For those with at least some exposure to post-war American culture, ‘suburban Gothic’ is likely to be a familiar cultural mode. It is prevalent across various forms, both popular and ‘serious’. Its tropes are readily identifiable, and its motivations seem intelligible. Indeed, the decaying tract homes, insidious duplicating technologies and sequestered monstrosities arguably all serve to evoke a horror of suburban surveillance and conformity, or to articulate anxieties about the violence and perversity of family life hidden behind closed doors. Thus it would seem reasonable to generalise that late twentieth-century works of fiction and feature films, such as The Stepford Wives (1972; 1975; 2004), Blue Velvet (1986) and The Virgin Suicides (1993; 1999) make use of the Gothic principally as a means to call into question a white middle-class dream of security and prosperity predicated on home-ownership and the nuclear family.

The familiarity of suburban Gothic certainly owes a great deal to its situation within a broader generic tradition. Like so many Gothic narratives, suburban Gothic is centred on buildings and built environments which seem to provide suitable stages to play out concerns to do with status and power, as well as tensions arising from various conflicts, both psychological and social. Further, in characterising bright new suburban landscapes in altogether familiar Gothic terms – as ruined, haunted, labyrinthine – suburban Gothic would appear to be drawing on a long-running vein of American literature. Suburban Gothic's apparent scepticism directed towards the narratives of progress voiced by promoters of the United States’ suburbanisation echoes earlier Gothic stories written in a decidedly anti-rationalist mood. Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland (1898), with its portrayal of a doomed utopian community, and several of Edgar Allan Poe's tales imbued with ‘the spirit of the perverse’ cast doubt over the Enlightenment thinking undergirding the recently constituted United States. Meanwhile, many Southern writers, from Poe to William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, have contributed to the development of a regionally inflected Gothic which explores ‘the tensions between a culturally sanctioned progressive optimism and an actual dark legacy’. The darkest shadow, of course, is that cast by slavery. Thus, from the late eighteenth century to the present, a persistent element of American Gothic has been the distrust of the transformative potential of the projects of modernity, in particular, the mutually constitutive discourses of nation building and progress.