At the heart of The Village lies a struggle between the residents of an isolated, peaceful 19th-century town and a race of creatures who live in the surrounding woods. The elders of the community have made a choice to co-exist with the creatures, referred to as "Those We Don't Speak Of" by the townspeople. This truce is tested when two of the village's young people decide to leave the town's boundaries and venture into the unknown.
Like countless works of fiction before it, The Village portrays a small, rural community as a magnet for sinister forces. But what lies at the root of this common depiction?
Horror films such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Psycho brand the people who live in isolated, rural areas as malevolent and regressive -- often they are also the protectors of a collective secret. Many dramas follow the same path, such as the film adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter or Lars von Trier's recent Dogville, about a town that reluctantly embraces and then enslaves a female fugitive played by Nicole Kidman.
Films such as The Village offer a variation on this narrative -- their peaceful, idealistic communities act as beacons for terror as opposed to its source. Prominent examples include the Ray Bradbury novel-cum-film Something Wicked This Way Comes and the sci-fi classic Invasion of The Body Snatchers.
"Cities offer more places to escape. You can use the small town as a closed sphere and bring an unpredictable force inside of it," Orvell explains. "To find horror in what we believe will be a safe haven is truly traumatizing."
Orvell is researching material for Learning from Main Street, the tentative title of his upcoming book -- an analysis of America's small-town culture based on literature, film, photography and historical records. "These places offer an idealized sense of community instead of the anonymity of the city." But most of today's small towns are either being consumed by urban sprawl or have dwindling populations, Orvell explains.
"A lot of these towns have been driven to death by Wal-Mart and malls -- they can't compete with urban centres," he says. "Thousands to millions of people have left small towns to find a new life in the city."
But city dwellers still commonly view rural areas as a refuge. "Only after they move to the small town [do they] realize its 'true nature,' " Orvell laughs.
Pastoral versus urban values have been clashing for centuries, Paul Budra, an English professor at Simon Fraser University, explains.
The Roman poet Virgil argued that rural communities were morally superior to "the fleshpots of the city," Budra says. But urban centres such as Athens, Rome, Paris and the Renaissance city-states of Italy became the pillars of art and intellectual life -- and, in turn, rural areas were deemed unsophisticated. Both historical viewpoints help form today's small-town stereotypes. "Small towns don't get the paranoia and crime of the big city, but they get [branded with] the in-breeding and isolation of the countryside," Budra says.
Many small towns were founded by religious refugees from Europe. "They created 'happy' little places like Salem where their own extremism could run rampant -- often with terrible results," Budra says. "These places were unforgiving . . . they became sites of repression and marginalization."
Budra, who teaches courses on horror in fiction, says writers are responsible for integrating this vision of small towns into popular culture. He offers Shirley Jackson's The Lottery (a story about how the residents of a small town annually draw the name of someone who will then be killed) and Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown -- the story of a small town of possible devil worshippers -- as early examples from this American tradition. Modern horror-guru Stephen King has set most of his stories, including the film adaptation Misery, in small towns.
Ed Gein, the notorious 1950s serial killer from Plainsfield, Wis., offered an all-too-real example of the sinister small-town stereotype. Norman Bates of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, Hannibal Lecter of Silence of the Lambs and the psychopath of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre were all based on Gein's serial slaughter and necrophilia.
As many towns slid towards irrelevancy in the latter half of the 20th century, films began to regularly depict them as evil's lair as opposed to evil's victim, says Canadian horror writer and playwright David Annandale. Movies allowed the rural world to seek revenge upon urban citizens for its destruction, Annandale, also a professor of film and literature at the University of Manitoba, explains. "Most of the population is urban now -- if you're looking for alien space, it's now rural . . . and anything we don't understand, we fear."
Small towns are also typically abandoned by young people and left in the hands of the "vengeful" elderly, he says. "In Psycho, it's almost like Norman Bates's mother takes over the body of her son to cut up the young and nubile Janet Leigh."
If one film heralded the shift towards rural revenge narratives, Annandale offers 1964's 2,000 Maniacs, the story of a southern town destroyed in the U.S. Civil War that is reborn every 200 years in search of Yankee blood. But The Village is a throwback to tales of outside forces holding small towns under siege, Annandale says. Classic horror monsters such as Dracula, Frankenstein and the Wolfman always plagued small towns.
Ripe with authenticity, The Village was shot on a 40-acre replica of a 19th-century town built in a valley in rural Pennsylvania. "Given Shyamalan's love of plot twists, there are probably guilty parties on the inside and the outside," Annandale predicts. "I just really hope it doesn't turn out to be about werewolves or something that's been done before."
But whether the threat consists of a werewolf or axe-wielding murderer, what's the root of the unease about small towns? Canadian poet and author Christopher Dewdney suggests it comes down to people's fear of the darkness. Dewdney's recently released Acquainted With the Night: Excursions Through the World After Dark analyzes the power and significance that darkness has had on culture and society. "It's an urban-centric agoraphobia," he says of films like The Village. "It's fear of open spaces [combined] with fear of the dark."
Last summer's blackout in Ontario and the eastern United States offered city dwellers a glimpse of true darkness, Dewdney, also an English professor at York University, explains. "Darkness breeds the imagination . . . all of our mythology, folklore and superstitions come from the darkness. People imagined what could be found out there. It's tough to find a dark place in the city, whether a park or an alleyway. Even in our homes, the ambient light from the city floats into the room."
But while The Village is poised to haunt the silver screen and similar cinematic ventures are bound to follow, can the small town survive as a prominent film and literary setting when its real-world counterparts seem to be slowly fading away?
Annandale, for one, believes it can. "These kind of stories will remain valid -- the small town will just become even more mythical. Fewer people will know what they're really like."
