Something I never understood...

There are three possible answers to this:

1. The surrounding neighborhood may have thought it was just a thunderstorm and stayed indoors.

2. Glen's house wasn't the only one being affected by The Gate and the surrounding houses were too busy dealing with similar horrors of their own.

3. Michael Nankin (the writer) is a lazy sh!t!

"Wait...what?"

I thought about this too, and the idea I came up with was that these events were happening in a crossover reality. When the gate started to enter into our world, at the same time, their suburban house started to enter into the "hell" world. The rest of the neighborhood had not been pulled into this reality - yet. Defeating the demon prevented it from spreading its hell across our world.

Could also be the producers were too cheap to pay for any extras.


Cheers.

I never understand why people try to make sense of a grade B horror flick!

Do you mean to tell me that if YOU walked out of your house late one night because of loud noises and saw a whirling vortex of unpleasantness pouring out of the mother *beep* ground that you would go see if the people in the house were okay?

Well, because it's another dimension, where the neighbors are not really "there".

It puzzled me too after I became an adult, but I also remember that when this movie was made, I was 4 and I remember those manicured subdivisions being a brand-new idea in some areas. I knew some people that lived in one. There were like 30 houses and they were the ONLY family that had moved in ... it took awhile for some people in some areas to really take to those things ... so I just assumed that maybe the neighborhood was relatively new and that they could have been the first family to move in on the block.

The trans-dimensional shift theory also holds water, as well as the Gate having a limited radius. In the sequel no one believed Glenn or Terry about what had happened according to Terry, so if their were neighbors, they were not aware of what was happening. It's also possible that the power of the Gate could have simple put a spell on the surrounding area putting everyone into a deep sleep or adding a perception filter so that they simply couldn't see what was happening in front of them.

I guess the reality is that they wanted to keep the budget down and not over-complicate the story ... so in order for it to work, like with plays, you need to exercise the practice of "Suspension of Disbelief" and just assume whatever you need to in order to engross yourself in the limited parameters of such a small setting and story.

I like doing that. Tossing around different ideas to make the movie even better in my own my head than what was provided is something that has always made me love films. The nay-sayers on here surprise me ... I mean people have book clubs and essentially do the same thing: over-thinking something that simply doesn't need to be over-thought. The difference is that no one seems to knock book clubs for doing it ;)

We just do it because we are fans and it's fun!
Reality is boring; so let's make up our own!

Definitely budgetary restrictions.