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

Abstract

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.

I would like to thank Dr Elizabeth McCarthy for her helpful suggestions in relation to this chapter.