Untitled - Centre for Comparative Literature - University of Toronto

zombies,” escaping with only what they need, unburdened with the excess commodities
of capitalism, and thereby avoiding becoming zombies themselves.
Radiant City, a 2004 National Film Board of Canada pseudo-documentary,
contends with the issues of a real, modern Suburbia, one inhabited by nothing more
monstrous than an average, middle class family. But that does not make the landscape
any less horrifi c. As James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere: The
Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape, says in the fi lm, “80% of everything
that has been built in North America has been built in the last 50 years. And most of it is
brutal, depressing, ugly, unhealthy, and spiritually degrading.” Philosopher Mark Kingwell
is interviewed talking about Suburbia’s empty streets, where there is “…nobody to be
seen. There’s something kind of bizarre and post-apocalyptic about [that], so there is
no surprise when you see something like a zombie movie that starts in just that kind of
suburb.”
According to urban designer Ken Greenberg, also interviewed by the makers of
Radiant City, suburbs are “All the things that we would like to have in a congenial, small
town environment, which the suburbs aspire to. It’s turned out to be one of the hardest
things to recreate in a new setting.” The growth and development of suburbs is being
forced and planned—not allowed to develop naturally based on the needs and demands
of the inhabitants. Rather, the inhabitants, the families who chose to move to the suburbs,
are being told by the developers what they need and want, as Jacobs says above: good,
as long as it comes with grass. The suburbs, beautiful, clean, and desirable, are sanitary
and strange, isolated and isolating.
Suburbia is frequently a site of horrors, both real and imagined, from stabbings
in the subway stations around Toronto to the psychological horrors of isolation, alienation,
and frustration. 6 Suburban monocultures are such that as the inhabitants move in, have
families, age, retire, and move out at roughly the same time, communities can quickly die.
Similarly, zombies appear suddenly, mindlessly consume all in their path, and eventually
die of starvation. I could have chosen from dozens (probably hundreds) of horror movies
made in the last forty years as examples of suburban horror: Poltergeist, Nightmare on Elm
Street, the Scream series, countless zombie movies, The Birds, Rear Window, Disturbia, A
Clockwork Orange, the list goes on, and includes tributes to horror movies like The ’Burbs,
Fido, and Shaun of the Dead. Nor should we discount movies like Ghost World, American
Beauty, or The Virgin Suicides, and the more light-hearted Garden State, SubUrbia,
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