unmistakable. But of course, the inevitable ﬂipside of any utopian vision is the dystopia, and it is in the gothic impulse present in so many suburban-related texts that we can see the unease and resistance felt by many onlookers and participants as they observed the brave new suburban world which seemed to pop up overnight. Like the seemingly vast and treacherous forests which greeted the ﬁrst European colonists to land on American soil, who had come from a developed nation to an ‘uncivilised and savage’ place, the houses and streets of suburbia remain, in part due to their very ubiquity, a focal point for contemporary anxieties, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Representing as they do one of the most important environmental, economic, and cultural transformations of the past 60 years, it is therefore hardly surprising that the suburbs would come to play such an important role in popular culture, and that they should so frequently be dramatised in horror and the gothic in popular literature, ﬁlm and television. Furthermore, the Suburban Gothic is also in many senses a re-enactment of the paradigm which informs so much of the American gothic in general: initial settlement and construction of an idealised community is succeeded by creeping disillusionment and the sense that all is not well. As has often been noted, the gothic in America has from the outset served as a counterbalance to the myths of progress and optimism by which the nation from the outset deﬁned itself. Characterised as it is by its commitment to revealing dislocation and the chaos beneath apparent order, and the dark passions that pulse beneath ‘enlightened’ intellect, it is hardly surprising, then, that the gothic should soon become the most readily established and inﬂuential variety of national literature. By revelling in the unacknowledged guilt and anxiety buried deep in the national psyche, writers operating in the gothic mode were able to delve beneath the surface façade of optimism and progress and acknowledge in ﬁctional form the unpleasant but fundamental truths about their country that had been tactfully ignored by ‘polite’ society. This function, as Eric Savoy has noted, elevates the gothic beyond the realms of simple entertainment: ‘If early American Gothic was therefore

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bent perversely on dismantling the complacencies of ideological investment in human perfectibility through tales of the perverse, it turns out that its mission was a kind of political engagement rather than just escapist storytelling’.17 Just as the early American gothic often exposed the dark underbelly of the nation’s apparently progressive, enlightened principles, then, from the middle of the twentieth century the Suburban Gothic has dramatised the powerful undercurrents of anxiety and unease caused by the rapid political, technological and social changes of the post-war period. The most characteristic narrative trope of the Suburban Gothic is, of course the revelation, time and time again, that no matter how picturesque and peaceful a neighbourhood, house or family may seem on the surface, dark and usually terrible secrets lie beneath, whether of a psychological, supernatural or familial nature. The boy next door is a deranged murderer. The seemingly perfect new house is haunted. The ordinary housewife is secretly a powerful witch, or disenchanted neurotic. The new neighbours are cannibals. Bad things happen in basements, and corpses lie beneath neatly maintained front lawns. At the very least, relationships between husbands and wives are strained, the relationship between children and parents is frequently a difﬁcult one, and the people in the house next door are not to be trusted. Furthermore, even when the protagonists of the Suburban Gothic do decide to make their problems public, the outside authorities are usually of little help: problems are dealt with within the conﬁnes of the family or of the local neighbourhood. Inevitably, there is a great deal of crossover between the Suburban Gothic and more mainstream representations of the suburban lifestyle. Above all else, as we have seen, as a sub-genre the Suburban Gothic is fundamentally related to the fears and anxieties of the speciﬁcally white middle classes. At a time when the very future of suburbia, at least in its present form, is considered by many to be under considerable threat, the relevance of the Suburban Gothic becomes all the more signiﬁcant, and its place in American popular culture ever more secure. The despairing questions asked by the authors of The Split-Level Trap back in 1960 – ‘What has been happening to these people? What is missing, what is so terribly wrong, in this pretty green community?’ – remain as pertinent a summary of the sub-genre’s focus as ever, and the Suburban Gothic deserves to be considered one of the most signiﬁcant and most revealing undercurrents in American popular culture.

Notes Introduction: Welcome to Disturbia 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

Siddons, p.212. Clapson, p.2. Beuka, p.23. Clapson, p.14. Chafe, p.111. Ibid., p.120. Patterson, p.331. Rome, p.16. Patterson, pp.336–8. Keats cited in Donaldson, p.7. Keats, p.7. Donaldson, p.122. Donaldson, The Suburban Myth (1969). Cited in Garreau, p.268. Kenneth Jackson, 1985, pp.244–5. Fiedler, p.144. Matheson, Stir of Echoes, p.106. Clapson; Beuka, p.1.

1 The House Down the Street: The Suburban Gothic in Shirley Jackson and Richard Matheson 1. Joshi, p.63. Indeed, King’s 1979 novel Salem’s Lot – in which a European vampire invades small town Maine – vigorously and effectively dramatises this notion, as do many of his subsequent narratives. 2. Garreau, p.267. 3. Skal, p.201. 4. Dziemianowicz. 5. Cover notes, Richard Matheson, I Am Legend, (1954: 1999). 6. Jancovich, p.131. 7. Friedman, p.132. 8. Hereafter referred to as Road. 9. Friedman, p.132. 10. Hall, Joan Wylie, in Murphy, 2005, pp.23–34. 11. Ibid., p.236. 12. Oppenheimer, p.16. 13. Mumford, p.451. 14. Donaldson, p.24. 15. Clapson, p.1. 201

202 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

Notes Ibid., p.22. Shirley Jackson, The Road Through the Wall, p.5. Friedman, p.79. Shirley Jackson, Road, p.5. Anti-Semitism in a suburban setting also plays a part in Anne Rivers Siddon’s The House Next Door and, possibly, in Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (in which the notably Aryan hero fends off his vampiric next-door neighbour with a copy of the Torah). Shirley Jackson, Road, p.43. Friedman, p.84. As we shall see, the suburban community as lynch mob is a common trope in the Suburban Gothic. Jackson, Road, p.206. Ibid., p.213. Oppenheimer, p.17. Ibid., p.16. Quoted in Oppenheimer, p.125. Oppenheimer, p.125. As is obvious in her later novels, physical boundaries such as walls and gates frequently isolate the Jackson protagonist from the real world, and ﬁnd reﬂection in the psychological containment and self-obsession of her characters. Oppenheimer, p.18. Joan Wylie Hall’s ‘Fallen Eden in Shirley Jackson’s The Road Through the Wall’ (in Murphy, 2005) furthers this contention by claiming that Road contributes to a prominent theme of much Californian literature: the loss of innocence in the Eden of the ﬁnal American frontier. Wharton, p.106. ‘Richard Matheson’ The Science Fiction Encyclopaedia, (London: Orbit, 1993) p.585. Winter, p.40. Hereafter shortened to Legend. Interestingly, Jack Finney’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1955) was also set in 1976, although, as in Matheson’s novel, the future still seems very like the 1950s. As to the reasons why this year was chosen as the setting for two of the decade’s seminal sci-ﬁ/horror novels it seems likely that since 1976 marked the 200th anniversary of the founding of the United States (the bicentennial) it represented a useful milestone for nightmarish narratives such as these. Oakes, p.105. Ibid., p.45. ‘Houses for the Atomic Age!’ The Golden Age of Advertising: The 50s (Taschen, 2004) p.55. Newman, p.66. Zicree, pp.90–2. Fox Television, Episode 2F11. Original US airdate 5 February 1995. The low-budget thriller Right at Your Door (2006), provided a interestingly post 9/11 variation on this theme, as the detonation of several so-called

Notes 203

45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76.

‘dirty bombs’ in downtown Los Angeles forces a slacker suburban husband to seal up his home with duct tape and wood. He spends much of the ﬁlm denying access to his pleading wife, who had been dangerously close to the bombs when they went off, and is therefore, according to ofﬁcial broadcasts, one of the ‘contaminated’. In an ironic twist, at the climax of the ﬁlm it is revealed that by remaining inside, he is the one who has become irradiated, not her, and in a scenario reminiscent of that seen at the climax of ﬁlms such as Romero’s The Crazies (1973), David Cronenberg’s Rabid (1977) and the 2007 Spanish Zombie movie [REC] he is sealed in forever by the military and left to die. Matheson, Legend, p.8. Jancovich, p.149. Matheson, Legend, p.44. Ibid., p.13. Ibid., p.110. Winter, p.40. Matheson, Legend, p.10. Avila, 2004. Ibid., p.35. Matheson, Legend, p.23. Ibid., pp.26–7. Ibid., p.30. Ibid., p.53. Ibid., p.153. Ibid., p.157. Ibid., p.160. Ibid., p.160. Matheson, The Shrinking Man. Hereafter shortened to Shrinking Man. Matheson, Shrinking Man, p.175. Ibid., p.186. Hereafter referred to as Stir for convenience sake. Though overshadowed by the release of the similarly themed The Sixth Sense in the same year, the 1999 movie adaptation of Stir of Echoes (starring Kevin Bacon) is actually a surprisingly effective and engaging movie which intelligently updates Matheson’s original text. The middle-class, suburban setting of the original has been replaced however by a distinctly urban, blue-collar setting, and Tom Wallace is now a working-class telephone repairman rather than a young executive type. Matheson, Stir of Echoes, p.69. Ibid., p.106. Ibid., p.43. Ibid., p.43. Ibid., p.104. Ibid., p.44. Ibid., p.48. Ibid., p.49. Ibid., p.121. Ibid., p.180.

204

2 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

Notes

Conjure Wife: The Suburban Witch Sharon Russell, p.115. Ibid., p.116. Karlsen, p.xii. Rosenthal, p.3. Hoffer, p.xv. Rosenthal, p.2. Creed, p.76. In an interesting discussion indebted to Russell’s earlier article, Creed brieﬂy traces the depiction of the witch in ﬁlm as a prelude to her discussion of Brian De Palma’s 1976 horror movie Carrie. The ‘witch as housewife’ trope is mentioned only in passing. Sharon Russell, p.117. Ibid., p.121. Ibid., p.121. Klaits, p.119. Filmed as Weird Woman (1944), Burn, Witch Burn! (1962: Also known as Night of the Eagle) and Witches’ Brew (1980). Smug male academics also play an important role in Jack’s Wife. Leiber, p.9. Ibid., p.5. Ibid., p.12. Ibid., p.17. Ibid., p.23. Ibid., p.61. Ibid., p.63. Ibid., p.124. Herbie J. Pilato, Bewitched (Tapestry Press, 2004). Reprinted in The First Mayﬂower Book of Black Magic Stories, (ed.) Michael Parry (Frogmore: Mayﬂower, 1974). Beaumont, p.132. Season 6, Episode 15. First shown on 7 March 1999. In an interesting contrast to her role in Bewitched, Montgomery would later play the lead role in the made-for-television movie The Legend of Lizzie Borden (1975) based on the case of nineteenth-century New England’s most famous alleged murderess. Gerard Jones, p.174. Marc, p.107. Ibid., p.109. Shirley Jackson also resided in Westport with her husband and young family from 1949–59, before moving to the Vermont town of North Bennington, where she lived for the rest of her life. See also the television show Mad Men (2007–) which is similarly about the relationship between a work-obsessed ad man and his frustrated wife. Gerard Jones, pp.178–9. Ibid., p.77. Chafe, p.123. Clapson, p.125. Skolnick, p.57.

Notes 205 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55.

56.

57. 58.

59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

Patterson, p.361. Ibid., p.363. Chafe, p.123. Degler, p.418. Ibid., p.418. Chafe, p.125. Ibid., p.123. Patterson, p.368. Degler, p.423. Ibid., p.430. Ibid., p.430. Skolnick, p.102. Gerard Jones, p.177. Marc, p.113. Gerard Jones, p.179. Skolnick, p.51. Ibid., p.52. Indeed, I have come across just two critical discussions of the ﬁlm, the better of which is that by Tony Williams in his excellent book The Cinema of George A. Romero; the other by John Muir in his encyclopaedic Horror Movies of the 1970s, pp.123–4. These scenes feature the unmistakable stereotype of the 1970s suburban cocktail party – cheesy music, kaftans, stiff drinks, big hair, and innuendoladen chit chat – also seen in contemporary texts such as The House Next Door, The Stepford Wives, and The Exorcist, but also in nostalgic 1990s novels such as Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm. Rather more recently, the ‘witchcraft as drug’ metaphor also became the basis for an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (‘Wrecked’, Season 6, Episode 10), in which Willow becomes hopelessly addicted to the energies generated by forbidden magical practices. John Muir, Horror Movies of the 1970s, p.124. In an interesting paper on Jack’s Wife delivered at the 2007 International Gothic Association Conference in Aix-en-Provence, France, Christophe Chambost provided a rather more optimistic reading of the ﬁlm in which he noted that the ﬁnal scenes featured no men at all, and suggested that Joan has actually attained freedom and independence after all, and that her actions would inspire other women to subvert social norms. However, I would argue that the terrible blankness seen in Joan’s eyes in the ﬁnal shot contradicts this interpretation. Clapson, p.26. Ibid., p.26. Cited in Clapson, p.27. Skolnick, p.115. Purkiss, p.8. Bartel, p.xiv. Purkiss, p.39. Ibid., p.39. As it happens, the heroine (a young witch played by Nicole Kidman) ends up in LA, and accidentally lands the role of the Samantha character in a new TV

206

68.

69.

70. 71. 72.

Notes version of the actual Bewitched show, only to ﬁnd herself falling hopelessly in love with her arrogant, pampered on-screen husband (Will Ferrell). As in the similarly dire Kidman-starring remake of The Stepford Wives, it is clear that the writers, having failed to ﬁnd a satisfactory way to update a premise that was very much a product of its original time, settled for irony and clunky selfconsciousness. Needless to say, it was not a box-ofﬁce success. Kidman has also starred in a poorly received update of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers entitled The Invasion (2007). For more on the cultural and commercial ramiﬁcations of the ‘teenage witch’ phenomenon of the late 1990s, see Denise Cush’s article ‘Consumer Witchcraft: Are Teenage Witches the Creation of Commercial Interests?’ in Journal of Beliefs and Values, Vol. 28, No.1, April 2007, pp.45–53. In addition, in a move which aroused some controversy amongst local residents, a bronze statue of Elizabeth Montgomery as Samantha Stevens was erected in Salem by a television company in 2005. ‘The Craft’, Stephen Holden, The New York Times, 3 May 1996. Sue Short, p.93. Ibid., p.38.

3 Aliens, Androids and Zombies: Dehumanisation and the Suburban Gothic 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

Donaldson, p.viii. Mumford, p.353. Shirley Jackson, ‘The Beautiful Stranger’ in Come Along With Me, p.59. Ibid., p.60. Ibid., p.64. Ibid., p.50. Ibid., p.65. Dominic Bourget and Laurie Whitehurst (2004) ‘Capgras Syndrome: A Review of the Neuropsychological Correlates and Presenting Physical Features in Cases Involving Physical Violence’, The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, Vol. 49, No.11. pp.719–25. Blakeslee and Ramachandran, p.159. Ibid., p.159. Streatﬁeld, p.253. Marling, p.253. Ibid., p.253. Ibid., p.253. Quoted in Donaldson, p.10. Kenneth Jackson, p.239. Kenneth Jackson, pp.239–40. Gans, p.49. Shentin and Sobin, p.38. Sobchack, p.121. Ibid., p.20. For an amusing discussion of the suggestive similarities between Body Snatchers and The Puppet Masters, see Robert Rodriguez’s tongue-in-cheek

Notes 207

23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

1998 horror/science ﬁction ﬁlm The Faculty. More recently, the 2005 comedy/horror ﬁlm Slither relies on much the same premise, this time set in yet another small town. In 1978, Philip Kaufman’s excellent updated remake/sequel to Invasion of the Body Snatchers, starring Donald Sutherland as Bennell (this time a city health inspector rather than a doctor), was released. Set in San Francisco, the ﬁlm’s considerable effectiveness is derived from the air of burgeoning unease and urban alienation that Kaufman establishes from the very outset. Whereas the original ﬁlm pivoted upon the manner in which familiar and everyday people and places suddenly seem to have changed, the remake instead focuses upon the isolation of urban living. The movie deserves to be considered as one of the best of the paranoid thrillers which were so popular during this time. Leonard Nimoy, who here plays untrustworthy pop psychiatrist Manny Kaufmann, also played an alien spokesman in 1958’s The Brain Eaters. Body Snatchers was also remade in the 1990s by Abel Ferrara, who set the ﬁlm on an army base. Though inferior to both previous versions, the choice of setting and Ferrara’s highlighting of the regimented, repetitive and orderly nature of both military housing and of army life in general, is interesting, and does ﬁt in well with the ethos of the source novel. The most recent remake, The Invasion (2007) situated the takeover in Washington DC and made frequent reference to the ongoing ‘war on terror’. Finney, p.5. Whyte, p.269. Finney, p.10. Ibid., p.13. Ibid., p.16. Ibid., p.31. Jancovich, p.64. Richard Gid Powers, quoted in Stephen King, Danse Macabre, 1981, p.360. Finney, pp.38–9. Whyte, p.272. Finney, p.54. Ibid., p.70. Ibid., p.80. Ibid., p.97. Sobchack, p.125. King, p.362. The 1956 ﬁlm version famously had two endings, neither of which followed events as laid out in the original novel. The ﬁrst ended with a bleak, more thematically ﬁtting scene in which a desperate, hysterical Miles (here played by Kevin McCarthy) escapes Santa Mira and runs towards the highway, screaming about what has taken place in his little town, (which, naturally enough, makes him look like a madman). At the studio’s insistence, a slightly more optimistic frame narrative was added to the beginning and the end of the ﬁlm, concluding with the news that the FBI are on their way, and that Miles’s unlikely story has ﬁnally been believed: once the feds are involved, the script seems to suggest, the alien invaders don’t have a chance. The 1978 version once again reinstates a suitably bleak ending, whereas the 2007 version sees the status quo restored by the end of the narrative.

208 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

66. 67.

68. 69. 70. 71.

Notes Finney, p.170. Jancovich, p.73. Ibid., p.72. James, ‘New York Revisited’ in The American Scene, p.85. Finney, p.10. Jamie Russell, p.69. Whitﬁeld, p.71. Gans, p.vii. Chafe, p.114. Patterson, p.334. Ibid., p.334. Avila, p.31. Williams, p.91. Beuka, p.174. Knight, p.118. Ibid., p.118. Friedan, p.264. Ibid., p.265. The de Beauvoir quotation is as follows: ‘Today the combat takes a different shape; instead of wishing to put man in a prison, woman endeavours to escape from one; she no longer seeks to drag him into the realms of immanence but to emerge, herself, into the light of transcendence. Now the attitude of males creates a new conﬂict: it is with bad grace that the male lets her go’. The Second Sex, p.675. Ira Levin, The Stepford Wives, p.6. Paula Prentiss also came to a sticky end in another classic paranoid thriller of the 1970s: Alan Pakula’s The Parallax View (1974). Levin, p.1. Ibid., p.16. Ibid., p.40. Texts which make overt the idea that suburbia is a stage or an artiﬁcial construct include Philip K. Dick’s 1959 novel Time Out of Joint, in which a 1950s suburban everyman who has the uncanny ability to win his local newspaper’s ‘spot the ball’ competition every time he enters begins to realise that all is not as it seems; and more recently, The Truman Show, which depicts the idyllic suburban town of ‘Seaview’ as a giant ﬁlm set built around another unwitting everyman, the revealingly named ‘Truman Burbank’ (played by Jim Carrey). Dick’s novel was also discussed at some length by Fredric Jameson in the essay ‘Nostalgia for the Present’ in Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, pp.279–96. Levin, p.41. See also Larry Cohen’s It’s Alive trilogy (about a generation of infants mutated by environmental pollutants) and 1970s creature features such as Grizzly, Prophecy and Piranha. Levin, p.53. Ibid., p.54. Ibid., p.63. The link between Stepford and the advertising industry was ironically reinforced by the fact that director Brian Forbes’ wife, Nanette Newman, who

Notes 209

72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

78.

79.

played Carol Van Sant, was from 1981–91 the public face of Fairy Liquid detergent in a series of television advertisements which informed women that ‘hands that do dishes can be soft as your face’. Knight, p.122. Friedan, p.202. Avila, p.113. Baudrillard, p.14. Beuka, p.177. Profound suburban alienation in a European setting has perhaps best been captured in recent times by Austrian director Michael Haneke in ﬁlms such as Funny Games (1997) (later remade as an American ﬁlm), Benny’s Video (1992), Hidden (2005) and perhaps most strikingly in The Seventh Continent (1989), in which a middle-class family becomes so disenchanted by their meaningless, materialistic lives that they decide to commit suicide. Since Safe, Moore has become the ﬁrst lady of cinematic suburban alienation. She later returned to the soulless San Fernando valley for Paul Thomas Anderson’s sprawling 1999 epic Magnolia (in which she featured as a deeply unhappy, pill-popping trophy wife), and reunited with Haynes to make Far From Heaven (2002), a sumptuous, knowing homage to the work of 1950s melodramatists like Douglas Sirk, in which she played a much-envied 1950s housewife whose apparently perfect life is shattered by the revelation that her husband is gay. In the same year, Moore also played a (by now unsurprisingly) suicidal 1950s suburbanite in the Academy Award-winning ﬁlm The Hours. Beuka, p.183.

4 ‘You Son of a Bitch! You Only Moved the Headstones!’ Haunted Suburbia 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

Matheson, Stir of Echoes, p.106. Bergland, p.60. Goddu, p.4. Anderson, p.9. Davenport-Hines, p.267. Franks, p.7. Faulkner, p.8. O’Connor, p.17. Ibid., p.7. Malin, p.79. Bailey, p.71. King’s alter ego Richard Bachman has set a novel in a suburban setting: The Regulators (1996), in which the peaceful, family-centred neighbourhood of Poplar Street, Ohio suddenly erupts into chaos when the violent imaginings of a demon-possessed autistic child come to life. The premise owes much to Jerome Bixby’s classic SF/horror story ‘It’s a Good Life’ (1953). 13. A statement which ignores the fact that The Exorcist was based upon a reallife case as well. 14. Thomas, p.596.

210

Notes

15. For more on these allegations, see Rick Moran, ‘Amityville Revisited’, in Fortean Times (190: 32–7, December 2004). 16. King, p.163. 17. Anson, p.14. 18. Ibid., p.17. 19. See Amityville 1992: It’s About Time. 20. Bailey, p.66. 21. Michaels, ‘Romance and Real Estate’, p.89. 22. Ibid., p.89. 23. Skolnick, p.136. 24. Cited in Skolnick, p.138. 25. Skolnick, p.138. 26. King, p.168. 27. Skolnick, p.35. 28. Chafe, p.465. 29. Anson, p.30. 30. Ibid., p.68. 31. Ibid., p.36. 32. Ibid., p.105. 33. Ibid., p.80. 34. Ibid., p.80. 35. Or the overgrown garden of an antiquarian book dealer, in Joseph Payne Brennan’s famous story “Canavan’s Back Yard” (1958). For more on suburban entrances to hell, see Chapter 6. 36. Anson, p.128. 37. Bergland, p.66. 38. Ibid., p.9. 39. Anson, p.139. 40. Ibid., p.184. 41. Siddons, 1978. 42. Siddons, cited in Danse Macabre, p.306. 43. Siddons, p.9. 44. Holland-Toll, p.166. 45. Bourdieu, p.77. 46. Ibid., p.77. 47. Siddons, p.18. 48. Ibid., p.21. 49. Ibid., p.21. 50. Ibid., p.42. 51. Ibid., p.42. 52. Ibid., p.52. 53. Ibid., p.90. 54. Ibid., p.94. 55. Ibid., p.96. 56. Ibid., p.132. 57. Ibid., p.140. 58. Ibid., p.162. 59. Bailey, p.80. 60. Siddons, p.170.

Notes 211 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

71. 72. 73.

74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81.

82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87.

Ibid., p.212. Bailey, p.81. Holland-Toll, p.33. Siddons, p.333. Ibid., p.340. Holland-Toll, p.170. King, p.308 Bailey, p.83. Skolnick, p.130. The suburb’s Spanish name is a reminder of the fact that white history in Southern California was preceded by an earlier, Hispanic phase of development (as was Sunnydale in Buffy the Vampire Slayer), and therefore foreshadows revelation of the fact that the new housing development is built on land with a prior history of its own. Nixon, pp.217–26. Newman, p.329. Stephen Spielberg was executive producer of Poltergeist, and also contributed to the story: as a result, some critics long suggested that the ﬁlm’s more saccharine, child-related elements may have more to do with him than with the actual director, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s Tobe Hooper. As Newman has noted, ‘Spielberg’s amused tolerance of suburban triviality jostles with Hooper’s grouchy view of city slickers treading on the countryside’ (p.170). Bailey, p.81. Clover, p.196. Burseh, ‘The Electronic Cyclops: Fifties Television’ in The Making of American Audiences, From Stage to Television, 1750–1990, p.248. Coontz, p.28. Burseh, p.255. Ibid., pp.262, 263. Clover, p.73. Poltergeist 3, set this time in a shiny new city apartment block, and directed by the once-promising Gary Sherman (who helmed classic London underground shocker Deathline and the interesting small-town horror movie Dead and Buried) is notable mainly for the tragic fact that 12-year-old Heather O’Rourke (Carole Anne) died during the production. This, along with the fact that Dominique Dunne (Dana) was murdered shortly after the release of the original ﬁlm, led some to speculate that a curse hung over the Poltergeist ﬁlms. This didn’t prevent a largely unconnected and uninspiring television spin-off series (Poltergeist: The Legacy) from appearing in the 1990s with no apparent harm coming to either the cast or the crew. Michaels, p.90. See Rome, 2001. Botting and Townsend, p.338. The scene is virtually identical to one found in A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). Barber, p.143. Indeed, many of the people to whom I have mentioned the ﬁlm are under the impression that the Freeling house was built on an Indian burial ground, rather than a much more recent rural cemetery (a fact attested to by the fact

212

Notes

that the corpses wear wristwatches and pearls and recognisably twentiethcentury dress). A recent episode of Family Guy furthered this misconception in the episode ‘Petergeist’, a witty spoof of the movie in which idiotic suburbanite Peter Grifﬁth deeply disrespects the skull of an Indian chief and brings Poltergeist-style retribution into his home: his large-headed and freakishly intelligent infant son Stewie serves as surprisingly credible Carole Anne stand-in. 88. Rogin, p.134 cited in Clover, 1973.

5 Don’t Go Down to the Basement! Serial Murder, Family Values and the Suburban Horror Film 1. I would like to thank Dr Elizabeth McCarthy for her helpful suggestions in relation to this chapter. 2. Winter, p.27. 3. Ibid., p.202. 4. Phillips, p.65. 5. Ibid., p.72. 6. Ibid., p.4. 7. Skal, p.378. 8. Newman, 1989, p.90. 9. Muir, 2002, p.538. 10. Stephen Jones, ‘E is for Escape’ in Clive Barker’s A–Z of Horror, pp.64–5. 11. Newman, p.143. 12. Quoted in Jones, p.65. 13. Muir, The Films of John Carpenter, p.78. 14. Worland, p.238. 15. The name ‘Loomis’ is of course another wry nod to Psycho, and the fact that Marion’s boyfriend is named Sam Loomis. 16. Philips, p.141. 17. Sue Short, 2006, p.53. 18. Newman, p.55. 19. The premise also owes much to Anthony Boucher’s 1943 story ‘They Bite’. 20. Muir, 2002, p.65. 21. Ibid., p.66. 22. Wheatley, p.1. 23. See Chapter 4 for more on television in the Suburban Gothic. 24. Peach, p.113. 25. School janitors are often depicted as alcoholics or potential child abusers in American popular culture: see also Lucas Cross (Arthur Kennedy) in Peyton Place or even Groundskeeper Willie in The Simpsons. The implication is that a working-class male who spends his days in a school must be up to no good. 26. Williams, p.228. 27. See the 2008 ﬁlm Mum and Dad for a notably English variation upon many of the themes and scenarios depicted in The People Under the Stairs. 28. Bachelard, p.18. 29. Briefel and Nagai, pp.70–91. 30. Ibid., p.71.

Notes 213 31. The name ‘Loomis’ of course evokes Sam Loomis in Psycho and Dr Loomis in Halloween. 32. The ﬁlm has inspired some interesting knock-offs, such as a second-season episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (‘Ted’), and bizarrely, the famous story arc in Coronation Street in which single mother Gail Platt married a briefcasecarrying psychopath named Richard Hillman whose obsessive, controlling and ultimately murderous behaviour bore more than a slight resemblance to that of O’Quinn’s character. 33. Patricia Brett Erens, ‘The Stepfather: Father as Monster in the Contemporary Horror Film’, in Grant 1996, pp.352–63. 34. Ibid., p.353. 35. Jerry’s hobby brings to mind one of the running gags in the big screen version of The Brady Bunch (1995): the fact that every building architect Mike Brady designs looks just like his own family home. 36. And indeed, the similarities didn’t go unnoticed by the rights holders of Cornell Woolrich’s 1942 story ‘It Had To Be Murder’ (basis for Rear Window), who decided to sue the producers of Disturbia (including Stephen Spielberg) in mid 2008. 37. This element of the ﬁlm evokes the real-life case of proliﬁc serial killer John Wayne Gacy, who used the crawlspace of his suburban home to conceal the bodies of 27 boys and young men. 38. The ﬁlm, which features many lurid shots of various meats, purposely evokes the garish and, to modern eyes, often nauseatingly vivid aesthetic of 1950s cookbooks and advertisements. 39. It’s the most disturbing dinner-table scene since that in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. 40. The ill-fated juror is played by Patricia Hearst, no stranger herself to media attention and high proﬁle court cases. 41. Ballard, p.1.

6 ‘Ah, But Underneath . . .’ Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Desperate Housewives 1. I would like to thank my colleague, Dr Jenny McDonnell, for providing many useful insights during our discussions regarding the Desperate Housewives section of this chapter. 2. It is also a sequence which has much in common with similar scenes in earlier Suburban Gothic texts such as Jack’s Wife and The Stepford Wives, in which the numbing routine of the middle-class housewife and mother is communicated through the depiction of everyday tasks. 3. Halper and Mezzio, p.543. 4. Hereafter abbreviated to BTVS. 5. Billson, p.44. 6. Wheatley, p.8. 7. Arson is a frequent occurrence in Desperate Housewives as well: in the pilot episode, Susan Mayer accidentally burns down the home of her love rival Edie Britt, a favour which is returned in episode 2: 21 ‘I Know Things Now’. Lynette Scavo’s sons burn down a restaurant (in a bid to save their parents’

214

8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28.

Notes marriage) during the fourth season episode ‘Hello, Little Girl’ (4: 13). A major character also commits arson in the ﬁfth season episode ‘City on Fire’. Similarly, The House Next Door ends just as Colquitt and Walter Kennedy prepare to burn the malign home next to theirs to the ground, and in the third season ﬁnale of Weeds, Nancy Botwin, as previously noted, sets ﬁre to her own house. Famously, an episode of animated rival South Park accounted for the show’s unique narrative style by suggesting that Family Guy was in fact masterminded by trained manatees who chose storylines and joke topics at random. Havens, p.21. Boyd Tonkin, ‘Entropy as Demon: Buffy in Southern California’ in Kaveney, 2002, p.42. Billson, p.69. Ibid., p.66. http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/12/what-is-the-future-ofsuburbia-a-freakonomics-quorum/ Accessed 12 August 2008. Bernard Wieinraub, 2004. Henry D. Thoreau, Walden. The quotation is directly referenced in the pilot, in the scene in which Susan recalls her philandering husband Karl saying ‘You know Susan, most men lead lives of quiet desperation’ when justifying an extramarital affair, to which she responds ‘Really? And what do most women lead? Lives of noisy fulﬁlment?’ Rosalind Coward, ‘Still Desperate: Popular Television and the Female Zeitgeist’, in McCabe and Arkass, 2006, p.31. Indeed, Rex Van De Kamp says all of the following to his wife Bree during the pilot: ‘You’re the one who’s always acting like she’s running for Mayor of Stepford!’; ‘I just can’t live in this detergent commercial anymore’; and ‘You’re this plastic suburban housewife.’ Season 1, episode 8, ﬁrst broadcast 28 November 2004. Wheatley, p.3. http://www.thestudiotour.com/ush/backlot/street_colonial.shtml, Accessed 20 June 2008. ‘A Walk Down Wisteria Lane’ DVD Extra, Desperate Housewives: The First Season (Buena Visa Home Entertainment, 2005). See, for example, Thomas, Evany, ‘The Good of the Group’ in Watson, 2006. ‘Suburban Gothic’, The New York Times, Arts: Television, 28 November 2004. Putnam, p.210. Donaldson, p.10. Becky Nicolaides, ‘How Hell moved from the City to the Suburbs: Urban Scholars and Changing Perceptions of Authentic Community’ in Kruse and Sugrue, 2006, pp.80–99. Ibid., p.97. In a widely reported speech made at a White House Correspondents’ dinner in May 2005.

Notes 215

Conclusion: The End of Suburbia? 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

Deffeyes, p.1. Puentes and Warren, p.1. Short, Hanlon and Vicino, pp.1–16. Short, Hanlon and Vicino, p.6. For more on the decline of the ﬁrst suburbs, see also Puentes and Warren. See Puentes and Warren for more on the decline of the ‘ﬁrst’ suburbs. Kunstler, 2005, p.1. Ibid., p.291. Heiman, pp.213–26. The peaking of oil production does not mean that oil is running out, per se; rather, it refers to the maximum oil production rate, which typically occurs after roughly half of the recoverable oil in an oil ﬁeld has been produced. After this point, the remaining oil becomes increasingly difﬁcult to recover and to process, and thus becomes all the more difﬁcult to obtain, and correspondingly more expensive (Hirsch, 2005, p.2). Hirsch, p.2. On 11 July 2008. ‘Stiff Petrol Prices Drain Wealth in US Suburbia’ Rich Miller and Matthew Benjamin, Business Report, 12 June 2008. Gretchen Morgenson, ‘FAIR GAME; Home Loans: A Nightmare Grows Darker’. The New York Times, 8 April 2007. Accessed 15 August 2008. ‘Dropping A Brick’, The Economist, 29 May 2008. Rupert Cornwell, ‘The Ominous Sound of Jingle Mail: The Death of the American Suburbs’, The Independent, Monday, 4 August 2008. As Cornwell explains, homeowners in the United States are able to walk away due to a Depression-era law which makes it difﬁcult for banks to chase borrowers for an unpaid mortgage loan. ‘The result is a temporary hit to their credit rating . . . but in the end the slate is wiped clean’. Lewicki, p.5. Martin and Savoy, p.175.

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Bibliography 219 Leiber, Fritz, Conjure Wife (Woodbridge, CT: Twayne Publishers, 1943; 1953). Levin, Ira, A Kiss Before Dying (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1952). Levin, Ira, Rosemary’s Baby (New York: Random House, 1967). Levin, Ira, The Stepford Wives (New York: Fawcett, 1972). Lewicki, Zbigniew, The Bang and the Whimper (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1984). Little, Bentley, The Association (New York: Signet, 2001). Malin, Irving, New American Gothic (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1962). Marasco, Robert, Burnt Offerings (New York: Delacorte Press, 1973). Marc, David, Comic Visions: Television Comedy and American Culture (Malden: Blackwell, 1974). Marling, Karal Ann, As Seen On TV: The Visual Culture of Everyday Life in the 1950s (Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). Martin, Robert and Savoy, Eric, American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative. (Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 1998). Martinson, Tom, American Dreamscape: The Pursuit of Happiness in Postwar Suburbia (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2000). Matheson, Richard, I Am Legend, Science Fiction Masterworks (London: Millennium, 1954; 1999). Matheson, Richard, Born of Man and Woman (London: n.p. 1956). Matheson, Richard, The Shrinking Man (London: Corgi, 1956; 1983). Matheson, Richard, Stir of Echoes, (London: Sphere, 1959). Matheson, Richard, Hell House (New York: Viking, 1971). Mathews, Glenna, Just a Housewife: The Rise and Fall of the American Housewife (New York: OUP, 1987). McCabe, Janet and Arkass, Kim, eds, Reading ‘Desperate Housewives’: Beyond the White Picket Fence (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006). Michaels, Walter Benn, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century (Berkley: University of California Press, 1987). Moody, Rick, The Ice Storm (London: Little, Brown, 1994). Muir, John, Horror Films of the 1970s (North Carolina: McFarland, 2002). Muir, John, The Films of John Carpenter (North Carolina: McFarland, 2005). Mumford, Lewis, The City in History, Its Origins, Its Transformations and Its Prospects (New York: Penguin, 1961). Murphy, Bernice M., Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy (North Carolina: McFarland, 2005). Newman, Kim, Nightmare Movies: A Critical Guide to Contemporary Horror Films (Prospect, KY: Harmony, 1989). Newman, Kim, Millennium Movies: End of the World Cinema (London: Titan Books, 1998). Nixon, Nicola, ‘Making Monsters, or: Serialising Killers’ in American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative, Martin, Robert and Savoy, Eric, eds, (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 1998). Oakes, Guy, The Imaginary War: American Civil Defence and Cold War Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). O’Connor, Flannery, Everything That Rises Must Converge (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1965).

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Bibliography 221 Updike, John, The Witches of Eastwick (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984). Updike, John, The Widows of Eastwick (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008). Watson, Leah, ed. Welcome to Wisteria Lane: On America’s Favourite Housewives, (Dallas: Benbella Books, 2006). Webster, Roger, ed. Expanding Suburbia: Reviewing Suburban Narratives, (New York: Berghan, 2000). Wharton, Edith, The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton (London: Constable, 1937; 1975). Wheatley, Helen, Gothic Television (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006). Whitﬁeld, Stephen J., The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). Whyte, William H., The Organisation Man (London: Lore and Brydone, 1956). Wieinraub, Bernard, ‘How Desperate Women Saved a Desperate Writer’ The New York Times, Arts, 10 October 2004, accessed 10 August 2008. Williams, Tony, Hearths of Darkness: The Family in the American Horror Film (Madison, WI: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996). Winter, Douglas, Faces of Fear: Encounters with the Creators of Modern Horror (London: Pan, 1990). Worland, Rick, The Horror Film: An Introduction (London: Blackwell, 2007). Wylie, Philip, Generation of Vipers (New York: Rinehart, 1942). Zicree, Mark Scott The Twilight Zone Companion (New York: Bantam Books, 1982).

Filmography American Beauty (Sam Mendes, 1999) The Amityville Horror (Stuart Rosenberg, 1979) The Amityville Horror (Andrew Douglas, 2005) Bell, Book and Candle (Richard Quine, 1958) Benny’s Video (Michael Haneke, 1992) Bewitched (Nora Ephron, 2005) The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myerick and Eduardo Sanchez, 1999) Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986) Body Snatchers (Abel Ferrara, 1994) The Brain Eaters (Bruno VeSota, 1958) The Brain from the Planet Arous (Nathan Juran, 1957) The ’Burbs (Joe Dante, 1989) Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Fran Rubel Kuzui, 1992) Burn Witch Burn (Sidney Hayers, 1962) Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1976) Chiller (Wes Craven, 1985) City of the Dead (John Llewellyn Moxey, 1960) The Craft (Andrew Fleming, 1996) The Crazies (George Romero, 1973) Dawn of the Dead (George Romero, 1978) Dawn of the Dead (Zac Snyder, 2004) Day of the Dead (George Romero, 1985) Deadly Friend (Wes Craven, 1986) Disturbia (D.J. Caruso, 2007) Edward Scissorhands (Tim Burton, 1990) The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973) The Faculty (Robert Rodriguez, 1998) Fido (Andrew Currie, 2006) Funny Games (Michael Haneke, 1997) Ginger Snaps (John Fawcett, 2000) Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978) Halloween (Rob Zombie, 2007) The Hamiltons (Michael Altieri and Phil Flores, 2006) Head Case (Anthony Spadaccini, 2007) Hidden (Michael Haneke, 2005) The Hills Have Eyes (Wes Craven, 1977) I Am Legend (Francis Lawrence, 2007) I Married a Monster From Outer Space (Gene Fowler, 1958) I Married a Witch (Rene Clair, 1942) The Innocents (Jack Clayton, 1963) Invaders From Mars (William Cameron Menzies, 1953) The Invasion (Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2007) Invasion of the Bodysnatchers (Don Siegel, 1956) 222

Filmography 223 Invasion of the Bodysnatchers (Philip Kaufman, 1978) Invitation to Hell (Wes Craven, 1984) It Came from Outer Space (Jack Arnold, 1953) Jack’s Wife (George Romero, 1972) Land of the Dead (George Romero, 2005) The Last House on the Left (Wes Craven, 1972) The Last Man on Earth (Sidney Salkow and Ubaldo Ragona, 1964) Monster House (Gil Kenan, 2006) Night of the Living Dead (George Romero, 1968) A Nightmare on Elm Street (Wes Craven, 1984) The Omega Man (Boris Sagal, 1971) Parents (Bob Balaban, 1989) The People Under the Stairs (Wes Craven, 1991) Poltergeist (Tobe Hooper, 1982) Practical Magic (Grifﬁn Dunne, 1998) Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) Rabid (David Cronenberg, 1977) Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954) [REC] (Jaume Balaguero and Paco Plaza, 2007) Red Eye (Wes Craven, 2005) Revenge of the Stepford Wives (Robert Fuest, 1980) Right at Your Door (Chris Gorak, 2006) Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968) Safe (Todd Haynes, 1995) Scream (Wes Craven, 1996) Serial Mom (John Waters, 1994) The Seventh Continent (Michael Haneke, 1989) The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980) Shocker (Wes Craven, 1989) The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991) Slither (John Axelrad, 2005) The Stepfather (Joseph Rubin, 1987) The Stepford Children (Alan J. Levi, 1987) The Stepford Husbands (Fred Walton, 1996) The Stepford Wives (Brian Forbes, 1975) The Stepford Wives (Frank Oz, 2004) Stir of Echoes (David Koepp, 1999) Targets (Peter Bogdanovich, 1968) Terror Tract (Lawrence W. Dreesen and Clint Hutchison, 2000) The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974) Weird Woman (Reginald Le Borg, 1944) Westworld (Michael Crichton, 1973) Witches’ Brew (Richard Shorr and Herbert L. Strock, 1980)

Index Absalom, Absalom! 107, 162 Abuse of children, 35, 126, 131, 151 of spouse, 189 Academics, smug, 44, 59 Addams, Charles, 50 Addam’s Family, The, 50 Adultery, 123, 171, 188 Advertising, signiﬁcance of in Desperate Housewives, 184 The House Next Door, 158 Mad Men, 171 The Stepford Wives, 95–7, 99, 208n71 Agrestic, CA, 169 AIDS Safe as allegory for, 101 Alcoholism, 30, 153 Alienation, 209n77 All That Heaven Allows, 90 American Beauty, 13, 134, 167 American Dreamscape, 12 American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative, 12 American gothic, the adaptations from European gothic tradition, 105–6 association with speciﬁc geographical regions, 10–11, 38 early establishment and development, 9–10 focus upon the family as locus of horror, 136 new American gothic, 107–8 American Scene, The, 84 Amityville Horror, The (book) 109–16 as economic horror story, 110 veriﬁable facts of the case, 110 Amityville Horror, The (ﬁlm versions), 105, 110 Angel (TV show), 175, 177, 177–8 Anson, Jay, 13, 105, 116–32, 210n17–18, 210n29–37

penchant for excessive use of exclamation marks, 114 Anti-Semitism, 22, 123–4, 202n20 Aorta, Mr, 104, 111 Apocalypse apocalyptic strain in American literary culture, 198 in BTVS 174, 184, 191, 213n7 in I Am Legend, 27 Apt Pupil, 167 ‘Arcadia’, 48 Architects haunted, 120, 122, 125, 182 Arson, 170, 174, 184, 191, 213n7 Arthur Mervyn, 10 Association, The, 48 Atlanta, 117 Austin, Steve, 91 Avila, Eric, 32, 203n52, 208n52, 209n74 Baby boom, 6, 116, 142 Bachelard, Gaston, 155–6, 212n28 Bachman, Richard, 209n12 Bacon, Kevin, 203n60 Bad Place (King), 109 Bailey, Dale, 111, 209n11, 210n59, 211n62, n74 Bailey, Sarah, 66 Baker, Dylan, 90 Balaban, Bob, 160–1 Ballard, J.G. 165, 215n41 Bankruptcy, spectre of in Suburban Gothic, 112–13 Barber, Paul, 152, 211n84 Bartel, Pauline, 205n64 ‘Bart’s Comet’, 29 Basements, 155, 157, 163 as bomb shelter, 29 burial ground, 38 prison, 154 Bates house, motel, 137–9 Bates, Norman, 137–9, 164

224

Index 225 Battlestar Galactica, (original series), 91 Baudrillard, Jean, 98, 209n75 Baumgartner, M.P., 188 Baxendall, Elizabeth, 12 Beane, Sawney, 148 Beards growth of as sign of depression, 31 of looming madness, 113–14 Beaumont, Charles ‘Free Dirt’, 104 ‘The New People’, 47–8 as writer for The Twilight Zone, 130 ‘Beautiful Stranger, The’ 69, 71–2, 206n3–7 Bell, Book and Candle, 40, 43 Bennell, Miles, 77–85 Bergland, Renee, 115, 209n2, 210n37 Berne, Suzanne, 152 Beuka, Robert, 3, 11–12, 15, 103, 201n3, 208n45 Bewitched, 11–12, 40, 43–57, 65, 67, 190 conformity in, 50, 51, 55 Cousin Serena, 56 ﬁlm adaptation, 205n67 ‘I Darrin take this Witch’, 49 as ‘magic’ sitcom, 50 original title, 50 ‘phoniness’ of, 54–5 as racial allegory, 49 Big Love, 169 Billson, Anne, 168, 213n5, 214n11–12 Bionic Woman, The, 91 Bixby, Jerome, 209n12 Blackwood, Merrricat, 22 Blair, Linda, 150 Blair Witch Project, The, 42, 66 Blake, Jerry, 106, 157–8, 163 Blakeslee, Sandra, 206n9–10 Blatty, William Peter, 108 Blind Ballots, The, 9 Bloch, Robert, 137 Bloodstains, suspicious, 47 Blue Velvet, 42, 66 Bodily functions and 1970s horror, 114, 124, 131 Body-replacement narratives, 76 Bogdanovich Peter, 13, 137, 139 Bogeymen, suburban, 146

Bomb shelters and suburbia, 28–30 Book of the Dead, 85 Boomburbs, 195 Borden, Lizzie, 204n26 Boreanaz, David, 177 ‘Born of Man and Woman’, 17 Botting, Fred, 211n84 Boucher, Anthony, 212n19 Boundaries, signiﬁcance in Jackson, 202n30 Bourdieu, Pierre, 118 Bowling Alone, 118 Boy-next-door-turned-madman trope, 136, 139–41, 143, 146, 164 Brackett, Sheriff, 145 Bradbury, Ray, 17, 28 Brady Bunch, The (ﬁlm), 213n35 Brady Bunch, The (TV Show), 157 Brain Eaters, The, 76 Brain From the Planet Arous, The (1953), 76 Brainwashing, 55, 73 Brecht, Kyle, 160 Brennan, Joseph Payne, 210n35 Briefel, Aviva, 156, 212n29–30 Brown, Charles Brockden, 10, 38, 106–7, 165 Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 173–81 academic interest in, 173 ‘Buffy vs Dracula’, 179 climax of series, 166–7 economic realism, 180 European origins of supernatural entities in show, 177–8 ﬁlm version, 174 Hellmouth, 175, 178 hybrid nature, 168–9 Mayor Wilkins, 176–7 ‘Pangs’, 177 ‘The Prom’, 179 Summers house as microcosm of Sunnydale 179–80 teenage friendship in, 189 witchcraft in, 64, 66 Buffybot, 180 Bulldozer in the Countryside, The, 4, 131 Bulldozers, 128, 131 Bullying, in The Road Through the Wall, 22

226

Index

Burbs, The, 132–3, 135, 187 Burial grounds in The Amityville Horror, 115 in BTVS, 177 Indian, 104, 114, 125, 138 lack of in Desperate Housewives, 182 Poltergeist, 127, 131, 132 Burlingame, CA, 19–21 Burnham, Lester, 134 Burnt Offerings, 108–9, 120 Burton, Tim, 164 Bush, George and Laura, 191 Bush, George Senior, 154 Cabrillo, San Francisco, 19 California, 19, 35, 100, 137, 167, 169 Cambridge Companion to Gothic Literature, The, 12 ‘Canavan’s Back Yard’, 210n35 Candyman, 156, 86 Cannibalism in Parents, 160–1 The People Under the Stairs, 154–5 Capgras syndrome, 72–3, 206n8 Carpenter, John, 11, 13, 137, 142–6 Carrie, 203n7 Carter, Jimmy, 111–12 Catholicism in Jack’s Wife, 60 Chafe, William S. 53, 201n5, 204n34, 205n39, n42–3, 208n49 Chambost, Christophe, 205n58 Charmed, 41, 63, 65–6, 127 Cheever, John, 22, 172, 188 Cherry, Marc, 166, 182–3, 187–8 Chihuahua’s head, no bigger than, 29 Children under threat, 2, 22–3, 112–13, 133–14 Chiller, 150–1 City in History, The, 7, 20 City of the Dead, 42 Civil defence, 28 Clapson, Mark, 5, 61, 201n2, n4, n15, n18, 204n35, 205n59, 61 Class in the Suburban Gothic, 22, 118–19, 123, 125, 152, 155 Clayton, Jack, 145 Clergy, 113–14, 130

Close, Glen, 100 Clover, Carol J, 128–9, 174, 211n75, n80 Cohen, Larry, 208n67 Cold War anxieties and the Suburban Gothic, 69, 73, 149 Collier’s Magazine, 199 Collingwood, John and Estelle, 147–8 Colonial-era rhetoric applied to suburbia in Eisenhower era, 10 Colonial Street (Universal Studios back lot), 187 ‘Comfortable concentration camp, the’, 9 Commentary, critical, on suburbia, see 2, 7–9, 15, 18, 25, 69, 190–1 Community relations post-apocalyptic, 155 Commuting patterns, 139, 141 Compton, 32 Coneheads, 164 Conformity, 2, 7, 15, 50–1, 69, 83 Conjure Wife, 12, 43–7, 49, 68 ﬁlm adaptations, 204n12 Connecticut, 50, 109 Connolly, Billy, 90 Conspicuous consumption, 86–7, 161 Consumerism, mindless, 74 Containment culture, 25 Coronation Street, 213n32 Cortman, Ben, 30, 35 Couch – mistaken delivery of as trigger for existential crisis, 101, 166 Country clubs: as entrance to hell, 20, 151 Couples, 9 Coven as female self-help group, 63 Crack in the Picture Window, The, 7, 70, 74 Craft, The, 41, 56, 66 Crane, Marion, 138–9 Craven, Wes, 2, 13, 51, 113, 146–57, 150–1, 160 Crawlspaces as repository for bodies, 133–4, 155, 213n37

Index 227 Crazies, The, 57, 203n44 Creature-Features, 76 Creed, Barbara, 204n7 Crichton, Michael, 91 Cronenberg, David, 202n44 Cross, Marcia, 183 Cuesta Verde, 126, 131, 211n70 Currie, Andrew, 2, 89, 91 Curtis, Jamie Lee, 144 Cyborgs, in 1970s pop culture, 91 Danse Macabre, 12, 82, 109 Dante, Joe, 175 Davenport, Richard Hines, 209n5 Dawn of the Dead, 86, 87 similarity to ending of The Stepford Wives, 88 2004 remake, 88–9 Day of the Dead, 52 Day, Doris, 52 Dead and Buried, 211n81 Deathline, 211n81 De Beauvoir, Simone, 92, 208n59 DeFeo, Ronnie, 106, 110 Deffeyes, Kenneth, 193, 215n1 Degler, Carl, 53–4, 205n45–7 Dehumanisation and the Suburban Gothic, 69–104 in Conjure Wife, 46, Demographic changes caused by suburban expansion, 61 Demonic rituals, 60 Desmond, Caroline, 21, 24, 35 Desperate Housewives, 181–91 academic interest in, 171, 173 arson, extraordinarily common occurrence of in the show, 184, 186–7, 213n7 insularity in, 188 narration, 134 pilot episode, 166 Psycho connection, 137 ‘real life’ inspiration, 182 relative avoidance of real-world issues, 191 setting, 11, 13 soap opera tropes in, 168–9 Stepford references, 214n17 Twin Peaks, inﬂuence of, 184–5

Dick, Philip K., 91, 208n65 Dinner scenes, disturbing in Last House in the Left, 148 Parents, 213n39 The Texas Chain Saw Massacre 213n39 Dirt, graveyard, 44, 104 Disney, Walt, 98 Disneyland as simulation (Baudrillard), 98 Distinction, 118 Disturbia phrase coined by Gunther and Gans, 1, 8 2007 ﬁlm, 160, 165, 213n39 Disturbing Behaviour, 99 DIY and the Suburban Gothic Amityville, 111 in I Am Legend, 30 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? 91 Dogs deaths of in The House Next Door, 120, Halloween, 145 vomiting canines, 114 Domestic ideology media ‘collusion’ in creation of, 53–4 on verge of collapse, 52–3 Donaldson, Scott, 9, 15, 20, 73, 75, 201n10, n12, n18, 206n14, 15, 25 Donaldson, Todd, 23, 24 Doppelgangers, 72, 185 Doubles, dark, and witches, 56–7, 79 Dougherty, Kim, 120, 122, 125 Dracula, 11, 42 Draper, Don, 171 Driscoll, Becky, 78 Drone, John and Mary, 7, 74, 76, 190 Drug dealing, 58, 169 Dunne, Dominique, 211n81 Dystopian visions of suburbia, 199 Dziemianowicz, Stefan, 201n4 Eagle State, 11 Earthquakes in Buffy The Vampire Slayer, 175 Eberhart, Joanna, Walter, 93, 94, 99–102

228

Index

Economic anxieties and the Suburban Gothic, 109, 112, 115, 118, 128, 141, 180, 197 Eden, fallen in Road, 26 Edgar Huntly, 10 Edge City: Life on the New Frontier, 12, 92, 194 Edward Scissorhands, 164 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 10, 28–9 Ellis Island, 84 Ellison, Harlan, 145 Emge, David, 87 End of Suburbia, The, 195 Entrapment, ﬁnancial, 33, 139, 154, 171 Environmental concerns and the Suburban Gothic, 4, 96, 131, 163, 194, 198 Ephron, Nora, 64 Erens, Patricia Brett, 159–60, 213n33–4 Etiquette, breaches of, 121, 162 Eugenidies, Jeffrey, 13 European gothic, 10, 105 Ewen, Elizabeth, 12 Exorcist, The, 67, 108, 113–14, 150, 168, 209n12 Expanding Suburbia, 12 Exurbs, 193 Faculty, The, 206n22 Faculty wives as witches in Conjure Wife, 45–7 Fakery (fake bakery), 170 Fairview in Desperate Housewives and Psycho, 137 Fairy Liquid detergent, 208n71 ‘Fall of the House of Usher, The’, 106 ‘Fallen Eden in Shirley Jackson’s The Road Through the Wall’, 202n32 Family, claustrophobic focus on in Suburban Gothic, 105–6, 112–13, 136, 147 Family Guy; Poltergeist spoof, 214n8 Family values, conservative, 150, 158–9, 165 Fantasy sitcoms of the 1960s, 50 Far From Heaven, 89, 209n78

Faulkner, William, 10, 38, 107, 117, 136, 162, 165, 209n7 Fembots, 55, 91 Feminine Mystique, The, 9, 52, on advertising industry, 97 as conspiracy theory, 97 references to in Desperate Housewives, 182 use of metaphor, 93 Fences, white picket, 166 FHA (Federal Housing Administration), 32 Fido, 2, 13, 70, 89–91, 160, Fiedler, Leslie, 9, 201n16 Final girls, 144–5, 153, 173–4 Finney, Jack, 13, 46, 69, 76, 77, 85, 207n24–9, n32, n34–7, 208n41, n45 Flanders, Ned, 29 Fleming, Andrew, 66 Floating Dragon, 109 Forbes, Brian, 50, 208n71 Ford, Richard, 15 Foree, Ken, 87 Forests, 148, 199 Fortress, suburban home as, 28, 29, 155–6 Frankenstein, 18, 42, 164 Franks, Fred S., 209n6 ‘Free Dirt’, 104 Freeling, Carole Anne, Dana, Diane, Robbie, Steve, 127–33 Friedan, Betty, 9, 52, 62, 92–3, 99, 182, 208n57–8, 209n73 Friedman, Lenemaja, 18, 201n7, n9, 202n22, n18 Gacy, John Wayne, 213n37 Gali, Eva, 109 Gans, Herbert, 9, 12, 61, 75, 86, 206n18, 208n48 Garreau, Joel, 12, 194, 201n14, 201n1 Gated suburbs, 91, 100 Gein, Ed, 137, 142 Gellar, Sarah Michelle, 174 Generation of Vipers, A, 52 Genovese, Kitty, 145 Geography of Nowhere, The, 194

Index 229 Geography and the Suburban Gothic, 10–11, 172–3 Ghosts, suburban, 35–7, 134, 116–35 G.I. Bill, 5–6 Ginger Snaps, 164 Goddu, Theresa, 209n3 Gordon, Richard and Katharine, 8–9, 191, 198 Gossip, 124 Gothic, American, see ‘American gothic’ Gothic, European, see ‘European gothic’ Gothic, Southern, see ‘Southern gothic’ Gothic, Suburban, deﬁnitions, see ‘Suburban Gothic’ Green zone in Fido, Baghdad, 91 Greene, Gregory, 195 Guidance counsellors, doomed in Parents, 162 in The Stepfather, 159, Gulf War, 1991, 154 Gunther, Max, 8–9 Haddonﬁeld, Illinois, 145, 176 Hall, Joan Wylie, 18–19, 202n32 Halliburton, 90 Halliwell sisters (Charmed), 67 Halloween (1978), 11, 13, 135, 137, 142, 150, 174, 190 absence of adults in, 145 setting, 143, 155 Halloween (2007), 142 Hamiltons, The, 164 Hamm, John, 171 Haneke, Michael, 209n77 Hanks, Tom, 133 Happiness, 167 Hatcher, Teri, 184 Hattenhauer, Darryl, 18 Hauer, Rutger, 174 Haunting of Hill House, The, 17, 108, 120, 130 Hauntings, dubious (see also The Amityville Horror) Hauntings, suburban, 17, 26, 104–35, 190

contrasted with ‘traditional’ haunted houses, 116 economic factors contributing to, 109 material consequences of, 115–16, 118 media attention, 116–17 and stolen land, 111, 115 1970s haunted houses, 116–27 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 38, 42, 106 Haynes, Todd, 13, 61, 100, 166, 209n78 Head Case, 163, 165 Hearst, Patricia, 213n40 Hell House, 39, 116 Hell mouths, suburban, 132, 151, 167–8, 174–8 Hepburn, Katherine, 53 Hess, David, 147 Hidden (aka Cache), 209n77 Hills Have Eyes, The, 148–9, 165 Hispanic origins of Californian suburbs, 176, 211n70 Hitchcock, Alfred, 135–7, 187 Alfred Hitchcock Presents, 150 Hoffman, Alice, 56, 63 Hogle, Jerome, 12 Holland-Toll, Linda, 123–4, 126 Holmes, A.M., 13 Homeland Security, 157 Homosexuality, 121, 126 Hooper, Tobe, 211n73 Horror and the everyday, 27–31 Horror ﬁlms, American, 136–65 Horror, post-war, 15–16, 27, 38–9, 47, 109, 137, 141 Hours, The, 209n78 House Next Door, The, 1, 4, 11, 12, 13, 35, 105, 114, 116–27, 144, 158, 176, 204n55 alternate interpretations of narrative, 126 cause of haunting, 125, 134 class and privilege in, 118–19 as ﬁctional analogue to Amityville, 118 narcissism in, 119 social ostracism in, 124–5

230

Index

House Next Door, The – continued social taboos in, 126–7 violation of etiquette, 121 House of the Seven Gables, The, 106 Houses disputed ownership of, 111 in the new American gothic, 107 rundown, 144 standardised housing, 74 Housewives, trapped, 62, 133, 171 Housework, 166 and perfectionism, 95–6 Hubbert, M. King, 196 Hurt, Mary Beth, 160 Hypnosis, 35–6 Hysteria, mass, 79 I Am Legend, (2007 ﬁlm), 28, 33 I Am Legend (1954 novel), 2, 12, 27–35, 149, 156 beards in, 31 celibacy in, 30 DIY, 50 importance of routine in, 31 inﬂuence on Romero, 85 misogyny in, 35 racial subtexts, 32–3 I Dream of Jeannie, 56 I Married A Monster From Outer Space, 76 I Married A Witch, 40, 43 Ice Storm, The, 167 Illinois, 11, 142 Incest, 155, 148–9 Indians, see also burial grounds Infantilism, 140 Innocents, The, 145 Insularity in the Suburban Gothic, 119, 123, 130, 188, 190 Invaders From Mars, 76 Invasion, The, 207n23 Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 13, 46, 69, 77–85, 103, 202n37, 207n40 Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978 ﬁlm), 207n23 Invitation to Hell, 151, 175 IT, 109 It Came From Outer Space, 76 It’s Alive!, 208n67

Jack’s Wife, 40, 57–63, 171, 205n58 alternate titles, 57, 211n67 as horror ﬁlm, 61, 210n16, n26 opening scenes, 59 Safe comparison, 101 Jackson, Kenneth, 9, 201n15, 206n16–17 Jackson, Shirley, 10, 12, 42, 130, 136, 152, 202n17, n19, n21, n24, n25, 206n3–7 ‘The Beautiful Stranger’, 69 Californian origins, 20, 21 The Haunting of Hill House, 17 Houses in Jackson’s work, 18, 26, 108 ‘The Lottery’, 17 residence in Westport, CT, 204n30 The Road Through the Wall, 15–27 The Sundial, 19 We Have Always Lived in the Castle, 18, 42 Jacobs, Jane, 191 James, Henry, 108, 208n44 Jameson, Fredric, 208n65 Jancovich, Mark, 17, 79, 83, 201n6, 202n46, 208n42 Janitors, school, 152, 212n25 Jaws, 143 ‘Jingle mail’, 197, 215n15 Jones, Gerard, 51, 56, 204n27, n29, n32 Jones, January, 171 Joshi, S.T., 201n1 Jurca, Catherine S., 15 Just a Housewife, 52 Karp, David, 9 Karras, Fr. Damian, 113 Kaufman, Philip, 207n23 Keats, John, 7, 12–13, 70, 74, 92, 190, 198, 201n10, n11 Kelly, Tim, 139 Kennedy, Colquitt, Walter, 1, 117–28 Kennedy, John Fitzgerald, assassination of, 141 Khatchadourian, Kevin, 139

Index 231 Kidman, Nicole propensity for appearing in dire remakes, 206n67, see also Bewitched, The Stepford Wives and The Invasion King, Stephen, 2, 10, 12–13, 15, 17, 82, 109, 115, 207n31, n39 as Richard Bachman, 209n12 on The Amityville Horror, 110, 112 on The House Down the Street, 165 Kinkle, Harvey, 66 Kiss Before Dying, A, 91 Knight, Peter, 92, 97, 208n55–6, 209n72 Knots Landing, 168 Korean War, 171 Krueger, Freddy, 152–3 Kunstler, James Howard, 8, 181, 194–8, 215n6, n7 Kuzui, Fran Rubel, 174 Laemle, Nick, Lily and Michael, 160–1 Lake, Ricky, 162 Lake, Veronica, 43 Land of the Dead, 87 Landlords, evil, 153–4 Lassie, 89 Last House on the Left, The (1972), 13, 147–8, 165 Last Man on Earth, The, 28, 85 Leave it to Beaver, 157–8 Leave Me Alone, 9 Legend of Lizzie Borden, The, 204n26 Leiber, Fritz, 12, 40, 43–4, 204n14–21 Levin, Ira, 13, 46, 55, 70, 91–2, 99, 108, 180, 208n60, n63, n64, n66, n68–70 Levitt, William, 6 Levittown, 6, 73 Levittowners, The, 61, 75, 86 Little, Bentley, 48 Little Children, 152 Long Emergency, The, 8 Long Island, 108–9 as locale for suspiciously cheap houses, 111 Longoria, Eva, 183 Loomis, Dr Sam, Billy, Los Angeles, 28, 66, 174

‘Lottery, The’ (1948) Love and Death in the American Novel, 9 Lovecraft, H.P., 10, 15, 27, 38 Lovely Bones, The, 13, 133–4, 152 Lutz, George and Kathy, 110–16, 118, 127 Lynch, David, 184–5 Lynch mobs in the Suburban Gothic, 202n23, see also Vigilantes Mad Men, 171–2 Magazines enforcing domestic ideology, 53, 98 Magic black, 48 as metaphor, 45, 58, 190, 205n56 use of by suburban witches, 45, Magnolia, 209n78 Mai-Lai massacre, 147 ‘Main Street USA’ (Disneyland), 9 Malin, Irving, 107, 209n11 Malls, establishment of in post-war era, 87, 98 Manhunter, 164 Manifest Destiny, 10 Mann, George, 9 Mansﬁeld, Jane, 52 Manufactured obsolescence, 86 Marasco, Robert, 108–9 March, Fredric, 43 Markowe, Bobbie, 93–9 Martinson, Tom, 12 Masculinity in crisis, 4, 30, 34–5, 134 Mass murder, 139–41 Mass production and prefabrication techniques, 6, 74 Massachusetts, 65, 124 Massacres, family, 106, 110, 140, 158 Materialism and the Suburban Gothic, 111, 115–16, 138, 170–1, 183 Matheson, Richard, 2, 10, 12, 15, 17, 27, 33, 39, 108, 130, 136–7, 156, 188, 201n17, 202n45, 49, 51–64, n67–76 Matthews, Glenna, 40, 52 Mayer, Susan, 183 Mazzard, Ike, 98 McCarthy, Elizabeth, 212n1

232

Index

McCullers, Carson, 10, 38 McDonnell, Jenny, 213n1 McLachlan, Kyle, 185 Meat Loaf Mambo, 160 Meet the Applegates, 164 Menzies, William Cameron, 76 Mezzio, Douglas, 167, 213n3 Michasiw, Kim Ian, 12 Misanthropy, 25 Misogyny in I Am Legend, 35 in Stir of Echoes, 37 in Matheson generally, 52 Mitchell, Joan, 57–63 ‘Momism’, 52 Monroe, Marilyn, 52 Monster House, 13, 133 Montgomery, Elizabeth, 49, 56, 204n26, 206n69 Moore, Julianne, 100 as ﬁrst lady of cinematic suburban alienation, 209n78 Moorhead, Agnes, 49 Mormonism, 169 Mortgages easy availability of in post-war era, 6 sub-prime mortgage crisis of 2008–9, 197 Moss, Carrie Anne, 90, 160 Motels, 132, 137–9 Mothers, single, 158–60, 179 Move to suburbia, 174, 94, 190 Mr Ed, 50, 158 Muir, John, 61, 143, 149–50, 205n57 Mulder, Fox, 48, 178 Mum and Dad, 212n27 Mumford, Lewis, 7–8, 12–13, 20, 70, 92, 191, 198, 201n13, 206n2 Munsters, The, 50, 187 Mutants, mutation, 17 My Mother the Car, 50 Myers, Michael, 135, 142–3, 151, 176 Nagai, Sianna, 156 Narcissism, 116, 119, 127 Narration, from beyond the grave, 134–5 Neighbourhood rivalries in I Am Legend, 30–1

Neighbours, indifferent in Halloween, 132, in Poltergeist, 146 Neighbours, nosy, 49 Nelson, Craig T., 3 Neville, Robert, 27–34, 56, 82, 148 New England, 1, 28, 41, 65, 105 Newman, Kim, 127, 141, 148, 202n41, 211n72, 212n8 Newman, Nanette, 208n71 Newness, and the Suburban Gothic, 1, 10, 36, 128 Nicolaides, Becky, 191, 214n26 Night of the Living Dead, 28, 58, 85, 89, 136, 142 Nightmare on Elm Street, A, 13, 150–3, 155–6, 165, 176, 190 Nimoy, Leonard, 207n23 Oakes, Guy, 28, 203n38 Oates, Joyce Carol, 13 O’Connor, Flannery, 10, 38, 107, 118, 139, 209n8, n9 Oil cheap oil as an aid to suburban growth, 87 crisis of the 1970s, 112, 138, 191, 196–7, 215n9 crisis of 2008, 193 peak oil, 193, 196–7 Omega Man, The, 28 Oppenheimer, Judy, 25–6, 201n12, 202n28–9, n31 O’Quinn, Terry, 157 Organisation Man, The, 22, 28, 70, 78–9 Orlock, Byron, 139–41 O’Rourke, Heather, 211n81 Overlook Hotel, 109 Oz, Frank, 100 Paedophiles and the Suburban Gothic, 131, 151–3, 187, 190 Palmer, Laura, 184 Paranoia, 78, 97 Parapsychology, 113, 125, 130 Parent/child relationships, 136–66 Parents, 13, 137, 157, 160–1, 163, 165 Parker, Mary Louise, 169 Party of Five, 164

Index 233 Patterson, James, 201n7, 204n34, 205n37–8, n44, 208n50–1 Paxton, Bill, 169 Peaceable Lane, 9 Peach, Linden, 152, 212n24 People Under the Stairs, The, 2, 13, 150, 165 Pepper Street, 18, 21, 25–6 Perrota, Tom, 152 Peyton Place, 168 Philadelphia, 38, 87, 89 Philips, Kendall, R., 138, 212n4 Picture Windows, 12 Pigs, demonic, 110, 113 Pilato, Herbie J., 204n22 Pod People, 46, 76, 80–6 Poe, Edgar Allan, 107 Polanski, Roman, 49 Police and the Suburban Gothic, 24, 147–8, 152, 155, 176 Polley, Sarah, 88 Poltergeist, 3, 11–13, 105, 127–33, 135, 144, 158, 166, 182, 211n87 Poltergeist 3, 211n81 Portland Cement Association, 28 Possession, demonic, 108 Post-war era, social and historical contexts of, 6, 15 Practical Magic 41, 56, 63 Prentiss, Paula, 208n61 Price, Vincent, 28 Property prices, in the Suburban Gothic, 156 Psychic ability, 34–6, 113 Psycho, 135–9, 141–5, 154, 156, 159, 187 Puppet Masters, The, 77 Purkiss, Diane, 62–3, 205n63, n65–6 Puritans, 38, 43, 65, 105–6, 131, 198 Putnam, Robert, 188, 214n24 Quaid, Randy, 160 Rabbit Redux, 9 Rabbit Run, 9 Racism and the Suburban Gothic, 22, 91, 32–3, 123–4, 148, 153–4, 156, 170 Radiation, cosmic, 89

Ragona, Ubaldo, 85 Railroad suburbs, 20–1 Ray, K’Sun, 90 Reagan, Ronald, 127–8 Realtors and the Suburban Gothic, 110, 121, 128, 144 Rear Window, 59, 160 [REC], 203n44 Red Dragon, 164 Red Eye, 157 Regulators, The, 209n12 Revenge of the Stepford Wives Rhode Island, 38, 63 Right at Your Door, 202n44 Road Through the Wall, The, 12, 15–27, 152, 202n17, n19, n21, n24–6 bullying in, 23 geographical location in, 19 removal of wall, 20, 23, 119 Rolfe, Marion, 108–9, 120 Rome, Adam, 4, 131, 201n8, 211n83 Romero, George, A., 13, 28, 40, 57, 70, 85–6, 89 Rosemary’s Baby, 42, 49, 91, 18 Ross, Gaylen, 87 Routine, 166, 213n2 Russell, Jamie, 85–6, 208n46 Russell, Rosalind, 53 Russell, Sharon, 40, 42, 204n1–2, n8–10 Sabrina the Teenage Witch, 41, 56, 63, 65–6, 168 Sacriﬁces, human, 48 Safe, 4, 13, 61, 70, 100–3, 171, 209n78 Salem Witch Trials, 40–3 Salem’s Lot, 109, 166 Salkow, Sidney, 85 Salmon, Suzie, 134, 152 ‘Sameness’ and the Suburban Gothic, 28, 69–70, 74–5, 77 San Fernando Valley, 100 Santa Mira, 77, 79 Savoy, Eric, 12, 199, 215n17 Saylor, Norman, Tansy, 20–47, 67 Scavo, Lynette, Tom, 184 Scooby-Doo, 168 Scream trilogy, 150, 156, 162, 165 Scully, Dana, 49, 17

234

Index

September 11, 191, 194 Serial killers, 136–65, 190 Serial Mom, 13, 137, 157, 162–3 Serling, Rod, 29 Sex and the City, 183 Sheridan, Nicolette, 168 Shining, The, 106, 109 (novel), 113 (ﬁlm) Shirley Jackson’s American Gothic, 18 Shocker, 150 Short, Sue, 66, 206n71–2 Shrinking Man, The, 34–5, 149 Shriver, Lionel, 55, 139 Siddons, Anne Rivers, 1,11, 13, 35, 105, 116–17, 122, 128, 176, 201n1, 210n41–3, n47–58, n60, 211n64–5, n69 Siegel, Don, 79 Silence of the Lambs, The, 137 Simpsons, The, 11, 29, 172–3 Simulations and simulacra, 98–9 Sirk, Douglas, 89, 168, 183 Sitcoms, fantasy, 157, 162, 172 Skal, David J., 15, 139, 201n3, 212n70 Skolnick, Arlene, 57, 62, 127, 204n36, 205n48, n52–3, n62, 210n37 Slasher ﬁlms, 143, 156 Slither, 207n22 ‘Slumburbia’, 197 Small towns, decline of, 77, 79, 80–2 Snyder, Zack, 88–9 Sobchack, Vivien, 82, 206n21–2, 207n38 Social gatherings which end in disaster, 24, 35, 47–8, 114, 120–1, 124 Solis, Gabrielle, Carlos, 183 ‘Some Stations of Suburban Gothic’, 12 Sopranos, The, 171, 183 South Park, 214n8 Southern gothic, 10, 38, 107 Spadaccini, Anthony, 163 Spielberg, Steven, 127, 211n73 Split-Level Trap, The, 8–9, 70, 191, 200 Stepfather, The, 157–8, 163 Stepfathers, 112–13 Stepford Children, The, 99

Stepford Wives, The, novel, 4, 13, 46, 61, 70–1, 91–100, 168, 180 1975 ﬁlm, 99–100 sequels and remake, 99–100 Stevens, Darren, Samantha, 11, 59–63 Stewart, Jimmy, 43 Stir of Echoes, 10, 108, 122, 132, 149, 188 ﬁlm, 203n68 Stranger in Our House, A, 150 Straub, Peter, 109 Strode, Laurie, 144–5, 150, 152 Strong, Brenda, 184 Sub-prime mortgages, 197 Suburban Commando, 164 Suburban Gothic American popular culture, place in, 200 critical neglect of, 12, 14 deﬁnitions of, 1–5 environmental anxieties, relation to, 4, 198 literary Suburban Gothic, relation to, 13, 152 mass suburbanisation, 38, 203n55 in other countries, 5 persistence of key tropes, 191 Post-war changes and anxieties, relation to, 5 universal nature of, 10–11, 34, 38 Suburban Myth, The, 74, Suburbia as ‘borderland’ space, 3–7, 20 in ‘crisis’, 192 decline of the ‘ﬁrst’ suburbs, 2, 94, 193 ‘end’ of suburbia, 145–6 establishment and growth of, 18 as form of colonisation, 106 as a safe place for children and teenagers, 127, 152–3 2008 ﬁnancial crisis and suburbia, 197 SuburbiaNation, 11, 15 Suicide, 166, 185 Summers, Buffy, 167–8, 170–3 Sundial, The 19, 108 Sunnydale 11, 167, 174–81

Index 235 Supernatural and the Suburban Gothic, 104–35, 114 Sutpen, Beverley, 162 Sutpen, Thomas, 107, 162 Swanson, Kirsty, 174 Tabitha, 65 Targets, 13, 137, 139–41, 143, 145, 165 Tate, Larry, 56 Technology, as threat to small town life, 79 Teenagers and the Suburban Gothic, 22, 58, 66, 128, 131, 145, 148–9, 150–3, 158–60, 175–81 Television and suburbia, 25, 167–9 as conduit to supernatural, 121, 128 television and the gothic, 185–6 television movies, 150–1, 158 Teller, Marshall, 175 Terror Tract, 132, 135 Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The, 136–7 ‘They Bite’, 212n19 Thomas, Keith, 109, 209n14 Thompson, Bobby, 139–41 Thoreau, Henry David, 182 Time Out of Joint, 208n65 Tonkin, Boyd, 214n10 ‘Transient, The’, 77, 80, 131 Trees, evil, 131 Truman Show, The, 208n65 Tucker’s Witch, 65 Tulpa, 48 Twilight Zone, The ‘Little Girl Lost’, 172 ‘The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street’, 29 ‘The Shelter’, 29 ‘Terror at 30,000 Feet’, 172 Twin Peaks, 168, 184–5 Universal Studios, horror movies of the 1930s, 42 Updike, John, 9, 15, 63–4, 172 Utopian visions of suburbia, 199 Vampires, 27–31, 40, 109, 164 Vampires, Burial and Death, 132 Vampirism, psychic, 109

Van De Kamp, Bree, 183 Vance, Eleanor, 116 Vietnam War, 121, 140–2, 147, 161, 171 Vigilantes, suburban, 3, 26–7, 148, 151–3, 157, 164, 187 Virgin Spring, The, 147 Virgin Suicides, The, 167 Visions of Suburbia, 12 Voyeurism; as precursor to violence, 160 Wagner, Lindsay, 91 Walden, 214n15 Wallace, Tom, 10, 35, 122 Wanamaker, Frank, 35–6 War on terror, 157 Waters, John, 164 We Have Always Lived in the Castle, 18, 19, 22, 42, 108 We Need to Talk About Kevin, 55, 139 Weeds, 169–70, 176, 183, 191 Weinraub, Bernard, 214n14 Westport, CT, 50, 94, 204n30, 214n19 Westworld, 91, Wheatley, Helen, 150, 169, 185–6 Whedon, Joss, 174 ‘Whimper of Whipped Dogs, The’, 145 White, Carol, 101–3 White Diaspora, 15 Whitehurst, Laurie, 206n8 Whitman, Charles, 139 Whyte, William H., 22, 28, 68–9, 77, 80, 92, 307n25, n33 Wieland, 10, 106, 136 Wife-as-witch trope in the Suburban Gothic, 12, 40–68, 64 Wife swapping, 48 Wilkins, Mayor Richard, 176 Williams, Tony, 153, 208n53 Winter, Douglas E., 202n35, 203n50, 212n2, n3 Wisteria Lane, 124, 181 Witchcraft, 40–68, 115 Witches New England origins, 44 in popular culture, 42, 45 Salem Witch Trials, 41–2

236

Index

Witches – continued in suburbia, 40–68 W.I.T.C.H, 62 Witches of Eastwick, The, 63 Wizard of Oz, The, 42, 56 Women and suburbia, 52–4, 61–2, 92, 102 Wylie, Philip, 52 Xenophobia, 133 X-Files, The, 48, 178

Yeats, Richard, 9, 15, 172 ‘Young Goodman Brown’, 42 Young, Mary Alice, 134, 166, 171, 184 Zicree, Mark Scott, 202n42 Zombie, Rob, 142 Zombies, 4, 12, 85–91, 97 Zombieville, 85, 97 ZomCon, 90