Suburbs Poster Series

#1
Michael Myer’s House
Halloween, 1976, D: John Carpenter



#2
Laura Palmers’s House
Twin Peaks, 1990, d: David Lynch

Although the postwar American suburb presents itself as the paragon of normalcy, horror makers have long suspected that beneath its manicured lawns lie all sorts of hidden sins. Almost as soon as Levitt & Sons set up their supply chains, Shirley Jackson’s The Road Through the Wall imagined suburbia as a small-minded murderous enclave. Then came Carrie’s high school horrors, Carpenter’s wordless knife-wielder, Craven’s dream-invading psycho, and Laura Palmer’s interdimensional domestic tormentor. Of course, eventually the general public caught up with these horror maestros as the suburb’s crimes—the environmental footprint of its asphalt and automobiles, the “problem with no name” plaguing its housewives, the exclusionary FHA loans underlying its sunshiney sameness—became common knowledge. Scary movies, however, were the canaries in the coal mine, sounding the alarm long before anyone else took notice.

If horror directors have these intuitive powers, what of their location scouts? For it is only the prescient eye of the location scout that designates otherwise ordinary suburban houses as host to narrative terrors. This poster series seeks to discover what physical properties deem a house fit for playing such a dark role. Can we read suburbia’s sins in its facade design? Did the makers of the suburbs mass-produce evil mystical geometries alongside inequality? Is suburbia’s rot communicable via elevation? Only through formal analysis can we discover the frightening answers.

Poster - Twice Fold
Publisher: Familiars Strangers
Paper: Newsprint
Dimension: 4.625 x 7 x .75 in
Pages: Double Sided
Process: Offset Print
Color: Black