Wes Craven's The People Under the Stairs

The People Under the Stairs: MCA Universal Pictures
Rating: USA: R

As far as genre directors go, Wes Craven doesn’t always get the respect he deserves. This isn’t solely the fault of genre fans, but also Craven’s as well. For every film like Last House on the Left, there seems to be a Deadly Friend. Oh yeah, and let’s not even get started on the films he’s lent his name to as a ‘producer’ (like Mindripper, for example). Yet, a lot of the anti-Craven sentiment from hardcore genre fans seems misguided. B*tch and moan all you want about the Scream films and their commercial appeal, but it doesn’t change the fact that Craven has been responsible for some of the most innovative and original genre films of the last thirty years. For proof of that, one need look no further than the aforementioned Last House on the Left and his classic A Nightmare on Elm Street.

The People Under the Stairs is nowhere near as good as either of those films—but it is a lot better, and deeper, than you’d expect a mainstream horror film to be.

Fool (Brandon Adams) has just turned 13. However, unlike the normal 13-year-old, Fool’s got some grown up problems. His mom’s got cancer, his sister Ruby (Kelly Jo Minter) has kids, and no one has the money to pay the rent, meaning they’re all going to be on the street by midnight tomorrow—unless they can come up with some quick cash.

Ruby’s boyfriend Leroy (Ving Rhames) has a plan to do just that. It seems he’s found a treasure map that promises to lead to a bunch of gold coins hidden in the house of their landlord. Leroy, Fool, and a buddy of theirs decide to go after the loot, and get more than they bargained for when they become trapped inside the house and hunted down by it’s psychopathic inbred owners.

At its core, The People Under the Stairs is essentially an urban fairy tale. Fool, our young hero, must confront the wicked landlords (who are oppressing all of the ‘villagers’ in the ghetto), save the long-suffering and virginal princess Alice (who’s suffering at the hands of the other fairy tale cliché, the wicked step-parents), and find a treasure to save his own family. There’s child snatching (and a fate worse than death for the kids in question), danger, an odd assortment of characters who’ll help him in his quest, and more than a few monsters as well—but you can bet your last dollar that the story will feature still another fairy tale standard…a happy ending.

There’s an Alice in Wonderland feel to the film (which is, no doubt, why the young girl’s name is Alice), a sort of ‘through the looking glass’ vibe that takes effect once Fool exits the real world and enters the house. It’s these children’s story elements that make the film a lot more interesting than you’d expect—logic issues don’t seem to be a major issue in fairy tales, and this works to Craven’s advantage here by allowing him to create a situation that seems implausible without having to devote any time to explaining how it could really exist.

In many ways, The People Under the Stairs is a snapshot of Americana gone bad. The evil landlord and his wife (Everett McGill and Wendy Robie, referred to only as ‘Man’ and ‘Woman’ in the credits) resemble Ward and June Cleaver—if they were psychopathic cannibals who paraded around in S&M gear, murdered people behind closed doors, and lived in a house that would have made serial killer H.H. Holmes proud.

This contrast, between young, poor, and black Fool and the rich, white, and psychotic landlords, serves to set up one of Craven’s pet themes—which involves the idea of class struggle. Both Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes featured elements of class struggle, with the poor being criminals and monsters who covet what the middle class has, yet ultimately get their comeuppance at the hands of those same individuals (who the bad guys often assume have become ‘soft’ thanks to their pampered lifestyle). Craven turns that idea on its head with this movie, making the rich folks the evil ones and poor Fool and his family as the just and right. Unfortunately, the fact that Fool and his family are black and the rich folks white tends to make this play out as a liberal’s guilt fantasy instead of any kind of real social commentary (which is ultimately driven home by the fact that it literally rains money on the ghetto at the climax).

Of course, these are just a few of the ideas at work in the film—it’s by no means all of them. I won’t even get into the title characters, the ‘people under the stairs’, who seem to be some weird cross between Romero’s living dead and cannibals from an Italian horror film. I have theories on what they might represent as well, but I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions.

The performances are good, particularly Brandon Adams, who is one of the few horror movie leads in recent memory who’s actually smart throughout the film. Craven doesn’t have Fool do anything too stupid just to put him in danger, which is a refreshing change of pace. The fact that Craven’s chosen a young black child for his lead character could have led to all sorts of problems (most involving cliché and the cheap ploy of constantly putting the child in danger to elicit a cheap reaction from the audience), but the director is smart enough to work around these potential pitfalls—and Adams is a surprisingly decent child actor.

The rest of the cast is impressive as well, particularly Wendy Robie and Everett McGill, who manage to be both terrifying and oddly amusing as the psychopathic man and woman. Craven does occasionally allow these characters to become a little too cartoonish, but it seems to fit in with the film’s fairy tale vibe. People Under the Stairs is not meant to be an all out assault on the viewer like Last House on the Left, so Craven tries to interject some lighter moments to break up the horror. This works to the film’s benefit, for the most part.

What doesn’t work is the climax, which is silly, contrived, and overlong. I’ve already mentioned that parts of the film seem like a white liberal man’s guilty fantasy over the state of race relations in America, and nowhere is this more apparent than here. Craven has the entire surrounding ghetto show up outside the man and woman’s house during the climax, and then goes so far as to have Ruby make a speech about how the man and woman are letting the buildings that the poor people live in deteriorate so they can kick them out and build money making office buildings in their place.

First off, the social commentary in the film comes across well enough on its own—having this character make a speech is heavy-handed and condescending…the audience has already figured this stuff out without the speech. Worse still, is that Craven assembles these people on the lawn, let’s Ruby make her speech, then has them all stand around doing nothing while the two kids are locked inside doing battle with the man and woman who intend to kill them. I’m all for willing suspension of disbelief, but Craven’s lost me at this point.

There’s not a lot of gore in the film, and what is here is rather underwhelming. The FX work is average at best, and downright laughable in some spots. One character’s flayed carcass looks decidedly unrealistic, there’s a bright white skeleton chained to a wall in one shot (I mean, c’mon…bright white?) and there’s a chopped off hand that’s so clearly rubber that it’s painful to even look at it. Oh yeah, and who can forget the fake dog’s head for close up shots of dog attack scenes? I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that…

Yet, while the FX work isn’t so great, the set design is. Craven’s created the ultimate spook/fun house, the big gothic residence that every neighborhood seems to have, the one that kids cross the street to avoid. This one’s the real deal, filled with secret passages, hidden doors, hallways behind the walls, and lots of booby traps. In some ways, the house itself is almost the star of the film.

While no one’s likely to champion The People Under the Stairs as Wes Craven’s greatest film, this is arguably the best of his lesser efforts. There’s a lot of stuff going on in the film—allegory and social commentary, and a fairy tale story that’s a lot of fun all by itself. If nothing else, the film demonstrates that Craven still has a gift for coming up with odd, interesting, and whacked out story ideas. The execution isn’t flawless, but the film’s well worth a look anyway.