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‘The People Under the Stairs’ Review: A Brilliantly Bizarre Undercover Horror Classic

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Can someone please tell me why I’d never heard of Wes Craven’s The People Under the Stairs (1991) until just last week? I’m honestly annoyed.

This film bends horror conventions to create a nightmarish atmosphere, accelerating the audience’s sense of wonderful apprehension from start to finish. What really sold me on this seemingly forgotten box-office hit was its perfect thematic balance between utterly bonkers and eerily real.

Our brave protagonist goes by “Fool” (Brandon Quinton Adams), a name dubbed to him by his older sister (Kelly Jo Minter). She has a friend—Leroy (Ving Rhames)—who plans to rob his greedy, gentrifying landlords and promises Fool that if he joins in on the act, he can pay his rent and afford his mother’s desperately needed cancer treatment. When Fool, Leroy, and another friend in on the plot (Jeremy Roberts) enter the house, they realize these landlords are even crueler and twisted than they ever could have imagined.

Inside, Fool stumbles upon Man (Everett McGill) and Woman (Wendy Robie): an incestuous brother-and-sister / married couple, along with rampant child abuse, cannibalism, and a person named Roach living in the walls—which he booby-trapped himself. Fool also meets Man and Woman’s daughter, Alice (A.J. Langer), who is deeply psychologically abused and constantly in fear of being put under the stairs, where Man and Woman lock up the children who failed to obey them.

The People Under the Stairs is filled with diverse, bizarre elements that bring many horror sub-genres into one excellent, spooky mix. There are plenty of traditional slasher elements, with incredibly gory moments and jump scares. The film brings in elements of a psychological thriller, in that Man and Woman are extremely emotionally abusive, cannibalistic, and racist. The Stairpeople trapped in the basement are almost undead, which harkens to the zombie thriller genre.

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The true genius of Craven’s underrated story is the intersection between bizarre and candid. Woven into the utterly bonkers plot of this movie are stories and messages that reflect and comment on our very real society. Man and Woman are caricatures of evil. They are everything horrible, terrifying, and threatening tied all into one in an exaggerated, horrific package. Frankly, I think it’s awesome and extremely well done.

The film’s subtext tells a story of class division, gentrification, and racism. Fool’s family lives in a rundown apartment building owned by Man and Woman, who continue to hike up the rent in the hopes that the last tenants in the building will be forced to move out. Then, they can sell the land to developers to make room for office buildings.

In Craven’s story, the greedy landlords are the result of years of one family hoarding wealth through the generations. They are the epitome of white supremacy. At the end of the movie, the Stairpeople lead Fool to Man and Woman’s stash of gold coins, cash, and jewels. At the same time, the Black community gathers around the house to support Fool’s sister as she searches for her brother. Fool blows up the house, spewing money and valuables through the air, back into the hands of his exploited and marginalized community.

Craven’s movie provides a terrifying, satirical, and ultimately hopeful outlook on our society by mixing the seemingly juxtaposing elements of absurdity and reality. While it is a nice idea, it is hardly as simple as blowing up a house to revitalize underfunded and underrepresented people. However, we as an audience in 2022 can see this as a message alluding to something bigger; for things to get better, we’re going to have to blow some shit up.

If I were you, I would grab a snack, call up a fellow horror enthusiast, and watch this movie as soon as I got a chance. It is the perfect combination of scary, thrilling, attention-grabbing, heartfelt, and strange. Not to mention, it’s the perfect film to watch if you’d like to explore racist class inequality through satire and terror.

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Hey! I’m Maya, a snarky, queer freelance writer, horror enthusiast, and history nerd. My hope is that my writing both entertains my readers and provides educational commentary on human behavior & society. In my spare time, I love to eat food, hang out with my girlfriend, and needle felt little monster sculptures.

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Reviews

[REVIEW] The Skiing Slasher ‘Iced’ (1988) Provides Chills, If Not Thrills

Hell hath frozen over here at Horror Press, and as one of the world’s premiere 1980s slasher obsessives, I thought this might be the perfect time to crack into my unwatched VHS of the 1988 skiing slasher Iced. Here’s the gist. Four years after their friend Jeff (Dan Smith) dies in a skiing accident, a group of friends (Doug Stevenson, Debra De Liso, John C. Cooke, Elizabeth Gorcey, Michael Picardi, Ron Kologie, and the original Wednesday Addams, Lisa Loring) is invited to the swanky Snow Peak skiing community for a vacation. Isolated and surrounded by snow, they begin to be hunted by a killer wearing Jeff’s cracked ski mask, who blames them for the accident. Is it Jeff? Or is it someone else seeking revenge? 

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Hell hath frozen over here at Horror Press, and as one of the world’s premiere 1980s slasher obsessives, I thought this might be the perfect time to crack into my unwatched VHS of the 1988 skiing slasher Iced. Here’s the gist. Four years after their friend Jeff (Dan Smith) dies in a skiing accident, a group of friends (Doug Stevenson, Debra De Liso, John C. Cooke, Elizabeth Gorcey, Michael Picardi, Ron Kologie, and the original Wednesday Addams, Lisa Loring) is invited to the swanky Snow Peak skiing community for a vacation. Isolated and surrounded by snow, they begin to be hunted by a killer wearing Jeff’s cracked ski mask, who blames them for the accident. Is it Jeff? Or is it someone else seeking revenge? 

Is Iced a Good Slasher Movie?

Unfortunately, like many meat-and-potatoes slasher movies of the late 1980s, Iced does not have much to offer the seasoned horror fan. The acting ranges from competent (hi, Lisa Loring) to absolutely abysmal, averaging out much closer to abysmal than not. The real estate agent Alex Bourne (played by the movie’s screenwriter, Joseph Alan Johnson), in particular, is a disastrously beige nonentity.

The movie’s pacing and structure are also baffling. There are almost no murders beyond the opening kill for a good half of Iced’s runtime, forcing you to spend time watching this group of people have a mediocre ski vacation where they’re constantly sniping at one another and not doing much else. When the kills do come, they zip past you at a too-rapid clip, hardly giving you time to pay proper attention to them, like chocolates on the conveyor belt in I Love Lucy.

There is next to no tension-building in the movie because of this, just a lurching sort of stop-start motion that will make you seasick. By far, the most exciting and visceral moment of the movie is a scene where a character is wandering around in the dark and bangs his shin on a coffee table.

Tragically, the skiing is also not that thrilling to watch. While it’s competently shot, enough to be legible, it seems to be beyond the limits of director Jeff Kwitney to turn it into something propulsive and exciting. Thankfully, the movie pretty much forgets about skiing after the first act, anyway.

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What Does Iced Do Well?

Although the sum of its parts is pure blandness, there is plenty that Iced does quite well. For instance, the movie was shot in Utah and thus comes by its iciness naturally (sorry, Jack Frost, California doesn’t quite cut it), crafting a unique setting for a late-period slasher with a frigid, moody atmosphere. I’m also a sucker for themed kills, and the use of a ski pole, an icicle, a snowplow, and a hot tub do a lot to spice up the proceedings.

For the gorehounds in the audience, only one of the kills is particularly bloody, though they are nearly all well-rendered by their own standards (there’s an electrocution that relies on performance rather than effects, for instance, and does stick the landing). And even the offscreen or underwhelming kills end up being useful in the Final Girl sequence, when their frozen bodies provide a gruesome and effectively bleak tableau.

As far as exploitation movies go, Iced also has quite a bit to offer on that front. Nearly every member of the cast takes off all their clothes at one point or another, chilliness be damned, and there is a reasonably equitable division of male and female characters wandering around bare-chested, which always feels shockingly progressive when you’re watching a 1980s slasher. Plus, the sequence that is the most undignified (a topless corpse is seen with snow piled on her breasts) actually works for the tone, as the indignity makes her death feel that much more tragic, while the piled snow emphasizes how impossibly long the character has been exposed to the elements.

What else is good? Well… The killer’s POV is depicted by showing a view through the cracks in Jeff’s visor, which provides a neat new image for a type of shot that is otherwise pretty standard for a slasher movie.

However, Iced ultimately exists in this nether space between interesting and boring where it never particularly feels like a slog, but is oh-so withholding when it comes to meting out exciting moments. I’ve seen dozens of slashers that are much, much worse, so it’s hard to get angry about what this 1988 entry is bringing to the table. That said, this one is only for die-hard fans of the subgenre, or for people who desperately need a snowy horror fix and have already seen everything else from The Shining to Wind Chill.

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Score: 4/10

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[Review] The Thrills and Kills of ‘Ils’ (2006)

Ils follows school teacher Clémentine (Olivia Bonamy) and her boyfriend Lucas (Michaël Cohen), who recently relocated from France to a remote McMansion in Romania. Clémentine arrives home one night after work to a normal evening. She and Lucas eat dinner, watch TV, flirt a bit, and head to bed. That evening, while they’re asleep, Clémentine hears a noise outside. They go to investigate, which turns out to be the wrong move. The couple soon realizes the noise outside has made its way inside. A cat-and-mouse game ensues, forcing Clémentine and Lucas to do anything they can to survive the night. But it soon comes to light the thing inside might actually be things.

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Author’s Note: It’s really difficult to talk about this film without spoiling who/what the killers are, so be warned.

As someone who lives alone, home invasion films have started to really get under my skin. Thinking that someone could break into the room in my basement apartment that I don’t use, and is street-facing, killing me, and then escaping, frightens me. Plus, there are no cameras around my building, and the windows don’t even lock properly. Okay, I’m going to shut up about that. But that doesn’t negate the fact that home invasion films get to me now. So, naturally, when researching some New French Extremity films for November, I figured I should finally break the seal and watch Ils, as it’s known in the States, Them.

Ils follows school teacher Clémentine (Olivia Bonamy) and her boyfriend Lucas (Michaël Cohen), who recently relocated from France to a remote McMansion in Romania. Clémentine arrives home one night after work to a normal evening. She and Lucas eat dinner, watch TV, flirt a bit, and head to bed. That evening, while they’re asleep, Clémentine hears a noise outside. They go to investigate, which turns out to be the wrong move. The couple soon realizes the noise outside has made its way inside. A cat-and-mouse game ensues, forcing Clémentine and Lucas to do anything they can to survive the night. But it soon comes to light the thing inside might actually be things.

Supposedly, this film is based on true events. If IMDb Trivia is to be taken at face value, then this film is based on a couple that a group of teenagers brutally murdered. In retrospect, it’s difficult to believe a group of kids pulled this all off. Take the cold open of the film. There is a mother and daughter involved in a single-car crash. The mother goes to check under the hood and disappears. This leads her daughter to lock the doors. In a few seconds, the car’s hood is slammed shut, mud is slung at the car from both sides, and the street light goes out. So, knowing that teenagers are the ones to blame for this, it seems a bit far-fetched. Especially when we eventually see the kids. We’re supposed to believe they’re teenagers, but they look between the ages of eight and ten.

The film works best when it blends the line between natural and supernatural, and when it seems like there is only one antagonist inside. Writer/directors David Moreau and Xavier Palud can’t find their footing with what type of story they want to tell. Ils would have worked much better as a supernatural horror film rather than a home invasion film with teenagers. When Ils makes you question what lurks within the house is when it works best. The big reveal at the end feels a bit forced. Part of me wishes Moreau and Palud had taken the idea on which they based their story and gone the supernatural route.

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That being said, the cat-and-mouse aspect of Ils is the most enjoyable. When Lucas is taken out of commission, Clémentine is forced to take matters into her own hands. Clémentine is fascinating to watch and makes, what feels like, choices anyone else would make. Her reactions feel more authentic than the actions people usually take in horror films. But there’s still something that feels off and stale about this movie. At just 74 minutes, Ils feels like it rolls the credits before it really gets going.

Many people consider this film New French Extremity, and I can understand that. Would I consider it NFE? No. This is just a plain home invasion horror film. The violence, setting, and action do nothing to classify that as extreme in any sense. Is it scary? Sure! Is the [limited] violence painful to watch? You bet! But it doesn’t push any boundaries or set out to tell something deeper than it does. Ils isn’t a bad film, but it’s far from being a great film.

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