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Plot

Suburban homeowner Ray Peterson is home on a week-long vacation. Late one night, he hears strange noises coming from the basement of his new and reclusive neighbors, the Klopeks. Ray and his other neighbors—nosy Art Weingartner, Vietnam War veteran Mark Rumsfield and teenager Ricky Butler-suspect that the Klopeks may be ritualistic murderers. On another night, they observe the youngest Klopek drive an oversized garbage bag to their curbside garbage can and aggressively mash it down. Later that night, during a rainstorm, Ray sees the Klopeks digging in their backyard. In the morning, Ray, Mark, and Art search the garbage truck for human remains after the Klopeks' trash is collected but find nothing.

Mark's wife, Bonnie, finds their neighbor Walter's dog, Queenie, running loose. Worried about Walter, Ray, Art, Ricky, and the Rumsfields enter his house and find overturned chairs and Walter's toupée but no Walter. Ray collects Queenie, leaves a note for Walter, and sees one of the Klopeks watching him from their house. Ray and Art theorize that the Klopeks used Walter as a human sacrifice, becoming further convinced when Ray's dog Vince digs up a human femur from along the Klopeks' fence line.

Ray's wife, Carol, tired of the men's behavior, organizes a welcome visit to the Klopeks. While the Petersons and Rumsfields meet Hans, Reuben, and Dr. Werner Klopek, Art snoops around the Klopeks' backyard and is chased out by their dog. Afterward, Ray reveals to Art and Mark that he found Walter's mail and toupée at the Klopeks', proving they had been in Walter's house.

The next day, Ray sends Carol and their son, Dave, to visit Carol's sister. When the Klopeks leave, Art and Ray enter their backyard to search for Walter's corpse while Mark acts as lookout. Finding nothing in the yard, Art and Ray break into the Klopeks' basement, discover what appears to be a crematorium, and dig into the floor in search of human remains. Ray strikes a gas line with his pickaxe; Art escapes before the house explodes, and Ray emerges from the inferno just as Carol and Dave return home.

Walter arrives home during the commotion, having spent a few days in the hospital due to heart palpitations. He had asked the Klopeks to collect his mail for him, and they had mistakenly gathered up his toupée as well. When Art intends to continue looking for evidence against the Klopeks, Ray goes on a tirade, declaring that he and the others were wrong before climbing into an ambulance. Werner enters and accuses Ray of having seen a human skull in the basement furnace, revealing that the Klopeks murdered the previous homeowners, the Knapps, so they could live in their house.

Werner attempts to lethally inject Ray as Hans drives the ambulance away. Their struggle causes the ambulance to crash into Art's house, ejecting Werner and Ray, who makes a citizen's arrest. Ricky uncovers human skeletal remains in the Klopeks' car trunk. The Klopeks are arrested, and charges against Ray are dropped. While Art speaks to a TV news crew and explains how suburbanites are out to get criminals in their neighborhoods, Ray states that he and his family are going away for a while and asks Ricky to watch over the neighborhood.

Writing

Screenwriter Dana Olsen based the script on experiences from his own childhood: "I had an ultranormal middle-class upbringing, but our town had its share of psychos. There was a legendary hatchet murder in the thirties, and every once in a while, you'd pick up the local paper and read something like 'LIBRARIAN KILLS FAMILY, SELF.' As a kid, it was fascinating to think that Mr. Flanagan down the street could turn out to be Jack the Ripper. And where there's fear, there's comedy. So I approached The 'Burbs as Ozzie and Harriet meet Charles Manson."

Olsen's script attracted producer Larry Brezner, who brought it to Imagine Films. It was greeted with a warm reception from Imagine co-founder Brian Grazer: "I liked the concept of a regular guy taking a vacation in his own neighborhood, plus it was funny and well written. It suddenly dawned on me that Joe Dante would be fantastic [as a director] because it's a mixture of comedy, horror, and reality."

Dante, who had directed Gremlins and Innerspace, and his partner, Michael Finnell, were immediately impressed by the concept of the movie. Dante, who specialized in offbeat subject matter, was intrigued by the blending of real-life situations with elements of the supernatural: "When I tell people about the story, a remarkable number say, 'On my grandmother's block, there were people like that. They never mowed their lawn, and they never came out, and they let their mail stack up, and nobody knew who they were.' And I must confess that in my own neighborhood there's a house like that, falling to wrack and ruin. I think this is perhaps a more common event than most people are aware of."

Dante had been developing Little Man Tate (later made by Jodie Foster) but that project collapsed when he was offered the script which was then called Bay Window. Dante recalled, "I liked the characters. But the script ended with the hero being killed and driven away in an ambulance by a guy that he's been persecuting through the movie, the guy who then turns out to really be guilty. And the fact that the guy is guilty turns out to be sort of a Twilight Zone surprise, an O. Henry twist ending. And I thought, 'Well, that's OK.' But then they decided that we wanted to hire Tom Hanks. And suddenly, it was like, 'Well, you know we can't kill Tom Hanks. What are we going to do? We'll have to change it'."

Casting

Dante, Brezner, and Finnell agreed that Hanks would be the most suitable actor to portray the married Ray Peterson, a conservative man who tries to introduce excitement into his life by investigating the activities of his strange neighbors. Dante referred to Hanks as "the reigning everyman, a guy that everybody can identify with", comparing him to James Stewart. Brezner echoed this sentiment, saying "Hanks is an actor capable of acting funny rather than funny acting. He also has no problem with transition from comedy to pathos, as he showed in Nothing in Common, and he's now proving himself as one of the country's most versatile actors."

Hanks accepted the role of Ray with enthusiasm, later saying "What's so bizarrely interesting about this black psychocomedy is that the stuff that goes on in real life in a regular neighborhood will make your hair stand up on the back of your neck." He was also intrigued by his character's distinctive personality traits: "Sometimes there's more of an opportunity to create than others. Here's a guy with a great life – a nice house, a wife, a beautiful tree, a nice neighborhood – and he's happy. Next day, he hates it all. I thought something must've happened to him offstage. And that's the challenge for me of the part: to communicate Ray's offscreen dilemma. One of the reasons Ray doesn't go away on vacation is because it's another extension of the normalcy he's fallen into. So he thinks he'll try a more Bohemian thing, which is to just hang around the house. With a week's worth of free time on his hands, Ray is drawn into the pre-occupations of his neighbors, who always seem to be at home. But what I did is just back-story embellishment that any actor will do. Perhaps from my repertory experience. I don't ask a director for motivation. If he says, 'Go over to the window', I find the reason myself."

Hanks found admiration for Dante's directorial style, saying "Joe has a stylized, visionary way of looking at the entire movie. It's pure film-making – the story is told from the camera's point of view, and that's a type of movie I haven't made." Dante, in turn, praised his star. "The most impressive thing about Tom Hanks as a comic actor is how effortless he makes it seem. He actually is very diligent about his acting, but his comic sense of what is going to work – and what isn't – is really unparalleled."

Dante's laid-back, casual style encouraged improvisation among the actors. He noted, "Tom doesn't like to do scenes the way they're always done. He goes out of his way to put a different spin on everything and his being good as he is and as open as he is encouraged the other actors to do the same. It set a tone for the movie that made it a lot of fun to make."

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