Destroy All Neighbors Is Like The ‘Burbs But Weirder, and That’s As Fun As It Sounds

Destroy All Neighbors is one of those movies I knew I’d like the minute the opening credits started. Though many films abandon them these days, opening titles can be fantastic tone-setters, especially in the realm of horror, and director Josh Forbes clearly understands this. So he recruited animator Rich Zim to give us something that’s both dazzling on its own and, with the aid of music by Ryan Kattner and Brett Morris, delivers a taste of the film that follows in microcosm: An all-out assault on the senses that’s fun, funny, and still capable of making you a little queasy. That’s Destroy All Neighbors in a nutshell, but that’s also just the beginning.

Jonah Ray Rodrigues stars as William, a struggling musician and sound engineer who’s trying to achieve his dream of crafting the perfect prog rock album in his spare time, no matter how few people believe in him. Lately it feels like everyone around him is pushing his dreams aside, from his girlfriend Emily (Kiran Deol) to his boss (Thomas Lennon) to a pushy rock musician who’s taken over his day job (Kattner). Thankfully, William still has his hero, a prog-rock bassist (Jon Daly), to keep him company through a series of throwback instructional videos, so at least he’s not totally without inspiration.

But everything gets even harder thanks to the arrival of Vlad (Alex Winter, in heavy makeup), a loud and obnoxious new neighbor who wears tracksuits, yells, and plays insufferable dubstep music at all hours while he lifts homemade weights. A clash is coming between neighbors, a clash that will change William’s life forever, and put him on a path that might mean his triumph, or his doom. 

Immediately, the film channels the vibes of Joe Dante’s 1980s horror-comedy The ‘Burbs, substituting the busybody nosiness of that film’s idle baby boomers with the entitled primal wail of millennial angst. You almost certainly know a guy like William, a guy who’s got that Big Project that will change his life if he can just finish, whose sole obstacle to completing said Big Project is…well, everyone but himself. When Vlad rolls into town, with his massive forearms and his craggy face and his vaguely Eastern European accent, the resulting confrontation forces William to confront what a life of action might look like, with all the misguided energy of a guy driven mad by his own ambition in tow. It’s a clever use of certain key millennial tropes, something that comes through again and again in the work from writers Mike Benner, Jared Logan, and Charles A. Pieper. 

But Destroy All Neighbors is not content to become a horror-driven millennial satire. Forbes is after something much, much weirder in this film, and his tendency to just keep following William down a strange rabbit hole of frenzied violence and paranoia without telegraphing his moves is the film’s greatest strength. Some horror films thrive on tropes, on formulas they can simultaneously follow and subvert, but others are at their best when they throw down the scaffolding of story and just go for it. This is one of those movies, and that means that as bodies start to pile up around William, we really don’t know where it will end, or who will survive, or what’s real and what’s happening in William’s head. Sometimes you wish it was all a little more developed, but most of the time the film moves at such a clip that you barely notice.

The paranoid fog of William’s life might become frustrating in another film, but with Destroy All Neighbors, the whole delirious package is wrapped in a sense of fun that rivals the best horror-comedies of its era. It certainly helps, of course, that the film is led by two very game comic performers, and that Rodrigues and Winter throw everything they’ve got into the film’s wildness, giving it an added layer of commitment atop an already towering pile of committed performances. They’re both having a ball. Throw in wonderfully bonkers photography by Will Stone and special makeup effects by Bill Corso, and you’ve got a film that feels fresh while simultaneously embracing a throwback sensibility reminiscent not just of Joe Dante, but of Stuart Gordon and Sam Raimi. 

All of this means that Destroy All Neighbors is the blast you need to start the new year of horror cinema right. It’s a gore-covered, laugh-filled tornado of a movie, and you won’t soon forget what it has to show you.

Director: Josh Forbes
Writer: Mike Benner, Jared Logan, Charles A. Pieper
Starring: Jonah Ray Rodrigues, Alex Winter, Jon Daly, Kiran Deol, Thomas Lennon
Release Date: January 12, 2024

Matthew Jackson is a pop culture writer and nerd-for-hire who’s been writing about entertainment for more than a decade. His writing about movies, TV, comics, and more regularly appears at SYFY WIRE, Looper, Mental Floss, Decider, BookPage, and other outlets. He lives in Austin, Texas, and when he’s not writing he’s usually counting the days until Christmas.