The other day I watched Clive Barker's 1987 horror film Hellraiser, which features as its backdrop a seemingly normal house with a dark secret or two lurking inside. It struck me when I was watching this just how many popular horror movies from the late seventies and eighties feature similar houses and secrets as central points of their stories. Many of these stories include the surrounding suburbs or residential neighborhoods as part of their settings, neighborhoods which are usually quiet and pleasant, but not ironically so like you might see in movies from later decades. The safe domesticity of middle America is disrupted in these movies from some terror that comes from or at least takes place in a house--usually the house(s) of the central characters. Examples include Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street and The People Under the Stairs, Hooper's & Spielberg's Poltergeist, and perhaps most importantly, Carpenter's Halloween. I only say "most importantly" because Halloween is likely the film that set the pattern in motion to begin with. Watching Hellraiser, I found myself wondering what this says about our culture's insecurites during that era. Perhaps the generation that was buying houses in the eighties had deep fears about certain evils that they were trying to keep out of their homes and neighborhoods and lives. Maybe that's the reason people move to quiet neighborhoods in the first place.