This is our Annual 31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews, a project where I review a horror movie every single day through the month of October. And this time, it's special. This Halloween is my thirty-first Halloween since my birth. This means we have 31 days, 31 horror (or horror-adjacent) movies, and 31 years to celebrate. We start in 1991 with Wes Craven's The People Under the Stairs.
The People Under the Stairs is so many things at once. Therefore it is unsurprising that it feels like nothing else from its time or any others. It is one of the only movies to center itself around the crisis of mass eviction and tenant abuse, a problem that continues today. But beyond social commentary, The People Under the Stairs also is completely gonzo with its its ideas. There's a psycho
running around in a gimp suit, a fairy tale of a princess trapped in a castle, and pale ghouls in the basement. Then it's also a Home Alone-style comedy of a boy against the adults using wacky traps and prat-falls. Serious issues can coexist alongside very un-serious kicks to the balls.
The People Under the Stairs is the story of Poindexter
(Brandon Adams), a preteen boy who everybody calls “Fool”. Fool and his family are
evicted from their apartment at the opening of the movie, due to missing the
rent by only three days. The slumlords who rule their lives are the Robesons, a
strange married couple who live alone in a fortress home in a Whiter and "safer" part of Los Angeles. Fool teams up with his older friend Leroy (Ving Rhames), a wanna-be crook, in a plan to break into the Robesons’ home and redistribute their ill-gotten wealth. This goes poorly for everybody involved.
The Robesons are not merely bad landlords, not merely racist, not merely eccentric, they’re also complete monsters. “Daddy” and “Mommy”
(Everett McGill and Wendy Robie, hired right off of Twin Peaks) have been kidnapping dozens of children to engineer a perfect Nuclear Family. Their one success is Alice (A.J.
Langer) a normal girl forced to live as their perfect doll. But
also, they keep all the failures for their impossible "boy-child" ideal in the basement in
wooden concentration camp pens. Those kids have descended into cannibalism and
are completely feral ghouls by the time Fool runs into them. In case you’re
worried that the Robesons are not deranged enough, Daddy does his killing in a full
leather masochist suit. Oh, and Mommy and Daddy are actually Brother and Sister.
Honestly, not sure we needed the incest on top of all the
other fetishes going on here, but sure, throw it on the pile. It’s
all a grotesque parody of the fantasy American family of the Reagan-Bush era, up to the 1950s dress
code and décor. The only sign that the 1990s exist at all inside the Robeson
House is a TV upstairs broadcasting Gulf War news reports. America made great again.
Considering the themes of child abuse, cannibalism, and racism, The People Under the Stairs could be a very dark movie. One could also imagine that the comedy might undercut the important tone of a social thriller. I'd argue, that actually, the comedy never defeats the film's message. Instead an important message is presented to mass 1991 audiences in a disgustable and entertaining way.
This is a solid comedy too. Leroy complains about Fool’s age: "Thirteenth birthday
is unlucky anyway, too old to get tit, too young to get ass". Everett McGill
rushes around his house as a furious berserker, but his attacks are usually
answered with physical comedy. Fool drops bricks on his head or kicks him in
the nuts. Then there is the Robeson house being filled with whimsical traps, like a
staircase that turns into a ramp, or an electrified door. The People Under the
Stairs is never gorey enough to work as a slasher, but it is silly enough to be funny. The jokes also do not kill the deranged and disturbing edge to Mommy and Daddy's behavior.
The Los Angeles of 1991 was already at the center of
American racial politics, and would remain so throughout the decade. In May of this
year, Rodney King was savagely beaten by the LAPD. The People Under the Stairs
releases only five months before the city will explode after King’s assaulters
are found not-guilty in a grotesque parody of justice. Wes Craven started work
on The People Under the Stairs before any of that began, but he must have felt
that energy to begin the project. He's still a White author and White director working in a Black space, but his work never feels inauthentic or misguided. Meanwhile, a different White writer/director would release the equally prescient and important Candyman set in Chicago a year later.
People seemed aware that something was terribly wrong, that
our society was betraying entire classes of Americans. At they knew in 1991, they forget quickly. They voted
overwhelming in Newt Gingrich’s Republican Revolution of 1994, and the story
turned forever towards cutting budgets, cutting welfare, and pouring money into
the hands of the police. For a moment we recognized the problem, then chose to
make it worse. So the horrors have continued to compound until this very
day. Rodney King did not need to be the template for George Floyd. But he was.
The People Under the Stairs is less beloved today than Candyman,
and it isn’t hard to see why. Candyman is far more terrifying and more
primal. It’s a conscious act of mythmaking. Meanwhile, The People Under the
Stairs sacrifices fear and stakes for the occasional goofy trap and one-liner.
Though, to Wes Craven’s credit, his movie is set from a Black perspective. Fool
is an able, strong hero, supported by his community. Candyman’s perspective still is terrified of Black neighborhoods. The People
Under the Stairs sees those places as home. In the ghetto, there is community,
family, and love.
In the White suburbs, that’s where the real evil lies.
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