prototypical meaty forms

Since my topic’s scary suburbia, get ready for a sprawl. I’m gonna let myself spread out in this one!

I’m hot off seeing Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw The TV Glow, and it was the best theater experience i’ve had in eras. Whenever i patron the cinema, i love whenever i laugh at stuff no one else does. It makes me feel special!

In a theater chock full of hets, there were several moments that made me and my bestie laugh while everyone else looked on in silence. I’m not talking polite chuckles either. Our cackles were so full-throated they seemed to echo.

It’s a funny movie, but i think the humor will mostly hit for queers. If you’re queer, Schoenbrun’s second feature is a musical comedy fable, a gift celebrating those of us who messily break from the reality imposed on us, and it will leave you feeling validated about your ridiculous, but at least interesting, life choices…but if you’re het, it’s a psychological horror tragedy, a downer eulogy for your dead imagination, and it will leave you feeling haunted by the idea you’re wasting your one precious life kowtowing to convention. 

Of course, this is a false binary i’m establishing. I don’t mean to put queers on a pedestal. Queers suck too. Who’s to say my imagination’s not dead! 

Across this movie’s press cycle, the filmmakers and journalists seem to be emphasizing the narrative’s trans angle–it’s all trans this, egg that. I’m going to mostly sidestep that convo because i want to tango with something that transcends gender, even transcends transgender–the astringent, soulless, corrupt, vibrant and rich suburbs. 

I’ll later get into the nitty gritty of the funniest gags in TV Glow, all the stuff that had my bestie and i a-hootin and a-hollerin while the hets gawped at the screen baffled and depressed, but first i want to set this new flick in the spoooooooky tradition of suburban horror movies. A lineage that i say begins with….George A. Romero’s 1968 classy classic, Night of the Living Dead. Probably my favorite movie in the public domain, oh after Steamboat Willie of course. 

Night of the Living Dead isn’t an obvious choice for the first suburban horror movie. Mainly because it doesn’t take place in the suburbs; it’s almost entirely confined to a rural Pennsylvanian farmhouse. But why quibble over setting? The suburbs are more than the aesthetics of ticky tacky subdivisions. 

Night of the Living Dead is a creature feature where the real creature is a little guy i like to call society. Flesh-eating zombies are background players against which a different horror plays out: the toxic dynamics of a cast that mostly reads as suburban types.

The movie’s story is basic and famous: a random assortment of people flee to a farmhouse when a zombie outbreak occurs. Here’s who we got in the plot: the mod Barbra, a well-dressed truck driver named Ben, the rustic hot young couple Tom and Judy, and the bitter spouses Helen and Harry Cooper, whose daughter is in a zombie bite coma. Ben and Harry’s egos clash the very moment they meet. Harry wants everyone in the cellar; Ben wants to stay up in the house that him and Barbra worked hard boarding up while Harry’s people hid in the basement.  By the end, everybody dies. 

We don’t learn much about these doomed folk, but look at those guys: they’re suburbanites, or at least they could be. The way everybody talks is refined and calculated, even when they’re arguing. Everyone’s always eager to sound reasonable. They project intense self-consciousness. As their pissing contest increasingly threatens the entire group, Ben and Harry project the nervous authority of uptight, middle-class dads.  They keep trying to sound smart. 

Aside from the suburbanite affectations of its cast, the liminal status of the suburbs, somewhere between rural, samey smalltown and diverse bustling city, is crucial to the movie’s premise.  Our stranded characters aren’t in the city, where we presume there’s more chaos, but they aren’t so far from the urban sprawl, and its extensive tracts of homey suburbs, to escape zombie hordes. When Ben arrives on the scene, he monologues about escaping hundreds of the ghouls. He vividly describes plowing through crowds of them with his truck. Based on this, we assume he was driving away from the city and its population density. 

I love how in this movie, and its follow-ups, Dawn and Day, the supernatural threat is other people, or an uncanny twist on other people. It’s unsettling how the survivalists in these movies get so quickly acclimated to killing what is essentially other people. Sure, the zombies are non-communicative cannibals, but they’re still people!

Day especially underlines the humanity of the zombies with the character of Bob, my favorite character in the franchise. But more on that later! Let’s get through Night first. 

I love this movie so dearly. I saw it very young, as a budding horror movie fan. It’s the first proper horror movie i ever saw if we don’t count the 1960 Psycho (and we don’t). I saw it through one of those valu pack DVDs that boasted hundreds of scary movies, each and every title a public domain gem. I thought i’d like scary movies because i liked scary kid stuff like Goosebumps and Are you Afraid of the Dark? 

I remember i recognized the title, because it’s a famous title. It’s a title i’ve known since the day i was born. That’s why i watched it first, but i’d go on to watch many of these valu-pack movies, and i still love those sort of scruffy, grody, cheapo horror flicks. 

My introduction to gore! I swoon at the memory. Stunned that an old movie, or any movie could be so gross. It was like something illicit sneaking into my life. I wasn’t allowed to see violent movies ya see, but my parents weren’t worried about cheesy old movies. I, too, wrote off black and white movies as dull, safe, and chaste. Not this one. They actually show the ghouls munch on the charred organs of the attractive young couple who die in an accidental car explosion during an escape attempt. They fight over their guts like dawgs. It’s gross and cool.

Then there’s the climax of ghastliness: the little zombie girl crouched and snacking on her dad’s gunshot wound (Ben shoots him after he tries to leave him out to die), and zombie kid drops this task only to pick up the even grislier activity of stabbing her mom to death with garden shears. The blood literally flies in this scene. And the editing goes crazy: all this amazing, weird layering of distorted screams. 

Ben is killed by the authorities once they arrive. They mistake him for a zombie as he creeps out, and everyone’s so trigger happy shooting down the uncanny replicas of humans that it seems likely Ben isn’t the only accidental shooting victim. Oh yeah, Barbra is killed when the zombies break into the house, including her zombie brother who died at the movie’s beginning and i cut everything i wrote about that scene because…eh, lots to cover here folks. 

But wait! I should mention that the movie starts with Barbra and her brother Johnny driving out to a cemetery and complaining about the trip. That’s another detail that makes this a suburban horror movie as distinct from a smalltown horror movie with similar themes, like the original 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers…this movie begins with characters griping about that quintessential suburban annoyance…the commute.  

Let’s get back to the topic of death. Tallying it up, four out of seven of the stranded crew die by mishap or human antagonism. A handy majority of kills compared to the supernatural threat of the zombies.

In providing this broad sketch of Night, i’ve included, i think, all of what i think are crucial elements of suburban horror: 1) morbidly comic satire on human folly or evil, with an emphasis on how this folly or evil enables or enforces the supernatural (or natural) threat 2) a cast of broadly defined middle-class strivers (conformists), sometimes the protag is full conformist, sometimes they’re situated between outsider and insider, conformist and rebel 3) uncanny dread in the true sense of uncanny (uncanny is one of these words like campy that feels overused and it makes fools like me feel the need to get hyper-specific pedantic and annoying…more on this later) and 4) nasty subversions on nuclear family life, in which brothers kill sisters, daughters kill mothers, husbands kill wives, etc. etc. just total violent dissolution of peaceful domesticity, that undeniable and ruthless ideal of the suburbs.  

And, sure, let’s say the hidden fifth core component of suburban horror is taking place in the suburbs. I’m talkin middle of nowhere aesthetics. I’m talkin desolate subdivisions. I’m talkin unappealing grey and beige clapboards. It’s no surprise the spiritual sequel to Night, Romero’s 1978 Dawn of the Dead, elevates the action from a farmhouse to that bastion of suburbia iconography: the mall. 

In the decade between Night and Dawn, suburban horror had firmly established itself as a cinematic genre. Romero himself made 1972’s Season of the Witch, a satire on the commercialization of both the occult and feminism in which a suburban housewife kills her jerk husband after going hogwild with a credit card at a pagan store as that irritating hippy dippy rock song croons must be the season of the wiiiiiitch. This movie comes out the same year as Ira Levin’s acclaimed (attempted) feminist suburban horror novel The Stepford Wives, adapted into a 1975 movie. In that suburban nightmare, husbands en masse off their wives and replace them with robot replicas…so yeah it’s a lot less fun than Romero’s. 

All this business of uncanny copies is crucial to suburban horror, or suburban anything. Near the end of his book Under the Eye of Power (2023), Colin Dickey tosses out an incidental observation about how the conformity of suburban housing tracts and strip malls evokes Freud’s notion of the uncanny: a vertigo of losing one’s identity in a sea of clones, the terror of seeing a stranger, the stranger in your reflection. 

So when we see the zombies shuffling about through the mall in Dawn, we recoil at the idea that that could be us. But, dude, those zombies are totally like us. In fact, doesn’t that mall look familiar? Maybe we’ve been there before?

Dawn begins in the city…there’s a chilling scene right out the bat where zombies are loose in some housing project and a cop utilizes the chaos to shoot innocent black people…i think Romero partly included this scene because he’s always been adamant that Night’s Ben wasn’t written to be black, like that ending where the cops shoot him wasn’t an intentional statement on racism, but rather a tragic blunder that Romero wants audiences to see themselves in. That could be anyone getting shot dead mistaken for a zombie, not just a black person. So i bet, in contrast, he wanted to desperately explicitly convey that racial message in Dawn right off the bat. As if Romero’s saying, “you want to see me make a message about racism? Here’s your message! A slur-spewing cop shooting up a housing project. Now that’s a real commentary right there. How dare you accuse me of subtlety!”   

When the four protags of Dawn helicopter out of the city, they fly to a mall. This progression evokes white flight, even as one of our leads, Peter, arguably the main lead, is black. Yet the logic of white flight is laid explicitly bare: the impoverished city is dangerous, patrolled by corrupt cops, hotbeds for violence with their dense populations, but hark! There’s an escape hatch! Safety, space, and resources beckon in the suburbs. 

I mean there’s a reason this genre begins in 1968…right around the turning point when the suburbs go from upper to middle-class, from a status symbol of wealth to the new norm for middle-class normalcy, the post-war replacement of the Americana smalltown.  

Then in 1985, it’s another decade and Romero has another entry in his 24 hour zombie horror trilogy: Day of Dead. I read somewhere that this one’s Romero’s personal favorite, and i hope that’s true because i think it’s the most underrated of the bunch.

Day counts as suburban horror because it all takes place in a military bunker beneath a city overrun by zombies…so it’s suburban in that it’s lower than the urban area….suburban….y-you, y’know because sub, like the prefix….yeah it’s a stretch…

But! Day of the Dead is covertly in a genre often associated with suburban environs…in a skewed way, this is basically a high school movie. There are three distinct cliques in the bunker: scientists, brute army men, and laid back tech guys, with the scientists and army men locked in escalating conflict. A classic high school movie dynamic! It’s the nerds vs. the jocks with the cool bohemians caught in the middle. And the zombies represent the preps! A perfect match of an allegory! I mean high school mineaswell be an underground military bunker, amIright?

The scientists insist on studying the zombies in hopes there’s a cure, but the military guys just want to kill them all. 

Fuck, i want to talk about Bob the zombie. I want to talk about the ethical implications! I want to talk about Bob’s triumphant, homicidal arc!

But i simply can’t. Too much ground to cover i’m afraid. I need to stay on topic, and honestly i don’t truly think Day of the Dead qualifies as suburban horror. Feels like something else. Post-apocalyptic horror.   

I’ll write more about Bob later. Watch, look at me right now: i’m putting a pin in him for a future post about, i dunno, my most dearly beloved monsters maybe. That’s a good post, right? 

Anyway, I can’t jump from 1978 to 1985 without bringing up two seminal works of suburban horror cinema: 1978’s Halloween and 1982’s Poltergeist. 

Along with the sublime Blood Rage, aka Nightmare at Shadow Woods aka Slasher (1987), Halloween is my favorite single slasher movie. It’s undeniable, really earns its title. It’s the only full slasher where there’s a thematic reason the killer, credited as The Shape, wears a mask. He wears a mask because he’s the uncanny personification of what a mask is. He embodies a hid face, an anonymous shape. 

One of my favorite aspects of Halloween is John Carpenter’s and Debra Hill’s script. It’s just so full of good choices. 

The cold open feels like a table-flip. I’ve seen this movie a few times (it’s a perfect movie to put on for pumpkin carving)….and it still surprises me how young Michael Myers is when he kills his older sister. That reveal shot is so fucked! He’s almost like a fucking toddler! I always expect him to be older, more like a preteen. I love the quasi-supernatural glow given to Michael Myers (the doctor’s monologue is delicious melodrama). I love how the parents of the teens are by and large not depicted. There’s this wonderful underlying cynicism: all the adults can provide in this world is the illusion of safety, an illusion they themselves buy into to the point of revoking their guardian roles. And there’s a base, relatable simplicity to the teen girls. Their dialogue captures the stilted, itchy horniness of their suburban banality. 

In Halloween, the suburbs are peaceful, clean, and full of threatening space, as if it’s all set up to make it alarmingly easy to stalk someone. Really comes across as an abyss. 

Halloween begins the entwining of suburbs and slasher. And then we have Poltergeist coming out with Speilberg and his cronies entwining suburban horror with optimism and family values, which of course is unfashionable and icky. Sure, there’s some vague commentary on greedy housing developers, but Poltergeist presents the family unit as strong and absolutely on the good side in a good vs. evil faceoff. The kids are sickeningly well-behaved and the parents unbelievably good-intentioned.  

But it’s not like i don’t like Poltergeist. I don’t have it in me to dislike a movie where a guy hallucinates peeling off his own face in the bathroom mirror. My girl Zelda Rubinstein rocks the place too. There’s a lot going for Poltergeist.

Spielbergian magic suburbs dovetail with the slasher suburbs in depicting a good vs. evil worldview, a yawny breeder perspective where family is the safe in-group and dangers lurk outside this in-group (Halloween is an exception, it’s different than the movies it spawned). A tiresome outlook that loses a lot of what makes suburban horror a bold and (for me) fun subgenre.

Uncanny instability largely departs from suburban horror in the 1980s, finding greener pastures in the body horror subgenre. While family murder becomes more commonly the stuff of general horror. By the 1980s, inner family murder gets all psychological. It’s not happening in the satirical context of broad suburban types, but in harsh psychological intimacy with complex characters.  

King’s breakout foray is the suburban horror Carrie (novel 1974, movie 1976). Yet the abusive Jesus nut of a mom is probably too wackadoo to be considered a representative suburban mom. By the time he writes The Shining  around the close of the decade, he’s portraying a killer parent who’s even more singular and complex, and he’s ditched the suburbs for a ski lodge.

For a while, surreal and satirical suburban horror appears more frequently outside the horror genre. We see it pop up in artsier fare that’s not really horror, you know cinema that’s too respectable and uniquely extra for the horror classification, even if they are horror adjacent–films like Tim Burton and Caroline Thompson’s Edward Scissorhands (1990), David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1991) and Charlie Kaufmann’s Synecdoche, New York (2008). I’m not going into these flicks because for fucks sake i need to confine myself a little, we’re sticking to strictly horror movies. 

By 2014, a perfectly fine movie like David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows can come along and its suburban horror feels nostalgic. The subdivision dread, lack of attentive adults, disaffected horny teenagers, even all the socio-political subtext, it all comes across as part of that movie’s overall homage to the stylings of John Carpenter. 

Which isn’t to say that’s bad! There’s some great freaky shit in It Follows, especially the death scene where the teen is fucked to death by the demon guised as his mom. It’s just, le sigh, it’s starting to feel like there isn’t anywhere new for this subgenre to go.

Not so fast! Don’t look now, but suburban horror may have zest left in her yet. 

Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2016) is original in a lot of ways. It’s the first mainstream horror movie i know of that dramatizes the real-life suburban terror of the sundown town. It does this in the cold open no less. There’s all the ominous signs of nocturnal danger for a black man like our guy played by Lakeith Stanfield, who’s immediate charm makes it seem like he’ll be the protag: the scary, mazey housing, a car stalking, emanating the threatening vibe of neighborhood watch or Michael Myers in the original Halloween (it’s telling that both apply).

Lekeith Stanfield’s immediate capture tells us something important about the suburbs: it is a racist environment that will snuff out main character energy. 

But my favorite bit of innovation in Get Out is its variation on the freaky white family. Usually, the freaky white family is insular and powerless. Cut off from society and probably poor.  Think of the freaky white family in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. They only have power if you stumble into their area, and really what are the chances of that. Texas is big. 

In many ways, Get Out is an inverted TCM. Its freaky white family enjoys good social connections. They don’t make furniture out of skin and redneck shit like that; they hypnotize people with tea cups and monologue into fireplaces. 

Among my favorite sequences in the movie is when the family’s friends gather for the auction party, and it sinks in how vast their world is. They descend on the house in a fleet of nice cars. In a massively scary montage, as we watch one after another awkwardly chat up our protag, we recognize power. The way they talk is nauseatingly cringe, like they don’t care about coming across as dumb or uncouth.  

Throughout the movie, Peele underlines how the cops would probably side with this freaky white family and their people. They’re the opposite of outcasts. 

That’s a major difference! Like, if a cop found Leatherface coming at you with a chainsaw, he’d shoot dead that drag queen in a heartbeat. Not so in Get Out. Get Out is like if Leatherface transitioned into that white girl with teeth and bangs, the evil girlfriend snare. And let’s be real, if Leatherface’s fucked up family were rich, if they owned that meat plant instead of their lowly employment as its butchers, and if they existed in the year of our Lord 2016…look, i know this may be hard to take if you don’t know why i call Leatherface a drag queen, but if you’re a real one you know it’s true, you’ve seen the TCM: New Generation  movie from the 1990s and you know, and if you know that then you should accept my insistence that if you gave our guy enough money and enough education and privilege, it pains me to say, but Leatherface the drag queen would absolutely transition into a racist serial killer quirky girl like the girlfriend snare of Get Out. I refuse to elaborate.    

Let’s change the topic. Goddamnit i cannot get into Leatherface.

Ahem, in 2023, Kyle Edward Ball’s Skinamarink got a wide release and made money, which is kind of nuts considering it sure is different. If It Follows is a homage to the Carpenter suburbs, then Skinamarink is like an anti-homage to the Spielburg suburbs.

Skinamarink depersonalizes its small cast of nuclear family unit: there’s the little kids Kevin and Kaylee and their parents. We don’t see anyone’s faces. In fact, often we don’t see much of anyone’s bodies at all. And as for voices, all we get are whispered snatches of dialogue. The movie’s editing is elliptical throughout. We don’t get regular scenes, where A happens leading to B or whatever. We barely get any sense of character. 

All this uncanny depersonalization feels anti-Spielberg to me. In this movie, we’re put into a child’s perspective, which is to say a perspective of helpless chaos. There’s no good and bad forces in this world; there’s no forces really, only the repeat occurrences of inexplicable scary shit. This leaves the characters, and the audience, stranded from the hope inherent in the sort of plots we find in movies like Poltergeist. There’s no Zelda Rubinstein to handily dump exposition that helps combat the sinister magic at work.

The malevolence is instead seemingly random, with no recourse for aide. Doors and windows disappear. The parents disappear. Kaylee’s eyes and mouth eventually disappear. Toys stick to the wall. A scary, malevolent voice urges, says it wants to play and it forces Kevin to stab his eye. The malevolent voice taunts it can do whatever it wants. 

There’s a great heartbreaking scene where Kevin attempts a 911 phone call after he hurts himself, wherein he reveals he’s four-year-old. Like that Michael Myers reveal in the Halloween cold open, i was shocked at how young this kid is. And i was shocked i didn’t feel more sore for the poor little guy. I was too scared to feel sorry for him.  

In Poltergeist and beyond, Speilberg movies famously imperil children to milk some easy suspense and sympathy from his audience. Skinamarink, alternatively, ensnares the audience into true childlike confusion, terror, and, sure, wonder. It would maybe be unwatchable (or effectively unfilmable) to actually show a four-year-old kiddo find a knife, then show him hesitate, then show him stab his eye, but what Bell does is scarier, or certainly more jarring. Shortly after the demon’s demand for eye trauma, Bell jump cuts to a blurry POV shot from Kevin’s perspective. We hear his agonized shriek. In a quickie of a shot, we see his tear-bleared view of the ceiling. 

The movie has a few jump scares like this, and they’re all crazy effective for me. A few times I screamed full-throated watching it alone in my dark, dark bedroom. 

It’s not made clear, but i think the malevolence in Skinamarink is a manifestation of Kevin’s psyche. The malevolence remains playful throughout, and its frightening distortions of his family and home (his entire world) could be viewed as a child’s need to experiment with boundaries. And near the beginning, we overhear the dad say Kevin injured himself while sleepwalking (his voice muffled, the audio quality perfectly evoking eavesdropping on parents as a kid). It’s one of the few tangible pieces of information we get, and i don’t know, i feel like noctambulism suggests scary stuff going on in someone’s mind when it happens in a horror movie. Seems to suggest the peril originates within Kevin. 

The closing shot is a creepy as fuck smudgy face. I can barely remember how it looks. Kevin addresses it, asking for it to reveal itself. I think that face is his reflection. Part of what makes it so effectively unnerving is that  by the way it’s composed, it could be our reflection too.   

What so excites me about Skinamarink is its powers of evoking the uncanny suburbs of my own personal childhood nights. Frosted mini-wheats eaten on a tv glow carpet, images like that. I love the slideshow near the end depicting suburban family portraits with the faces blurred out. It perfectly visualizes that little kid dread of feeling like you can’t hold onto an identity, that everything, everyone, is always slipping through your mind.

It’s nice to see suburban horror jolted back into a truly new kind of surreal uncanny. It Follows and even Get Out are such referential movies, such movie movies. Skinamarink feels like a completely new direction for the subgenre, or for horror movies at all. 

So at long last, i’ve traced suburban horror cinema right up to I Saw The TV Glow.

I think i watched this movie the way normies watch a summer blockbuster. I savored some cool-looking special effects and neat monsters, i went blah! at a few jump scares, i laughed, i cried, i rooted for our protags. I walked out of that theater with a pep in my step. It was almost like being in love. 

Which is part of what the movie’s about, how the feelings we get from screen fiction can supplant the feelings we get from real life. And just like love with people, we can fall out of love with movies and tv shows. I don’t think i’ve ever seen a movie depict this kind of romance and breakup, with all its sad and funny contours.

So our main guy Owen loves this very 1990s tv show The Pink Opaque, which is about two girls with a woo-woo psychic bond who fight odd monsters. When in 7th grade, he’s introduced to this show by Maddy, a 9th grade lesbian whose surliness adorably and kinda hilariously melts into childish affability when she starts chatting about this tv show.

They meet in an empty darkened school cafeteria while their parents vote. Liminal times. Owen sits by a 1990s Fruitopia vending machine that’s perhaps the best piece of symbolic set design i’ve ever seen in a motion picture. The symbolism is gay.  

Thanks to tv, Owen can live a fantasy life more vibrant than his dull, repressed suburban monotony. He doesn’t seem to have friends. In the few scenes with his mom, there’s an ocean of sadness between them: at a county fair, she looks at him with a distinctly motherly weary expression many queers have probably encountered, that scared look of a concerned mom who’s probably afraid you’re growing up gay or otherwise neurodivergent. In the even fewer scenes with his Fred Durst dad, there’s an ocean of tension and fatherly hostility between them.

Meanwhile, through tasteful dissolve edits, he’s transported into the existence of a fashionable teenage girl who’s played by a hot twenty-something and who goes on wild adventures. 

Is it uncanny to have more deeply felt emotions for a tv show than your parents? Oh my god yes. But it doesn’t crossover into the homicidal uncanny that we’re so accustomed to in suburban horror. 

This isn’t a typical horror movie in that no one or nothing is trying to kill anyone, that is unless we count the slow, lifelong death of burying someone alive in heterosexuality…

You may come home late to find Durst Dad and his creepy scowling face is bone pale and his eyes are blacked out like he’s a black-eyed kid…or he may force you to take your head out of the tv and roughly rinse out your queer in a steamy shower. But Durst Dad isn’t a zombie trying to eat you.

Durst Dad is a different kind of uncanny foe, the kind we perhaps face in real life.  The stranger that is a parent who insists they aren’t a stranger, and you’re not a stranger to them. The parent who keeps you in their idea of you. 

In the uncanny perspective, everyone is an islanded mind inside a prototypical meaty form and ultimately we’re all strangers to each other. Is this an isolating viewpoint? Damn right it is. Although it’s not entirely bleak!

I’ve always loved that zombie girl in Night of the Living Dead. She always inspired in me this weird swell of giddiness, especially when i was a kid close to her age. I’ve never really examined this reaction until now. 

  In uncanny horror, there’s so much space for transgression. Because if it’s true that we’re all minds trapped in prototypical meaty forms, then that means our minds are entirely our own, it’s impossible for anyone to know your mind as well as you do. We’re all capable of such surprises. Any one of us could be a zombie and eat someone’s face, even if they’re a family member, or any one of us could, gee i don’t know, change genders even if it kills a parent’s cherished notion of who we are.

The scary comitragedy of Owen is he’s afraid to explore his mind. Years go by and he gets more timid. First his mom dies offscreen, then his dad. Maddy disappears, then returns, claiming she found a rebirth. She found out her true existence is as a protag in The Pink Opaque. She knows their suburb was created as a trap by the tv show’s big bad. She insists Owen bury himself alive to wake up as Isabelle, the other protag from The Pink Opaque. 

(By the way, i think in the movie’s reality Maddie is entirely right and not insane at all…and i don’t even think it’s ambiguous) 

There’s a palpable distance to Owen and Maddy’s friendship even when she isn’t disappearing on the suburbs (and him). Growing up, she seems to mostly communicate through missives she writes on the tapes she smuggles into his life. When he spends the night in a sleeping bag on her floor, she offers confessions from a dark stairway, not looking at him. 

It’s debatable if they’re even friends. By some people’s standards (not mine!), i guess they’re not friends so much as fans. People with a shared obsession. 

Here we find another cheerful, hopeful side to uncanny horror: the possibility for profound emotional connection and compassion between strangers, or social relationships closer to stranger than friend or family. I find this pop up in almost all the movies i’ve written about here. 

In Night, Ben and Barbra are strangers, but he shows her many small considerations, even finding her shoes in the closet after noticing she lost her own pair. When she emerges from her daze and begins helping him board up the house, it feels like returning the favor is returning her to life.

This dynamic is echoed in Dawn between Peter and Fran, the two characters with the most distance among the core four cast. Peter is the new friend of Fran’s husband’s friend. Yet Fran and Peter seem to share the easiest, most unspoken bond. Right up to the end, when they fly away the two survivors from their group, she smiles at him in this kind of knowing, chummy way, a contented look in contrast to her troubled frown when laying beside her husband in bed. Peter’s also the first to defend Fran when she angrily demands the men to stop overlooking her after their negligence nearly gets her killed.

In Halloween, the bond between Jamie Lee Curis’ iconic final girl babysitter and the kids she supervises is easily the most poignant relationship in the movie. Early on, they display a comfy comradery, much more than what Laurie shows with her peer friends. By the end, she guides her charges with capable, frank, and quasi-maternal authority, despite not even being old enough to be their mother. 

On a similar maternal note, the gym teacher in Carrie shows her more motherly concern and compassion than Carrie’s bio mom. 

In Get Out, i think the most emotional scenes occur between the protag Chris and people he doesn’t really know. Sure, his bestie saves him, but he doesn’t show the aching emotion displayed by Lakeith Stanfield’s sunken-placed victim of the suburbs, when he lunges for Chris in a panicked weep urging him to titularly get out. This moment is soon followed up by our guy stumbling into a strangely deep connection with the freaky white family’s maid, when she blinks tears at him in a smiley breakdown.  He soon starts projecting his dead mommy issues onto her. They bond to that level without even having all that much of a convo!

Even in Skinamarink, where there’s barely any characters outside the family, i think the most palpably humane moment isn’t the mom saying “i love you” in that scary tense “look under the bed” scene. That line delivery is so unnerving and stilted. No, i feel the most tenderness with that 911 operator Kevin manages to contact after his eye injury. That voice sounds cooly compassionate, the closest to an ideal parental figure, if we define that figure as a protective, gentle authority. I think it’s the only time in the movie the viewer can feel something like hope. 

So yeah, i find a lot of coziness in the uncanny, a lot of true hope in the idea that we can show deep compassion beyond family and friend confines, and i don’t know if hets feel that same coziness and hope. Maybe that’s why my gal pal and i laughed at so much in Glow that the hets didn’t.

I don’t know, i honestly find it crazy though! How did they not laugh at the running ice cream man monster joke? When we first meet this creature of The Pink Opaque, we see it through the eyes of an adolescent fan. It’s a thing of melty, gooey, grotesque beauty, and it even gets a lil jump scare. Then, later in the movie, after Owen has comically, tragically resigned himself to being an AY-dult (his to-camera narration pronounces it like this, it’s funny), we see this same beast with an anti-nostalgic lens, flattened by disillusionment, and it looks cheap and dingy and dumb.

In the AY-dult Owen’s eyes, the teens on The Pink Opaque aren’t played by hot twenty somethings. They look young, like actual young teens, just silly kids. An amusing detail about what it’s like to rewatch the shows we absorbed in youth.

I was losing it in this scene, tickled and saddened, but damn other than my bestie that movie theater was icy.  

But maybe all this saddens the hets too much for emotional outbursts like laughter. They do so often fail to see a funny side to the sad. I guess to them everything in this movie is a stark reminder of what they reduce their own lives into: so your parents die, then you inherit their roles, divesting yourself of anything magical, anything powerful, writing it all off as crazy and kid stuff, and then you start to die too. If i wasn’t happily living outside this narrow straightness, i’d probably be bummed out as well.   

I still don’t know though! Nothing explains why the hets didn’t laugh at stuff like a great audio gag where Owen orders at a drive-thru and timidly attempts to communicate with a wildly staticky voice. It’s basically like the cinematic equivalent of saying what’s the deal with drive-thrus? Maybe they’re not on the spectrum enough to find humor in audio gags. 

They also didn’t emit any nervous, tittering laughs for the big finale, but that one’s not surprising. The thrills and chills of this sequence feel catered to all my fellow neurodivergent bitches. 

This final sequence takes place in the unbearable hellscape of a Fun Center, where Owen works. Many aspects of this part had me squirming in my seat. I can watch the nastiest gore with a chill smile and a song in my heart, but that goodman “happy! happy! birthday!” clap chant done by the other Fun Center staff made me sink in my seat with winces, literally groaning. 

Wow, i really need to wrap this up. One final shout out for this incredible image from the Fun Center: a merry lad wearing a birthday boy crown inside a neon-lit money booth, flailing for all the fluttering bills while the LED sign above scrolls out YOU ARE DYING.  That’s right up there among my favorite suburban horror images, in the same category as the boarded up house from Night of the Living Dead, or the suburbanite wasps eating raw meat in a grocery store in Messiah of Evil (1973), a movie i didn’t write about because not enough time. Neither of us have enough time.  Huh, that’s funny. I’m just noticing the protag for every suburban horror movie i’ve brought up (except Skinamarink) is a black guy and/or a white gal. Welp, too bad i can’t make this even longer because try as i might i can’t think of any possible resonances with that one.