THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS (1991) Review

In terms of horror auteurs, Wes Craven easily sits amongst the very best. Widely regarded as one of the most important and influential horror filmmakers of his generation, Craven brought to the screen several chilling, frightening, and thoughtful horror movies, creating arguably two of the most memorable and celebrated horror icons in the process; Freddy Krueger from A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and Ghostface, from the Scream franchise. His filmography boasts an impressive array of beloved properties, ranging from gritty, hard-hitting exploitation flicks (his debut feature, 1972’s The Last House on the Left is a film I have only dared to watch once in its entirety, and remains one of the most difficult movies I have ever seen), all the way through to glossy studio tentpoles (he’s the man behind the aforementioned Scream movies — well, the first four, at least — as well as the much-maligned but nonetheless fascinating Cursed from 2004).

Yep, there’s no point denying it! Craven was one of a select few horror filmmakers who successfully went mainstream. Some of his movies are recognized the world over, while a fair few of his lesser-known projects — The Hills Have Eyes (1977), The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988), and Shocker (1989), to name but three — have earned themselves loyal and devoted cult followings in their own right. That’s a pretty impressive feat for a man who consistently tried to break away from the genre he essentially helped define and reinvent three times over. But for all the talk of his knack for terrifying audiences, less is made of just how funny a Wes Craven movie could be.

Of course, the Scream films lean into this heavily with their metatextual takedown of slasher formulas, but throughout his career, Craven adeptly imbued his nightmarish output with a sense of perverse and biting satire. Never content to simply ‘entertain’, Craven was a filmmaker whose work always had something to say (whether it succeeded or not is another matter entirely). It is clear he liked to use his horror stories to explore complex real-world topics, including things like sexual assault, the deconstruction of the so-called American Dream, classism, poverty, and systemic and societal racism.

While many of his films tackle such difficult subjects, it is perhaps Craven’s 1991 horror/comedy The People Under the Stairs that does so the most overtly. This is a film that wears its message on its sleeve; ‘woke’ horror long before the term ‘woke’ even entered the minds of Daily Mail readers. It’s also a film that — in typically Craven-esque fashion — rings humor from its horror, playing every grotesque and grizzly moment for outlandish and slapstick laughs as much as it does for gory, gross-out yuks. One can see a lot of Jordan Peele in The People Under the Stairs, which isn’t much of a surprise, really, especially when Peele himself is reportedly working on a remake. Whenever anyone decries the apparent ‘decline’ of horror cinema, claiming that horror movies these days frustrating “strive, loudly and unsubtly, to be about something scarier than a sharp knife or sharp fangs, something real and important” rather than merely scary, it is Wes Craven’s The People Under the Stairs that always sits amongst the first to drop into my mind (FYI; that quote is a real quote from a real journalist in a real article… look! And we wonder what’s wrong with society?) as a blatant example of why this particular line of thinking is, like… well, total bullshit.

That’s not to say The People Under the Stairs is alone in this — The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) is about capitalism. Dawn of the Dead (1978) is about consumerism. Fucking hell! You want a movie that beats you over the head with an on-the-nose allegory? John Carpenter’s They Live (1988) is a movie that exists, people! — but what makes it stand out, for me at least, is that for all its overt and clumsy metaphors and, admittedly, half-baked attempts to explore these big and important social issues, The People Under the Stairs is just so much goddamn fun! Like, seriously!

The movie follows Fool (played by Brandon Adams), a young boy whose mother is dying of cancer and whose family is about to be evicted from their rundown apartment. The landlords of said apartment are a (it is believed) married couple, the Robesons, who refer to each other simply as ‘Mommy’ and ‘Daddy’ (played to increasingly unhinged and delightfully deranged effect by Wendy Robie and Everett McGill respectively). In an effort to secure funding for both the rent and his mother’s healthcare, Fool accompanies his two much older friends (Ving Rhames and Jeremy Roberts) to the Robeson's home, where they promptly break-in in the hopes of finding a rare coin collection. However, as our heroes soon discover, the Robesons are not the traditional all-American couple they would have you believe and are, in fact, sadistic psychopaths who keep their young daughter, Alice (A. J. Langer), locked away in her room, and have spent years abducting and killing a whole host of people while also keeping a group of pale, cannibalistic children locked in their basement (yeah, it’s a bonkers as it sounds). When the Robesons return home, Fool must navigate the labyrinth-esque house while remaining uncaught, all while the maniacal ‘Mommy’ and ‘Daddy’ hunt him down with deliciously batshit murderous intent.

It’s weird. Like, really weird. But it knows it. Craven is a smart enough filmmaker to recognize just how absurd this all is, and so he opts to lean into that absurdity rather than try to make us buy into it at all. The house itself becomes a sort of nightmarish cartoon obstacle course, complete with booby traps and secret tunnels, and the bulk of the movie is spent watching Fool make his way through an increasingly bizarre series of set-pieces as the villainous couple attempt to lure him out of hiding so that they can feed him to the titular people they keep under the stairs. This offbeat tone — an unsubtle blend of zany, over-the-top humor and outright skin-crawling horror — is made no more obvious than in the moment ‘Daddy’ dons a gimp suit in order to hunt Fool down (yes, you read that right). And McGill embraces the wackiness of everything; watching him slip and slide his way around the house, dressed like a Cenobite, while brandishing a shotgun and screaming angrily at the walls, is as entertaining as it is absolutely bonkers.

Likewise, the aesthetics of the film adopt a similarly heightened and absurdist quality. Craven begins by shooting everything fairly straightforwardly, but as the insanity builds the shot choices become more exaggerated and outlandish. By the time we hit the midpoint, everything is shot with wide-angle lenses and framed with over-the-top Dutch tilts. As a film, it knows exactly what it is trying to be, and the world Craven creates exists entirely within its own rules and on its own terms. Whether or not it’s successfully balancing this bizarre tone and delivering on its nutty premise is entirely down to personal taste. It definitely isn’t for everyone, and you’re pretty much either going to like it or loathe it. I don’t think there will be much of an in-between. It’s a brash, bold movie, and one that cares little about enticing mass audiences. Instead of trying to broaden its appeal, The People Under the Stairs basically doubles down on its lunacy and continues to double down on it until everything has gone so far off the rails that even the incredibly cheesy, ridiculously contrived finale can’t bring it down.

As such, it’s actually a really difficult film to try and critique, because any shade you can throw at it the movie more or less throws right back at you. Held up to real-world reasoning, none of the events make a lick of sense, but in Craven’s warped and twisted little universe it all flows effortlessly, each fantastically stupid moment building upon the last. There’s no room for logic here, and questions like ‘how the hell did they build all these contraptions into their house?’ or ‘why the hell has no one noticed these dozens of missing people have all disappeared after encountering the same couple?’ not only won’t be answered, but the movie actively ignores them altogether, and how much tolerance you have for this kind of nonsense will ultimately be the key in dictating how much fun you’re likely to have with it. For me, apparently, there’s a lot of tolerance, and so I really enjoyed it. Regardless, though, there’s nothing else quite like it, so on that basis alone I recommend seeking it out; there’s a fantastic Arrow Video release with some great extras!

It’s by no means Craven’s best movie (arguably it doesn’t even break the top five), but it’s most certainly his weirdest. Even the wild meta-ramblings of New Nightmare (1994) don’t reach the cartoonishly bonkers heights of The People Under the Stairs. It’s deliriously good fun, from the absurdity of the very premise itself to the scenery-chewing outrageousness of the performances, and once you’ve seen it, you’re very, very unlikely to ever forget it. 4/5.