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‘Vivarium’: The Horror of the Suburb
The suburb has been the subject of many horror movies and stories. Usually though the subject of said horror is the upper middle class who live within the suburban homes, their values, ideas, philosophies, and fears. A subject which is rarely or ever touched on is the suburb itself. The very essence of suburban narratives is almost never the thematic core of horror narratives, or any narrative for that matter.
In fact, most narratives don’t really engage with place as a concept for narrative exploration. They tend to either ignore place, seeing it as simply set dressing for the focus of the narrative, i.e. characters and plot. Or they see place as secondary only to telling the narrative, serving its purpose to push the narrative forward. In all, place is rarely seen as essential.
This is where ‘Vivarium’ comes in. Here, place becomes central to the film. It becomes a character within the film. It serves as the thematic core of the film. The suburb becomes essential to understanding the film.
But before we can even begin to understand how the suburb within the film is used we need to know what ‘Vivarium’ even is. ‘Vivarium’ is a 2019 film directed by Lorcan Finnegan, a lesser known Irish horror film director. The plot of ‘Vivarium’ follows a couple taking an impromptu house tour because they are looking for a house to purchase and live in. The tour takes them to a weird suburb where all of the houses are identical and once inside the suburb it is like a maze, with streets turning on identical streets, back onto identical streets.
They tour a house which has a very manufactured, sterile and artificial feel to it. Everything is just a little too perfect, a little too clean and nice. They eventually leave the house and try and find their way out of the suburb but they keep looping back onto the same street with the same house. They repeat this for a while before getting exhausted and just deciding to spend the night in the house and the day after trying to find a way out of the neighborhood.
