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 threat in these films almost always comes not from without, but from within. 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.
