A Film Canon

The 'Burbs draws on the meteoric rise of suburban horror as an autonomous genre, and a suburban world whose televisual and cinematic co-ordinates have become increasingly overdetermined, to present a vision of horror - and cinema itself - as irreversibly suburbanized, begging the question of whether there's any difference between living in the suburbs and going to a (horror) movie, or between multi-family residential and multiplex infrastructure.  As a result, Joe Dante leaves it unclear whether his film is a work of suburban horror, or a comedy about suburbanites treating their neighborhood as a work of suburban horror, structuring his loose narrative around a series of spectators - Ray (Tom Hanks), a bored husband; Art (Rick Ducommun), his friend; and Mark (Bruce Dern), a paranoid ex-lieutenant - who become obsessed with their new and mysterious neighbours. It feels as if Dante's project is to de-animate suburbia - it's difficult to believe that the squeaky-clean, palpably artificial cul-de-sac is anything more than a set - but only for the sake of re-animating it. Hence a mild hyperactivity, a distributed cyberpunk static, whose source and object is the mysterious neighbours' house and basement, memorably depicted as a giant tesla coil, feeding and sustaining the characters as mere bundles of electricity and celluloid, even as they're seduced and terrified by its otherness. It's this false strangeness that draws the film's comic and horrific threads into an eccentric, controlled atonality, encapsulated in the heightened awareness of the neighbours' property line as an electrified threshold, or a military front, culminating with a full-scale assault on their fence, replete with comic quotes from Patton's score, and suburban cinema's vigilantistic heritage.