The Untold Truth Of Channel Zero

Suburbia provides the perfect playground for horror stories to subvert audiences' expectations regarding safety and quaintness. We've seen the creepy suburb trope employed by a whole host of creators, including Tim Burton, David Lynch, and John Carpenter. In Channel Zero, Nick Antosca finds a way to depict suburbia all his own.

When discussing what makes the suburbs so scary in horror, Antosca told Polygon, "That landscape ... the suburbs anywhere in kind of a nondescript America, feels like there's so much unspoken and so much under the surface." Channel Zero turns the suburbs into a horror landscape by emptying them of all comfort, familiarity, and, for the most part, people. Instead, they are crowded with monsters — often ones with origins in the quaint details of suburbia itself. The Tooth Child is, after all, a child.

Though this portrayal of the suburbs runs through several seasons of the show, Antosca says that this wasn't part of Channel Zero's purpose and that it was simply the result of working with what he knows. According to the showrunner, "I didn't set out to do that in Channel Zero, but in exploring a landscape full of dread, we ended up going back to the suburbs a couple times."