Unlike other contemporary depictions of the sleazy underbelly of American life, such as that glimpsed in Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, the unwanted spectre here is purely familial. Thus, in its attempt to muddy and darken its representation of wholesome small-town Americana, to see the danger 'within', Hitchcock's film emerges as a subtle and humorous relation to both David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986) and Tim Hunter's River's Edge (1987). It is also prescient of the stream of family-obsessed films which define the American horror cinema of the late 60s and 70s. .
The family is drawn as a melange of ineffectual fathers, deranged siblings, potty mothers in love with their psychotic younger brothers, disaffected adolescents (young Charlie, Teresa Wright), annoying, though smart and never cute, younger children. The underlying oddness and general good humour of this family grouping, and the film in general, is grounded by the macabre, but comic, ongoing dialogue between Father and simple neighbour Herb (Hume Cronyn), absurdly preoccupied with how they are going to kill one another. Each of the family members emerges as something of a running gag, talking endlessly over one another in a brilliant display of overlapping dialogue, and providing an ever-shifting side-show to the rearing sexual tension that emerges between niece and her namesake Uncle. In its overt use of symbols (cigars, ominous silhouettes of pulsating trains, and an obscene phallogocentrism) to suggest the psycho-sexual threat of Uncle Charlie, the film relies upon a psychoanalytic vocabulary indicative of Hollywood's, and explicitly Hitchcock's, skewed digestion of Freud. Yet the moral landscape of this film is not a conventional or easily recognisable one, and in one deliciously ironic sequence, Hitchcock has the Newtons being chosen, by a couple of detectives posing as journalists for a lifestyle magazine, as the typical American family.
