Parents

Michael Laemle, a quiet boy in an immaculate Eisenhower-era suburb, is troubled by the meat his relentlessly wholesome parents eat at every meal and by where it comes from.

Bob Balaban, the actor, directed it as a stylised nightmare of 1950s conformity: everything is too bright, too clean, too cheerful, and the horror is filtered entirely through a child who may be imagining it or may be exactly right.

Randy Quaid and Mary Beth Hurt play the parents as beaming, aggressive avatars of postwar normality, and the film is as much satire as horror.

It is closer to Blue Velvet than to a monster movie, and its dream sequences, a bed sinking into a lake of blood, are genuinely disturbing.

It flopped and is a genuine cult item, and it prefigures a whole strand of suburban-nightmare horror.