American Beauty & Other Suburban Horror Movies

Fans of American Beauty may enjoy these other movies that pair unsettling horror with benign suburban settings.

Sam Mendes’ Academy Award-winning film is an off-putting exploration of suburban life in America. The film opens with a rather morbid voiceover monologue from its main character, Lester Burnham, in which he talks about his death. The audience is then introduced to his dysfunctional family, which appears perfect from the outside.

Lester’s life seems ideal: he has a job, a beautiful white picket fence home, a wife, and a daughter. He’s wealthy, comfortable, but he’s beginning to tire of the tediousness of everyday life. He soon becomes infatuated with his daughter’s friend Angela, who is only a teenager. His marriage falls apart, and the beauty of his suburban home unravels.

He appears to slowly lose his mind, losing touch with the propriety and routine expected of him, abandoning his job and the formalities society believes are necessary to uphold civility. His wife Carolyn, a real estate agent, becomes fixated on selling a home while she struggles with Lester’s behavior and her daughter’s angst.

Jane drifts away from her parents to spend more time with Ricky Fitts, an enigmatic boy who lives nearby and thinks of himself as an artist. Meanwhile, Lester pursues a wildly inappropriate relationship with Angela, which is depicted through a series of scenes that employ magical realism and satire to depict Lester’s alienation.

American Beauty may be one of a kind, but the unsettling feeling evoked through its apparently banal setting, characters, and situations has been a topic of fascination in what has become known as the suburban satire.

The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)

From acclaimed director Yorgos Lanthimos comes this eerie thriller set in the suburbs of Cincinnati. What the film lacks in wry humor it makes up for in other areas. The odd, stunted dialogue leaves a little extra room for interpretation when it comes to Dr. Steven Murphy’s relationship with the young Martin, whose father died during one of the doctor’s procedures.

When Murphy’s children begin experiencing strange symptoms, Martin confronts the doctor in an unsettling way, insinuating that his past has come back to haunt him. All the while, Martin remains polite and begins to form relationships with the rest of his family, especially his teenage daughter.

Steven’s wife becomes suspicious and pressures him to make the difficult but necessary decision that will end this madness. As their domestic life is thrown into chaos, one can’t help but compare Steven’s loosening grip on control to Lester’s in American Beauty.

Thelma (2017)

Thelma is a Norwegian supernatural thriller directed by Joachim Trier. It’s a far cry from American suburbia, but the urban setting of a university in Oslo, Norway is still a suitable backdrop for this horror story. The parties and friendly students are juxtaposed against the very internal struggles of the main character, Thelma.

Thelma has just moved away to attend college, where she still finds herself closely monitored by her religious parents. She begins to feel guilty when she falls in love with a girl, starts drinking, trying substances, and going to parties. Nevertheless, she struggles to fit in with her apparently easygoing peers, especially when she begins experiencing seizures and eerie nightmares.

As she investigates the source of her problems, she begins to uncover a whole collection of repressed childhood memories. The story seems so impossible thanks to its ordinary setting, populated as it is with people and normalcy.

The Truman Show (1998)

The Truman Show is much closer to American Beauty in terms of tone, though this character is completely unaware of his surroundings. Truman believes he’s living a normal life as an insurance salesman. He’s a lighthearted character and the comedy in this film is much more innocent than in American Beauty.

Things take a dark turn when Truman learns that his whole life is a television show. The people he thought he loved are actors, and the happy suburbia he lives in is a set. Though the film isn’t very scary, there’s a certain horror about this that makes it a great companion to the satire of American Beauty.

[Originally shared via Vocal Media.]