Suburban decay: The greatest onscreen tales of suburban crime

“Blue Velvet” will go down as the defining movie for director David Lynch, and from the moment Kyle MacLachlan finds a severed human ear in a field, you know things are amiss in his picturesque suburban town. “Blue Velvet” is not for the faint of heart, and Roger Ebert famously hated it, but its fervent fans are many as well.

“Disturbia” is basically “What if ‘Rear Window’ happened in the suburbs?” Oh, and if instead of starring the steady presence of Jimmy Stewart it stars a fledging Shia LaBeouf. While “Disturbia” doesn’t have the skilled hand of Alfred Hitchcock at the helm, it does create a sense of suburban paranoia.

“Suburbicon” doesn’t really come together, and is perhaps the most forgotten among George Clooney’s directorial efforts. Clooney tried to get the project in shape, even getting his buddies the Coen Brothers to take a pass at the screenplay. While the Saturn Awards did nominate it for Best Thriller Film, ultimately this story of suburban paranoia could never be reined in by Clooney.

The sci-fi nature of “The Stepford Wives” makes it a different flavor of suburban thriller, though we assume it is a crime to replace your wife with a robot replica. That’s probably on some statute somewhere. More cult classic than full-fledged hit, “The Stepford Wives” focuses on a woman who moves with her husband to Stepford, Connecticut and then comes to realize something is awry in the town.

“Serial Mom” is a John Waters film, which is to say it is a cult movie at best, and also isn’t an out-and-out thriller. However, it’s a pitch-black crime comedy with suburban flair, which makes it worthy of inclusion. Kathleen Turner plays a woman who appears to be a clean-cut suburban mom, but you know that Waters has no interest in peaceful suburban landscapes. Turner’s character, much like Hannibal Lecter, has a predilection for murder over minor slights or rudeness.

It’s a horror film, but “horror” and “thriller” are genres with a lot of overlap, and this slasher classic is certainly not a breezy affair. “Halloween” shaped the American slasher conceptually, and it also was one of the first movies to effectively mine the look and feel of the suburbs for horror and dread. A verdant city street isn’t so pleasant when a killer in a mask is hiding behind some of that greenery. John Carpenter really figured out how to make the suburbs scary with “Halloween.”

At the forefront of Tom Cruise’s rise to movie stardom was his turn in “Risky Business.” While what most people remember is Cruise dancing to Bob Seger in his underpants, the plot involves a criminal storyline. In between all the sex scenes, suburban teen Joel is awash in a world of theft, gun violence, pïmping, you name it.

Jonathan Demme’s “Something Wild” does two clever, and rare, things. One, the movie starts as a road comedy but then hard-pivots into being a thriller. Two, the film begins in New York City, but that’s really the only place where Jeff Daniels’ yuppie banker is safe. It’s everywhere else, be it New Jersey or Pennsylvania, where the peril is.

In film, vampires are often found in remote castles, or occasionally Brooklyn. “Fright Night” moves the vampire to the suburban town. A teenager comes to realize his next-door neighbor is no charming, single man-about-town. No, he’s a vicious vampire. Roddy McDowall has a fun turn as a horror host who had played a vampire hunter in “B” movies, leading the teen to go to him for help.

“Heathers” clicks when you realize it’s a horror movie with comedic elements as opposed to a dark satire. Made memorable by an idiosyncratic script, Winona Ryder, and Christian Slater doing the most transparent Jack Nicholson impression possible, the movie centers on a wayward teen girl who unfortunately falls for a boy who is less rebel and more psycho killer. You know, as one does.

In terms of TV shows with a central theme of “the suburbs aren’t as genteel as you think,” “Weeds” is the one that is most indebted to that notion. The problem with the show, which centers on a suburban mom-turned-marijuana dealer in the days before legalization, is that it beats you over the head with that idea in the most obvious ways possible. While “Weeds” has its high points, the whole thing is kind of a mess, albeit one popular enough to last several seasons.

Remember when this ABC dramedy was a true-blue phenomenon? “Desperate Housewives” is fully focused on the secrets and mysteries that are bubbling on Wisteria Lane. Plus, the show is narrated by a dead woman, which certainly adds to the intrigue and suburban morbidity.

Because so much of the attention to “Mare of Easttown” was paid to the accurate Philadelphia accents and Kate Winslet’s lead performance, one may forget that the show is not set directly in the City of Brotherly Love. No, the show is centered on Winslet as Mare Sheehan, a detective investigating a murder in Easttown. Easttown is a suburb of Philadelphia (a fictional one, for the record), bringing a different flavor to the murder-mystery drama than one of the largest cities in America would.

It’s right there in the title. David E. Kelley’s “Picket Fences” is set in the fictional suburban town of Rome, Wisconsin, the kind of place with green lawns and white picket fences. The show was perhaps too weird for large audiences to get on board, but “Picket Fences” was an Emmys darling that earned a devoted cult following. While “Picket Fences” focused on family dynamics and town life — when cows weren’t exploding — amongst the main characters are the town’s sheriff and his deputies, as well as a lawyer and a judge.

Though she’s a teenage private eye, Veronica Mars deals with headier crimes than Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys. Having learned the tools of the trade from her father, Mars was the role that put Kristen Bell on the map. As is the law, the private eye show is set on the California coast. Instead of plying her trade in Los Angeles like Philip Marlowe or San Francisco like Sam Spade, though, Mars lives in the fictional suburban town of Neptune.

The Grosse Pointes are a series of affluent suburban towns on the outskirts of Detroit. You may know Grosse Pointe from that one John Cusack movie (which was mostly not shot on location, but the filmmakers did go to one of the high schools in town for one exterior scene). The new NBC show “Grosse Pointe Garden Society” focuses on a gardening club in town who just so happen to be keeping a secret. A murderous secret? Naturally.