Tuned In: From ‘Twin Peaks’ To ‘Wayward Pines’ — What’s So Terrifying About Small Towns?

Tuned In is Junkee’s fortnightly TV column. This particular instalment has no spoilers; knock yourselves out.

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There’s plenty of places on TV you wouldn’t want to find yourself: the pre-credit sequence of Law & Order; on a date with any of the characters from Seinfeld; pretty much anywhere in Westeros. But if there’s one setting that should be avoided at all cost, it’s a small town.

M. Night Shyamalan’s miniseries Wayward Pines just aired its second of ten episodes, and surprise! Things in the eponymous town are not quite what they seem. Federal agent Ethan (Matt Dillon) finds his way to the idyllic small town in his search for two missing colleagues, and after a car accident wakes up with no money, no ID, and no way to contact home.

Shyamalan’s movies have become known for shattering normality with a ‘shocking’ third act twist (although one might ask exactly how shocking a twist can be when you build your entire career on them; being surprised at a sudden turn in a Shyamalan movie is like being genuinely terrified in a theme park haunted house). Somewhat anomalously, though, the eerie comes early in this show, with the first signs of uncanniness in Wayward Pines coming very early in the pilot.

Wayward Pines shares much of its DNA with Twin Peaks (although thankfully absent is the dead or violated girl that begins so many shows), but these two are hardly alone: small towns on TV are, on the whole, deeply creepy places. By small screen rules, if you’re a New Yorker you will either spend your time hanging out drinking coffee with friends and potential love interests, in a high-powered executive job, or end up dead in a dumpster. People from Southern California live in large open-plan homes with an array of annoying but ultimately endearing family members.

But if you live in the middle of America, mothers-in-law and murderers are the least of your worries. Bates Motel, Smallville, Under The Dome, The Prisoner’s The Village, American Gothic’s Trinity; dude, these places are supernaturally screwed. There was even a short lived show from the early ‘90s called Eerie, Indiana, located in a small town where, of course, nothing was as it seemed (although when your town’s called Eerie you can hardly be blamed for misleading wandering strangers).

Obviously, in any story, things have to go a bit off the rails at some point. A show about a small town where everyone is super-nice and everything is great wouldn’t make for riveting viewing; even charming towns like Pawnee, Stars Hollow and Springfield are packing more than their fare share of crazy. And in a place where everybody knows everybody else, dark secrets are currency — and if there’s only one movie theatre, it’s inevitable that people end up sacrificing virgins or joining cults, if only for a sheer lack of anything else to do.

The trope could also be a case of writers exorcising the demons of their past. Sensitive, artistic teenage boys who don’t fit in at high school are all over our televisions for obvious reasons; similarly, being trapped in a small town where you don’t fit in could be an idea that that resonates with showrunners. (Of course, there’s an element of wish fulfillment with these characters as well – despite supposedly being outcasts, these moody and broody boys always get heaps of tail). Anyone who spent their adolescence feeling out of place and misunderstood – that is, everyone – will be drawn to stories where everyone around them knows something they don’t.

You’d also need to be in a small town for weirdness to be evident. A woman walking around talking to a log is a symbol of Twin Peaks’ inherent oddness, but probably wouldn’t raise an eyebrow in Manhattan — and being unable to leave your city wouldn’t be so much a mystery to be solved, but a routine subway failure. There’s a kind of lunacy that we expect in the city, where people are piled on top of each other and left to fester amid exhaust fumes and traffic noise. Small towns should be the antithesis of this, where light and fresh air should soothe the senses and heal the soul.

Small town life is an essential part of American mythology, or at least it has been since the 1950s economic postwar boom coincided with the mass availability of the car and people no longer needed to live in the city to work. A cosy community, close neighbours, wholesome Christian friendly folk; these elements have run through every popular medium for half a century. The supernatural, both literally and figuratively, runs counter to that by definition.

But there’s a deeper and even older mythology at play: the mystery of the woods. Our earliest fairytales tell stories of the dark, and mysterious things that happen once you leave the brightly-lit path and delve into the trees. David Lynch spoke of woods being inherently terrifying places, and wrote these lines for Sheriff Truman in Twin Peaks: “There’s a sort of evil out there. Something very, very strange in these old woods. Call it what you want. A darkness, a presence. It takes many forms but… it’s been out there for as long as anyone can remember”. In Twin Peaks, Vampire Diaries’ Mystic Falls, or Wayward Pines, people live too close to the trees, and venture into them too often. They’re poisoned by that presence in a way that strangers who come to town can sense, but cannot grasp.

In Cold Blood, a non-fiction story of the seemingly random murder of a family, was considered so transgressive because it placed violence right in the middle of the American Dream. The uncanny villages of TV take this one step further: not only can violence visit your hometown, but it was born there and has been under your nose all along.

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Maddie Palmer is a writer, broadcaster, TV and digital producer. Her work has appears on The Feed on SBS2, and she talks about TV with Myf Warhurst on Double Jay. She tweets from @msmaddiep.