13 Horror Movies Set In Small Towns

People often forget that one of the biggest summer blockbuster films of all time takes place on such a tiny island. Although Amity is fictional, it’s filmed at Martha’s Vineyard, a small island off the coast of Massachusetts with a population of 15K. The small-town aspect of Jaws is so important to the plot, too.

In seaside towns that “rely on summer dollars” of tourists, businesses shut down during the off-season without ever knowing if they will open again. Local politicians get desperate, much like Mayor Vaughn in Jaws. The lust for power in a small community becomes too important, and priorities change from safety to money, and unfortunately, it’s hard to have one of those things without the other.

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If Amity were a well-populated area throughout the entire year, the events of Jaws and Jaws 2 would never have happened, as the town could afford to close the beaches until the shark moved on.

Many horror movies set in small towns remind us to always do our research on the house we are moving into. You just never know; it might be occupied by the demonic ghosts of a family that the town murdered in cold blood.

In We Are Still Here, the town is the villain. Seeking to continue their cushy, peaceful lifestyles, they try to sacrifice Barbara Crampton and her husband to a demonic presence rather than welcome them with open arms. Know what is worse than living in a tiny town where everyone wants you dead? Living in one, you can’t speed out of due to five feet of snow and ice on the roads.

Ah, the good ol’ Midwest. Small towns in the region just love to have pop-up fairs and carnivals. Usually, they all have similar things. Rides I wouldn’t get on if my life depended on it, food that is guaranteed to have me hugging the toilet for the next two days, and workers you don’t ever want to have a conversation with.

Unfortunately for the main characters in Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, escaping from an evil wizard and his Benjamin Buttoning merry-go-round would be much easier if the safe haven wasn’t in their houses… two blocks away.

I never really understood all the hate for M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village. Sure, it was a one-watch wonder, and people were led on by the trailer that there would be monsters afoot. Still, the film was technically beautiful, and the story was innovative. And, of course, there is a twist.

The small town in this story is a completely fabricated social project. It was created by a group of people that met at grief counseling, eager to escape the norms of society after suffering crime-related tragedies. It’s a shame they didn’t know that human instincts will follow them anywhere they go.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre might be the most famous of our horror movies set in small towns. Part of the terror in this film is the isolation that everyone has moved on from the dying town.

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There is no one left to hear the screams of the victims when the Hewitt family starts murder. No one to cushion the brutality the villains can impose without consequence. The remakes expanded a little further. But as far as the audience knows, the town has been whittled down to a closed meat processing plant, a few trailers/houses, and a gas station.

Honestly, I feel like I could make an entire list out of Stephen King’s stories. I’ll cut it down to just two for redundancy’s sake, and Children of the Corn is probably the creepiest.

The story combines the droning corn-filled isolation of a tiny Midwestern town with the perfect representation of their religious cult-like mob justice. If you are not down with their God, you are an Outlander, plain and simple. Making the villains kids was just a way to add to the eerie factor.

Keep in mind, I’m talking about the original here, not one of the 9 sequels.

If there’s one thing I can attribute to small-town living, it’s the potential to become inseparable friends with other people. You’re basically forced to interact with the same group of people for your entire childhood, and if things click, you can be friends for life.

IT perfectly demonstrates that the bond you create with your childhood friends can defeat any evil that a town can throw at you, even if it seems like everyone is covering it up. The story explores many challenges of small-town living, from the fear of someone different (homophobia and racism) to the danger of local bullies. It’s not surprising that Derry is based on King’s hometown of Durham, population 3,848.

One common theme in horror movies set in small towns is isolation. It doesn’t get much more isolated than 30 Days of Night. Barrow, Alaska, is the perfect setting for a vampire film.

In real life, Barrow gets about 82 days of darkness, so those humans would have been long eaten by the time the sun returned, but it was still awesome, nonetheless. The film showed that sometimes there’s nowhere to run, so you can only hide, whether it be in the attics of local houses or using the local utilidor as a bunker.

Two true things about small towns. If you’re a troublemaker, you’re immediately on a first-name basis with the cops, and you will run into them, and everyone else, everywhere. There is no escape, as the troublemaker in The Blob finds out.

In this film, the gelatinous alien eats its way through the entire town and is met by the military. In real life, it would be met with local yokels and Mason jars filled with homemade napalm, and it would have lost.

Here we are, back at a nice little seaside village, but this time on the west coast. John Carpenter did a fantastic job of weaving in an aquatic ghost story with the tradition of small-town chatted-about mythical lore. The ambiance of the film is so cool, somehow making a town that isn’t on an island feel like one.

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You feel like there’s no escape for the victims, but that may have something to do with the cursed pirate ghosts that can appear out of nowhere for some slicing and dicing.

Keeping the seaside village thing going, except we’re switching coasts. Potter’s Bluff is basically just the east coast Antonio Bay, but Dead & Buried is a far different film. In fact, it totally switches genres from small-town cult to supernatural zombie-esque stuff in the blink of an eye. It works extremely well.

This film has amazing effects and makeup in it, too, being one of the earlier horror films Stan Winston worked directly on.

The name may say Perfection, but this town is anything but. It’s basically like six trailers, some storage units, and a general store jammed between three mountains with one way in and out of town.

It says a lot for the town when in the first scene, the two main characters are doing everything they can to get out of it. The only thing the town is “perfect” for is prehistoric worm monsters being able to trap and eat humans without them being able to run away.

What is it with small-town Illinois and horror movies?! Oh right. The Midwest can be SCARY. Considering there are many cases in which criminal acts aren’t taken seriously due to small-town mindsets, the idea of Michael Myers escaping a low-rent insane asylum to wreak further havoc on his small town isn’t very surprising.

Even less surprising is the reaction the cops had when they noticed masks, rope, and knives went missing from the hardware store. “Probably just some kids.”

As you can see, these are just a handful of horror movies set in small towns. What are some of your favorites?

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