Welcome to Our Collective Nightmare: A Rough Guide to Some Weird Towns in Film, TV and Literature

 

 

Welcome to Our Collective Nightmare: A Rough Guide to Some Weird Towns in Film, TV and Literature

By Don Curren

                                                                                

A stranger pulls into town late one afternoon.

He’s got car trouble. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have stopped in what looks to be a boring, two-bit town.

He drops his car off at a garage and heads to the local bar for a beer and maybe dinner.

When he opens the door and steps inside, a sudden silence descends, and every head turns in his direction.

He gets a distinct feeling he’s unwanted, a feeling that intensifies as he overhears muttered remarks about who he is and what he’s doing here.

He walks to the bar, where the cluster of locals gathered in front of the bartender splits apart as he approaches, each of them avoiding eye contact, and no one smiling.

The bartender seems friendlier.

“Don’t mind them too much. They’re not used to strangers these days” he says, nodding toward the silent locals.

The stranger asks for a beer and briefly explains his situation.

“Oh, well you better get it fixed this afternoon, because there really isn’t anywhere to stay in town anymore,” the barkeep says.

Suddenly seeming less friendly, he turns away from the stranger and walks to the other end of the bar.

The stranger decides not to eat, and gulps down the rest of his beer.

He’s about to turn and leave the bar when he feels a tap on his shoulder.

He turns around, and a big man with a ferocious squint leans toward him and says softly, but in a gruff voice, “Yes, you heard what Charlie said. We really don’t take kindly to strangers in these parts. Best be getting out of town as soon as you can.”

The stranger disengages himself, walks calmly out of the bar and back the few blocks to the mechanic.

“Bad news, sir, but we need a part that we don’t have. Gotta get it on the bus from Shelbyville. Won’t be able to get your car fixed until tomorrow afternoon at the earliest,” the young mechanic says as soon as the stranger walks in the door.

“Well, is there anywhere I can stay overnight?” the stranger asks.

“We don’t get many travellers here anymore since they built the new highway, but Harvey Dunwich still runs his old motel out on the edge of town, on the highway to Arkham, and there’s where travelling salesman and other people who have to come here usually stay,” the mechanic says.

The mechanic gives the stranger some directions, the stranger nods his thanks and walks the short distance to the motel, which looks dilapidated and forbidding.

A sullen clerk takes the strangers’ booking – demanding payment in full in cash before he accepts the booking – and the stranger lets himself into Room 13, the last room in the main wing of the motel, which otherwise appears deserted.

Thus began the most terrifying 24 hours of his life …

 

In the geography of our fictions – books, movies, televisions, video games, etc. - there are many places that, for want of a better descriptor, can be called “weird towns.”

They are places where an individual confronts a community that isn’t what it seems.

At the superficial level of appearances, such towns often seem quite normal. In some cases, they even appear abnormally normal, as it were.

But as the individual probes beneath the surface, a much weirder and disturbing reality begins to make itself felt. A reality that is often outright evil and that usually presents a direct menace to the individual, who is then challenged to either escape or confront and overcome the evil.

The individual can be a stranger – as in the archetypal “entering the weird town” sequence sketched above.

Or they can be a local who had previously accepted the surface appearance of their own town and lived in accordance with it, but gradually – or suddenly – discovers that things aren’t at all what they seem to be.

One of the fascinating things about the “weird town trope” is that shows up in many different genres – westerns, film noir, science fiction, horror, and elsewhere.

There are also many different variations in the way that weird town stories unfold. In this piece, I’ll confine myself to trying to sketch out some of the main elements of the weird town, illustrate how they surface in some examples, and offer some speculation as to why weird town stories can be so compelling.

I’m calling them “weird towns” for a reason.

I’ve discovered, based on some admittedly superficial research, that “creepy towns” seems to be the preferred expression, at least on high-profile pop-culture sites like “Good Reads,” which offers an extensive list of creepy-town reads (https://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/creepy-towns).

The website TV Tropes (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UncannyVillage) a useful compendium I discovered during that admittedly superficial research, has a number of interesting pages that offer a more detailed taxonomy than mine, breaking weird towns down into “Uncanny Village,” “Stepford Suburbia,” “Lovecraft Country” and “Towns with a Dark Secret,” among other related tropes.

I’ve got two reasons to avoid using the word “creepy” in this context.

 Firstly, it’s acquired some unfortunate connotations. They’re reflected in the online version of the Cambridge Dictionary’s secondary definition for the word: “unpleasant and making you feel uncomfortable, especially because of sexual behaviour that is not wanted or not appropriate.”

Secondly, and more importantly, it enables me to link my exploration of weird towns to the framework advanced by the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher in his book The Weird and the Eerie, which I also wrote about in another post (Two Weird Books (doncurren.blogspot.com))

Fisher writes that what characterizes the weird is that it concerns the eruption into an established order of something that comes from outside it, something strange and unaccountable in the normal course of affairs.

“The weird brings to the familiar something which ordinarily lies beyond it, and which cannot be reconciled with the “homely” (even as its negation),” Fisher writes.

A paradigmatic example of the weird, for Fisher, is the work of HP Lovecraft, whose works typically deal with the appearance, veiled or otherwise, of monstrous beings from other dimensions in places like Massachusetts and Vermont.

In weird towns, the weirdness doesn’t come in the form of strange, menacing entities appearing in our usual, mundane environments, environments that otherwise remain unaltered.

Instead, it comes in the form of a revelation that there is something fundamentally weird about the places we live, that there is another dimension to them that we didn’t previously recognize, and that it’s a horrible, uncanny dimension that we can’t reconcile with our earlier perceptions of them.

It's the emphasis on the weirdness or evil implicit in the seemingly ordinary that distinguishes weird town fictions from other subgenres of horror or science fiction.

Some well-known examples in popular culture are the town of ‘Salem’s Lot, in the novel by Stephen King, David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, the Stepford of Ira Levin’s novel The Stepford Wives and its various cinematic and television spinoffs.

One of the most famous is the unnamed village in Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery.”

A more recent instance is the 2022 film Don’t Worry Darling,

Weird town stories are clearly akin to haunted house stories: they both involve the discovery that an environment that seemed ordinary, or at least habitable, is not what it seems, and in fact conceals a malevolent force will come to threaten the protagonists.

It’s been said that haunted houses are the psychological form of horror story. They often involve the protagonist(s) confronting some terrible, unresolved trauma from the past whose echoes still haunt the house they move into.

Weird town stories would logically seem to have more to do with sociology, or at least social psychology. And they often do focus on how an individual relates - or more frequently doesn’t relate - to their community or society at large.

But some of the best weird town narratives also circle back to questions of the self and identity, including revelations about not only the community depicted, but also about the individual who confronts it.

One example is HP Lovecraft’s classic weird town story, The Shadow Over Innsmouth.

It’s an archetypal and influential example of a weird-town narrative that tells the story of a young man making a holiday tour of New England in the 1920s.

He wants to go from Newburyport (a real town) to Arkham (the fictional epicentre of Lovecraft’s universe of horror), and is told the most logical route takes him through an obscure coastal town called Innsmouth.

The people he talks to about it in Newburyport seem pretty down on Innsmouth, and some research he does at the local library and the Newburyport Historical Society casts considerable doubt, at least in the reader’s mind, about the advisability of travelling through the allegedly blighted town and mingling with its mysteriously tainted denizens.

In fact, we know he’s going to encounter some horrible things there, as the story starts with accounts of a massive raid on Innsmouth by federal officials and extensive arrests in the town prompted by his visit.

But in the manner of horror-story protagonists in every genre and medium and period, he isn’t dissuaded by all the obvious portents, and takes a ramshackle bus into Innsmouth with a most unpleasant-looking driver.

I’ll avoid specifics for those who haven’t yet paid a visit to Innsmouth, but it’s memorable and frightening, in Lovecraft’s fusty, old-fashioned, way, and involves the discovery that there are some singularly unpleasant aspects to the genealogy of many of the citizens of Innsmouth.

The Spanish film Dagon, an adaptation of the Shadow Over Innsmouth directed by Stuart Gordon, provides a more modern version of the story that retains much of Lovecraft’s sensibility and delivers some powerfully frightening and disturbing images.

The ending of Lovecraft’s story, which is retained the film, is the final twist that takes us to the one of the darkest potentials implicit in the weird-town trope.

Our young narrator discovers, quite by accident, that he himself is tainted by the same dark secret that haunts the townsfolk of Innsmouth.

Interestingly, some of the best weird-town stories begin where his terrible odyssey ends.

These stories start with the protagonists living happily and unconsciously as residents of the weird town, although at first, they accept it as normal.

The focus in these stories is on their discovery of its weirdness and their mounting terror in reaction to it.

One of the best known of this variant of the weird-town stories is David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, where Kyle MacLachlan plays a young college student who returns to his seemingly average, upstanding Middle American town to look after his ailing father and discovers his town has a sordid underbelly he didn’t previously know about.

In other variations, the weirdness goes much deeper; it’s not so much that there’s a secret, previously unsuspected dimension of weirdness and evil to the town. It’s that the whole town is not what it seems to be in its very essence.

There are many examples, but I’m going to focus on Time Out of Joint, one of the strongest novels in the early period of the fecund, imaginative and influential science-fiction novelist Philip K. Dick.

Time Out of Joint is perhaps less well-known than the pieces by Dick that have been adapted into movies and TV shows, such as his alternative history novel The Man in the High Castle and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the excellent novel that Bladerunner and its sequel were adapted from.

But it’s a thematically rich and thought-provoking novel that provides an excellent example of the second main variant of the weird-town story, the Things Here in Town Definitely Aren’t What They Seem to be type.

The hero of the story is Ragle Gumm, a shiftless, middle-aged eccentric who lives with his sister and brother-in-law in a nondescript suburb in the late 1950s.

Gumm doesn’t have a regular job. He makes money by consistently winning a newspaper contest that involves predicting where a “Little Green Man” will appear in a grid published in the next day’s paper.

Gumm gradually begins to feel that there’s something profoundly unreal about the environment he’s living in – that it’s an elaborate illusion that somehow centres on him, like the unreal world that surrounds Jim Carrey’s Truman in the film The Truman Show.

Several small clues point in that direction, including Gumm overhearing references to himself on a radio transmission intercepted on his nephew’s crystal radio set.

It turns out that Gumm is right, the world he knows is essentially a controlled hallucination constructed to contain and deceive him. Precisely why, I won’t get into in order to avoid spoilers.

Weird town stories are as diverse as they are intriguing.

Weird towns can manifest themselves in many different ways. In the 1981 horror movie An American Werewolf in London, the titular character and his ill-destined bestie blunder into one only briefly – remember the Slaughtered Lamb pub? – but it’s a long enough visit to seal their tragic fate.

And like many notions about fictional tropes and archetypes, the idea of “weird towns” is a very elastic one.

Creators of fiction can use it in limitless different ways. Readers of fiction can apply it to a wide range of fictions, and through it can see different dimensions of works they had thought they had thoroughly digested.

For instance, taking the lead from the Shakespeare-derived title of Time Out of Joint, isn’t the Castle of Elsinore a kind of weird town – or weird castle, in this case – the hidden corruption of which is visible only to Hamlet, and to him only after the appearance of a visitor from another world.

Another HP Lovecraft, the brilliant Call of Cthulu, is essentially a catalogue of small narratives, each serving as a clue that Planet Earth, in the remote past, was home to race of horrible beings from another dimension, and might become dominated by them again. An entire weird planet?

In some stories, the weirdness can extend to our entire universe.

One excellent recent novel where that turns out to be the case is Sea of Tranquility by Hilary St. John Mandel.

This time, I can’t avoid something of a spoiler alert.

The novel is one of a spate of recent fictions inspired by the simulation hypothesis. That’s the idea, advanced by the philosopher Nick Bostrom and others, that it’s highly probable we are the inhabitants of computer simulation created by an advanced extra-terrestrial civilization, and not the “real” inhabitants of a real universe we believe ourselves to be.

In these fictional words, we discover our entire universe is weird in the sense that it doesn’t have the same existential status we thought it did. The weird town trope takes us through sociology to psychology to ontology itself.

The same theme is also at play in the movie Don’t Worry Darling, and the wide interest in the simulation hypothesis suggests we may be seeing more fictions exploring the idea that our entire universe may itself be a weird fiction.

We might be living at the beginning of halcyon times for the weird town trope, and I, for one, am looking forward to it.

I hope you are you, too.

Happy trails.