A neighbor stepping in dog shit. Tom Hanks chowing down on a slippery, slimy sardine. Human femurs excavated from the ground. A gas line exploding. These aren’t images that you’d first conjure when thinking of the perfect comfort movie, and yet they’re all contained within one: Joe Dante’s 1989 dark comedy The ‘Burbs. Dinged by critics at the time of its release (Vincent Canby of The New York Times called it “as empty as something can be without creating a vacuum”), audiences rejected that dismissal by showing up enough to at least make it a moderate commercial success. But then something strange happened. Over the years, the cult of The ‘Burbs has grown exponentially, to the point where the last decade has seen it receive multiple Blu-ray releases with a full-length making-of documentary in the special features. Waxwork Records dropped a (now sold out) deluxe double-LP vinyl of the soundtrack. Patti Lapel put together an entire line of ‘Burbs gear including pins, apparel, a blanket—even a skateboard.
The surging interest in the film is something Dante caught early on. Speaking recently with the director as his film approached its 35th anniversary, he tells me that “It does seem to have quite a following, and it was apparent even at the time. I’d go to the dentist and they’d say ‘Oh, you made The ‘Burbs? I love that picture!’ But in the meantime, you’re sort of feeling that you’re in movie jail because the reviews are so bad.” Nowadays, Dante says, apart from Gremlins, it’s the picture of his that people mention the most.
So, what makes The ‘Burbs such an enduring classic? For starters, there’s something utterly wholesome about its setting, pitched perfectly within the storybook collection of the Universal Studios backlot. A staple of quaint television like The New Leave It to Beaver, and still used as recently as Desperate Housewives, there’s a familiarity to the cul-de-sac suburban setting of the film that hits a particular American itch of comfort—yet within that is the sense recognition of something sinister, something not quite right looming underneath the surface.
When he first read the script for this tale of a white-picket-fence community, led by Ray Peterson (Hanks), who become suspicious of their new foreign neighbors, the Klopeks, Dante recalls, “I remember when I was a kid, we had a house on our street that everybody was afraid of, and people who didn’t come out. Then when I would talk to people during the making of the movie, almost everybody had a story about something in their life where they lived at a place where people were living in a house that everybody was afraid of.”
The script by Dana Olsen, originally pitched by the studio to Dante as a Rear Window spoof, registered as something more universal. “I think that must be a more common thing than I thought, because I think that may be one of the reasons why the picture’s been so popular all of these years,” Dante theorizes.
Filmed during the 1988 Writers Guild Strike, The ‘Burbs benefited from being what Dante calls “a behavior movie” about “the way these characters relate to each other in this situation.” While most movies made during writers strikes suffer from patchwork scripts that aren’t able to have scribes vigorously rewriting throughout production to keep the story fresh and cohesive, The ‘Burbs maintained its relatively simple narrative and was primarily shaped by the interactions of its ensemble: As Ray teams up with best friend Art (Rick Ducommun) and wiry Vietnam War vet Mark Rumsfield (Bruce Dern) to investigate the Klopeks, Ray and Mark’s wives (Carrie Fisher and Wendy Schaal) sit back in astonishment at the foolishness of their arrested adolescent husbands. Meanwhile, rowdy teenager Ricky Butler (Corey Feldman) pitches a lawn chair and invites friends over to observe the shenanigans. It was a set full of improvisation and ad-libs, with the actors feeling out their dynamics. Some of the most unusual developments (such as Mark awkwardly peeling apart the Klopeks’ wallpaper) were spur of the moment, aided by a film shot in sequence to make sure the picture retained continuity.
For Dante, it’s the casting that he remains most proud of, and suspects is a big part of why The ‘Burbs is only increasing in popularity. Even the actors who didn’t necessarily get along brought something vital to the table. Dante pushed to bring in Ducommun, despite him being less-known than SCTV folks like Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas who the studio was looking at for the part. It paid off in unexpected ways, particularly in the core dynamic between Ray and Art.
“Rick had a certain abrasiveness that actually kind of ticked off Tom,” Dante said. “It worked great for the movie. They had a prickly relationship, which sparked all this great improv from these guys.”
That specific prickliness could be part of why critics pushed against it at the time, with The ‘Burbs releasing in theaters just two days after Hanks earned his first Oscar nomination (for the far more civilized and easily digested Big). Dante is a master of threading the fine line between the friendly and the fiendish, and in Ray Peterson he taps into a more manic, frenzied side of America’s Dad than people may have been expecting. Hanks is off the rails at various points throughout The ‘Burbs, yet retains our trust in him leading this picture as a guy we can always root for. Hanks coming on board changed quite a few things for the film, which went down a somehow even more macabre path than it was headed before his arrival. While Hanks had reservations about playing a dad for the first time (just starting his leading man career, after all), the studio no longer wanted to end the picture with Ray… well, dead.
“In the original script, before we hired Tom, the character of Ray is taken off in the ambulance to die,” Dante explains, describing the initial version of the scene in which Dr. Klopek (Henry Gibson) reveals that he and his family were indeed evil all along to Ray before our hero thwarts him and saves the neighborhood.
“When we hired Tom, Brian [Grazer] and Ron [Howard] said, ‘We can’t kill Tom Hanks!’ So that meant that we had to explain what the Klopeks were up to in their basement, with the strange noises and the lights and all that kind of stuff,” Dante said. “It was always left to your imagination, but none of them were quite as satisfying as the idea in the original script that the Klopeks turned out to be bad and nobody knew it except Ray. But that’s a different movie.”
I’m inclined to agree that this scrapped ending is far more satisfying, as I can still vividly recall the first time I watched the picture and found my jaw dropping to the floor when—after witnessing this entire ordeal of America’s Dad and his all-American ensemble pursuing and harassing their foreign neighbors, suspecting them as nasty little criminals—it was revealed that they were totally innocent and our heroes were the villains all along.
Reckoning with this realization, Ray lashes out at Art, shouting in the street: “Remember what you were saying about people in the ‘burbs, Art? People who mow their lawn for the 800th time, and then snap? Well, that’s us! It’s us, not them! That’s us, we’re the ones who are vaulting over the fences, and peeking in through people’s windows. We’re the ones who are throwing garbage in the street, and lighting fires. We’re the ones who are acting suspicious and paranoid, Art. We’re the lunatics! Us! It’s not them, it’s us!”
I can recall the chills that sent through my body as for a moment, I genuinely thought a suburban Tom Hanks comedy had a “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” ending in which the mirror was turned on us all to reveal our prejudices, our fear of the Other and the ways in which that creates villains out of everyone.
When asking Dante about this scene and its incisive examination of xenophobia, the director says, “Yeah, the idea of the Other—the person who is not you. You could make a serious version of this movie where the Klopeks are Black people. It wouldn’t be very funny, and you wouldn’t really relate to the heroes very much, but I think it’s innate. I think there’s a fear of things that are different, particularly when you get into the xenophobia idea. There’s a lot of people who just don’t trust anybody who isn’t exactly like them, and I think it’s an underlying serious point that the movie makes.”
Speaking with Dante about that realization in particular helped me crystalize just why The ‘Burbs has never felt disappointing to me, despite leaving me a little deflated on my first watch when it doubles back on that cataclysmic reveal: The Klopeks were indeed the bad guys and Ray and friends saved the day. Just because that was the case here, doesn’t mean that will always be true. Maybe that’s even more haunting, at the end of the day. Because whenever we suspect that we’ve got some Klopeks in our midst, we’ll tell ourselves that we’re the good guys. No matter where that distrust comes from—often as Dante says, the innate fear of someone who isn’t exactly like us—we tell ourselves that we’re the ones who are good and just.
The ‘Burbs is a Tom Hanks movie, after all. We can’t end with him being a bigot who has destroyed a family for no reason but his own prejudices—prejudices fueled by the echo chamber mob of suburbia, who drum up those suspicions to the point where they find themselves justified to break into someone’s home and blow it to smithereens due to some unusual behavior. “Where there’s fear, there’s comedy,” The ‘Burbs screenwriter Dana Olsen once said of the film, and indeed this is a very humorous movie. That sense of frivolity helps you tuck yourselves into bed at night in your safe home, trusting in the knowledge that Tom Hanks saved the neighborhood. But The ‘Burbs also contains the lingering reminder of Ray’s words: “It’s not them, it’s us!”
Currently based in Newark, Delaware, Mitchell Beaupre is the Senior Editor at Letterboxd, and a freelance film journalist for sites including The Film Stage, Paste Magazine, and Little White Lies. With every new movie they watch, they’re adding five more to their never-ending Letterboxd watchlist. You can find them on Twitter at @itismitchell.