In “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” aliens—both real and imagined—are symbols of an unseen existential threat. They symbolize the unknown and the foreign. They are preternatural and menacing outsiders: the most extreme symbol of a technologically advanced “other.” Though they are initially implied to be an object of delusional fear, the threat of aliens does turn out to be real, albeit in a different way than Tommy suggested. When “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” is read as an allegory for McCarthyism, the aliens become a one-to-one analogue for Soviet aggressors.

“The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” begins with idealized 1950s American iconography depicting a Rockwellian 1950s white middle-class American neighborhood. This imagery symbolizes social stability. When Maple Street’s pleasant culture breaks down, it implies the fragility of that stability and reveals this vision of American prosperity and civility as a quixotic façade. Maple Street’s breakdown is ironic: What appears to be a tight-knit community plunges into violence and dysfunction at the slightest provocation.

The ironic twist of a prosperous American suburb hiding something sinister is a thematic lynchpin in “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street.” This subversion of the suburban ideal will become a staple of horror media in the 1970s and 1980s and is exemplified in films like Halloween (1978), Poltergeist (1982), and Blue Velvet (1886) as well as novels like It (1986) and The Stepford Wives (1972).