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.
The Twisted World Under the Stairs
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.
Satire Meets Social Commentary
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.
Why You Need to Watch This Now
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.