“Satan is Our Pal”: Satirizing Suburban Paranoia in Joe Dante’s ‘The ‘Burbs’
Joe Dante is one of the best filmmakers we’ve ever had at combining horror and comedy. So many writers and directors talk about what a challenge that is, how difficult that balance is to pull off, but Dante truly makes it look effortless. He’s been doing it for his entire career. It started with Piranha, an unashamed, tongue-in-cheek riff on Jaws. Then came The Howling, much less of an outright comedy than its 1981 counterpart An American Werewolf in London, but still a meta commentary on the tropes of werewolf films and full of little comedic moments nonetheless. Gremlins is a stunning mishmash of genres, weaving its way between outright horror, earnest family film, and outrageous comedy from moment to moment. These are just a few examples out of his terrific body of work. But even among them, I think The ‘Burbs stands out.
Instead of a horror film with comedic elements, The ‘Burbs is essentially a comedy first and foremost, albeit one that plays with traditional horror tropes. The action is confined to a single street in a suburban neighborhood, as the mysterious Klopeks move in, stirring up rapidly escalating paranoia among the street’s residents. The concept at the core of The ‘Burbs is something that dates back to the earliest horror stories. It’s something explored in almost all of the classic monster movies that Dante himself grew up with and felt incredibly inspired by. This is about the idea of the outsider, the foreign “other” as an object of fear and even hostility. Dracula was a classic example of this.
The Count is not only a foreign nobleman from a faraway land who is nothing more than a monster in disguise, seeking not only to hunt new and unsuspecting prey but to impose his own beliefs and customs — vampirism, in this case — on a new city. He is a villain, speaking deeply to the xenophobic fears of the time. Frankenstein explores much of the same issues, though in a more complicated way. The Wolf Man sees Larry Talbot battling the monster within, but it is the Romani people — met with blatant racism by almost the entire cast of characters — who bring the werewolf with them in the first place.
For tackling these themes, I know some have called The ‘Burbs xenophobic, which I feel is completely missing the point. The entire movie is based around xenophobia. This is a film about an upper middle class suburban neighborhood, all white, probably all mostly of the same faith, who have known each other for years. They are skeptical of the outsider, of anything weird or out of the norm, and their skepticism quickly turns into a fear that is outright destructive. The ‘Burbs is basically a movie about the Addams Family’s neighbors. The film only exists to comment on all of these paranoid themes in the modern era. In pure Dante tradition, it’s a comedy about how quick we are to judge, even to become frightened, when we see people who are different from ourselves. As someone who grew up in a small town like this, I can confirm that the “street gossip” present in The ‘Burbs is entirely real, and larger neighborhoods probably saw much more of it than I did. Everyone wants to know what’s going on with everyone, every neighbor has a story to share and a strong opinion of everyone on all sides of them, good or bad.
Dante expertly parodies this mentality and how quickly and obsessively people fall into it in The ‘Burbs. Tom Hanks gives such a genuine, bitingly funny performance as Ray Peterson, a neighbor who at first wants to mind his own business but gets drawn into suspicion after his friends on the street blame the new neighbors The Klopeks for the disappearance of their other neighbor, Walter. Ray gets drawn into this game of suspicion and intrigue, ultimately prioritizing it over his own family.
The Klopeks really do look like what the Addams Family must look like to their neighbors. They’re cold, dispassionate, they keep to themselves — but is that because they’re harboring sinister desires or because they’ve just moved to a new community in which everyone is already eyeing them for murder? Courtney Gains is basically a stand-in for Lurch, but with even less charm, and the house looks like such a haunted mansion that nobody of upstanding character was probably bound to move in there anyway. At first it seems like the Klopeks are so obviously murderers that there’s no point in even waiting for the shocking twist.
But the brilliance of The ‘Burbs lies in making the audience second-guess themselves. It’s a great film about perception, about stereotyping and about judging the entirety of someone’s character based on a first glance. Because it’s a Joe Dante movie, it’s also at times a living cartoon. It stretches its premise to absurdity in the best way possible, allowing for the movie to go for broke in a way that it probably shouldn’t get away with, and wouldn’t with anyone other than Dante at the helm.
At first glance, Ray’s the straight man of the movie playing against his increasingly wacky neighbors, all of whom would probably meet the same suspicion as the Klopeks from a different neighbor’s point of view. But as the film goes on, he devolves deeper and deeper into obsession. As much as he blames everyone around him for getting the idea that the Klopeks are possibly murderers in his head in the first place, he is the one who becomes obsessed to the point that it occupies his every waking moment. It’s actually Carrie Fisher, in an incredibly underrated performance, playing the straight man to all of these idiots, resulting in the feature’s funniest exchange:
“He can’t come out until he resembles the man I married.”
“Carol, we don’t have that kind of time!”
Another incredibly overlooked aspect of The ‘Burbs is just how much is left unsaid. There are major elements that could be overlooked on the first go-round. It rewards repeat viewings, even when it’s fresh in the memory. For example, why is Ray willing to devote all of his time and energy into spying on the Klopeks instead of focusing on spending time with his own family? Well, it’s because he’s just lost his job before the film begins, he’s ashamed, doesn’t want to think about it or focus on it and — more importantly — doesn’t want them to know. His “staycation” is permanent and his obsession spirals out of needing something to occupy his time, refusing to admit to himself or to tell his wife what has actually happened.
This even extends to the neighbors. Rick Ducommun’s Art is the over-the-top cartoon sidekick, the buffoon to Ray’s level-headed-in-comparison behavior. Which makes it really a problem for Ray when Art is the one who starts worrying about him, catching him chanting to himself and reminding Ray that chanting is a sign of Satanic mind control. This naturally only further pushes Ray over the edge as Art suggests the Klopeks may already have an evident influence over him. As for Corey Feldman’s Ricky, he is perfectly content to party the night and day away, yet there’s no appearance by his parents or even anyone else that lives in the house. That’s because they’re dead, according to Joe Dante, and if you watch the film with that in mind, everything Ricky’s doing makes a whole lot more sense. This is the kind of filmmaking Dante excels at. Just because it’s a vibrant, living cartoon doesn’t mean there aren’t layers or that there might not be something you missed the first time around.
At the end (and spoilers for the entire film because that’s the only way to talk about how its ending relates to the rest of the movie) in perhaps the only way it could possibly end, everything unfolds in the middle of the street in front of the whole neighborhood. Ray realizes what a colossal mess they’ve made and how utterly terrible they’ve been to their new neighbors — not the mention the amount of crimes they’ve probably committed in order to prove the Klopeks are committing crimes — and gives a great speech about what monsters they’ve been that also serves as his much needed moment of clarity to how he’s been ignoring his family because he simply didn’t want to deal with his own problems.
The twist, in this case, is that the Klopeks actually are killing people. It turns out that the most obvious answer was true all along, and that’s been a divisive point for audiences over the years. I personally think that The ‘Burbs earns this ridiculous, tongue-in-cheek ending by making that poignant, prior statement. Counteracting it with the reveal doesn’t negate anything that was said in that speech, it only gives in to the absurdist tone of the film as a whole. The movie had already made its point and anything that happened after that was pretty much gravy. That’s why the ending at least kind of works. The alternate ending also downplays some of the major, apparent heroics of the finale as well. But even in the theatrical, it’s clear that Ray has learned a lesson about his own neighbors and their overbearing antics.
Just because these neighbors aren’t the villains at the end, that doesn’t truly make them the heroes and Dante does a good job of making that clear. There’s actually something unsettlingly, darkly funny about the ending and its final word on suburban paranoia. While Ray’s speech is great for the audience, while it absolutely gets the point across, the suggestion at the end really seems to be that Ray himself learned nothing from it. Once the Klopeks are actually revealed as killers at the end, we don’t forget the words Ray said, but he does. He loses his moment of clarity. Yes, he gets away from the street, which is much-needed, but as he goes, he tells Ricky to keep an eye on the street for him and says it with a knowing wink.
The ‘Burbs might be silly, quirky and campy, but it’s got a lot to say about suburban life, and focuses on way more than the obvious notions of how people are quick to judge anyone they’re not used to seeing, anyone they consider an outsider or abnormal. This is a particular, honest suburban commentary on how those people become obsessive over anyone they believe is encroaching on their neighborhood, invading their way of life, and the way they will fixate on people who are just trying to live their lives in peace, to the point of obsession. If anything it almost plays better considering how much of exactly this we see on social media now. Those campy, often over-the-top quirks don’t undermine any of the things it has to say. If anything, they emphasize them and are a particularly Joe Dante way of saying them.
