I was initially going to use a contemporary setting, some unemployed shut-in like me trapped at home during COVID, very directly based on the original events that inspired me to start this project.
1950s Suburban Americana has been widely used as a setting for narrative fiction in the modern day. It was an interesting time, a time of transitions and tension that has fascinated and inspired many creatives. A very particular image was preserved through advertisements from the time, that people were encouraged to uphold in their daily lives, hiding all imperfections beneath, to embrace the facade. Many societal concepts that still influence the world of today – the nuclear family, the suburb, the middle class as we know it, and the stay-at-home housewife – first gained widespread traction during this decade. Advertisement on a comparable scale to what we know today, and the mass-scale consumerism it supported, also gained a foothold in this era – particularly in the USA, a country still trying to find its own identity, today still seen as the center of consumerist culture.
Meanwhile, beneath the veneer of consumerist joy, the Cold War was taking place. This came with the ever-present anxiety, the constant threat of nuclear annihilation over everyone’s heads. This aspect is particularly relevant today and explains some of the prominence of 50s imagery in modern works of fiction.
The Fallout video game series mines this contrast to great effect, depicting a world where nuclear disaster *did* befall the world in the 50s, and the culture that emerges in post-apocalyptic America is directly based on what fragments of the 1950s were preserved. The game’s setting is intricately designed to the point it would be easy to mistake a fictional advertisement created to be a game asset for a real advert actually created in the 1950s.
Guillermo del Toro’s 2017 film The Shape of Water, also takes place in a fictionalised version of 1950s America, taking inspiration from and deconstructing the typical creature feature; tapping into how the rigid ideals of the time would push down on, affect and conflict with actual people (and monsters) who are incapable of fulfilling them.
Graham Rawle, a contemporary British artist/writer with an obsessive interest in 1950s America, takes things one step further, in Woman’s World: A Graphic Novel, constructed entirely out of actual text and images are taken from adverts from the period, collaged together to tell a coherent, dramatic story.
My own prior engagement with fiction set during this era, made it so it was one of the first things I thought of when considering alternative settings for the moth story. The potent mix of pretense and tension, and the highly recognisable imagery, all make it ideal. The focus on domesticity and the conceit of the stay-at-home housewife (previously not really existent, working-class women could not afford to stay home and rich women generally did not perform their own housework), was a good fit for the single-location domestic horror narrative.
Horror in isolation and stir craziness, with the extra tension of having to maintain a veneer of propriety. I really enjoyed the contrast there and I think it could make for a powerful element of horror, one that wouldn’t be present if I just used myself as direct inspiration.
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