“Can’t get out. No one ever has.”
The People Under the Stairs would be a largely forgettable slasher for any number of reasons. It’s certainly not up to snuff with director Wes Craven’s best work, although it’s obviously difficult to top or even equal A Nightmare on Elm Street. The reason the film is worth watching, and why it has a curious staying power, is because it’s just so damn angry. Grisly premise notwithstanding, what stands out about the film is its bleak, cynical outlook, one even a hopeful ending can’t undermine. The People Under the Stairs is surprisingly timely, nearly three decades after its release.
Poindexter, nicknamed Fool, has just turned 13. His mother lies ill in bed, and she tells him that he’s the man of the house now – right after they receive an eviction notice. It’s an unconscionable action, with the mother’s illness and Fool’s nieces and nephews to consider. Enter Leroy (Ving Rhames), a friend of Ruby’s, who enlists Fool’s help in a scheme: rob the very landlords who are evicting the family. Rhames is surprisingly charismatic in the role (I usually find him pretty wooden), but doesn’t pretend to be Fool’s friend. Fool is a means to an end, and Leroy will not put up with any deviation from his plan.
The house is suitably spooky, an ink-black stain on an otherwise normal suburban street. It used to be a funeral home, and it looks like a place that has seen a lot of death. One member of the crew, Spenser, talks his way in to case the place, and that’s the last we see of him. A car pulls out, and Leroy and Fool decide to enter. The windows are grated and padlocked, and Leroy has to pry open two doors, one of them steel, just to enter the house proper. He’s promptly attacked by a snarling dog. Craven does a good job of showing just how trapped they are, and in so short a time.
The People Under the Stairs wraps itself in the guise of a home-invasion thriller, one where the invaders are the protagonists (Don’t Breathe would do this better). It’s easy to root for Fool, played with guilelessness and bravado by Brandon Quintin Adams. He makes a good foil for Rhames, who so often rests on how cool he is that he forgets to, you know, act. But that’s neither here nor there. Rhames’ best scene, and one of the film’s most telling, is when he and Fool are being pursued by a man with a gun. Leroy hides inside a closet and tells Fool that there is no room for him. He’s prioritizing his own life over that of a child. Which gets to the larger theme at play here: capitalism kills.
People is a black-hearted fable that wants to confront socioeconomic inequality in Los Angeles. Fool’s landlords are content to let the building crumble into decrepitude so they can level it to make room for condos. The ghetto where Fool lives looks like hell on earth: seemingly rabid dogs fight over raw meat, junkies shoot up in the hallways and harass Fool as he returns home. The landlords, by contrast, live in a kind of hermetically sealed solitude, insulated from the carnage that their avarice has wrought throughout the city. They address each other as Momma and Daddy, and are later revealed to be brother and sister, hinting at the entrenched power systems that keep the rich on top and the poor fighting for table scraps. In one scene, the cops arrive, and Fool pounds on the windows, crying for help. They can’t hear him; beyond that, they probably don’t want to. What’s another young black boy begging for help?
Craven’s film is smart, often at the expense of being scary. Much of that is due to the performances by Everett McGill and Wendy Robie as Momma and Daddy. McGill and Robie are both wildly over the top, with McGill being the worst offender. He’s campy when he should be menacing, and all traces of danger disappear from the character when he believes he’s killed Fool, and in celebration does a little jig and sings a song. (Craven is no stranger to misplaced comedy; just look at the buffoonish cops in The Last House on the Left.) Only Robie seems willing to lean into the implied incestuous relationship between the two. There is definitely a sexual element at play, though; when Daddy goes hunting, he dons a full leather fetish getup, for reasons that are not made explicitly clear. We’re led to believe that he just gets off on this.
The film is a little too long for its own good. Twenty minutes could easily be shaved off of this, especially the film’s greatest misstep, in which Fool escapes the house only to return to save a girl named Alice. It breaks the unity of the setting, and undermines the claustrophobic dread that it should embrace. Part of that is because the house itself is such a neat set, full of crawlspaces and labyrinthine corridors. The geography is never made clear, and every hallway seems to spiral further inward, making escape impossible – just like in a capitalist society. “Sometimes the only way out is in,” Alice tells Fool, and it’s a grim sentiment. You can’t beat the machine, you can only become part of it.
10/1: Hellraiser / The Invitation
10/2: Splice / Banshee Chapter
10/3: Jennifer’s Body / Raw
10/4: Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist / Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2
10/5: Kill List / A Field in England
10/6: Halloween II / Halloween III: Season of the Witch
10/7: A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge / A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors
10/8: Ginger Snaps / Creep
10/9: Cube / Creep 2
10/10: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) / The Ritual
10/11: Hell House LLC / The Taking of Deborah Logan
10/12: Re-Animator / From Beyond
10/13: Beetlejuice / Sleepy Hollow
10/14: Idle Hands / The Lords of Salem
10/15: The Ring / Noroi: The Curse
10/16: I Know What You Did Last Summer / The Monster
10/17: Night of the Living Dead / Train to Busan
10/18: The Devil’s Backbone / Southbound
10/19: Event Horizon / Dreamcatcher
10/20: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari / The Bad Seed
10/21: Eyes Without a Face / Goodnight Mommy
10/22: The Strangers / The Strangers: Prey at Night
10/23: In the Mouth of Madness / The Void
10/24: The Amityville Horror / Honeymoon
10/25: Gerald’s Game / Emelie
10/26: The Monster Squad / Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon
10/27: Veronica / Jacob’s Ladder
10/28: High Tension / You’re Next
10/29: The Innkeepers / Bug
10/30: The People Under the Stairs / Vampires
10/31: Saw / Saw II
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