Retro Review: The People Under the Stairs
Wes Craven’s Filmography is vast and wide, including revenge flicks, supernatural, sequels, romances, and one urban fairy tale. If you’ve not heard about that last one, don’t feel bad. The People Under the Stairs is a lesser known work of Craven’s filmography. It doesn’t feature the shock of a boogeyman in dreams or the relentless violence of his other work but it has perfect structure and his signature polish and merits recognition among the rest.
Fairy tales and horror go hand in hand as any scholar of the two could tell you, and has been demonstrated by the likes of Guillermo Del Toro in Pan’s Labyrinth. Fairy tales often feature the dark and scary in the forms of wolves, witches, monsters, and murderers. Horror has often had those same lot as well as murderous psychopaths and ghosts. The only difference lies in held high tension and intent. The former has a goal of a behavioral lesson while the latter often has the goal of exorcising specific emotions beyond anything else.
The film opens on Fool- aka Poindexter- our thirteen year old protagonist, as he discovers that his family is being evicted from their apartment in the ghetto after they fell behind on rent all while his mother is unable to afford her cancer treatments. He doesn’t understand how anyone could do that, but his sister’s boyfriend Leroy offers Fool a way to make some money to help his family out: stealing gold from the landlords.
The landlords however live in a massive suburban home with their “daughter” Alice, who is never allowed outside and is terrified of them.
Leroy, his partner Spenser, and Fool scope out the house and they send in Fool to try to get in. The woman is unwelcoming to Fool’s solicitation as a boy scout, leaving it to Spenser to try to make his way in by posing as a utility man. His efforts get him in, but soon after, the woman leaves the house and Spenser is nowhere to be seen. Fool and Leroy break in to try to find Spenser. Fool’s searching leads him into the basement where he discovers Spenser dead and mutilated boys trapped that attack him. The woman soon returns with the man and Leroy and Fool discover escaping is going to be a fight for their lives.
The premise is a simple one. In ways it is a home invasion storyline from the perspective of the invaders. It could even have strong parallels to the more recent horror film Don’t Breathe but the messages between the two films couldn’t be more different. It is in the themes that the similarity to fairy tales lies. The most striking of the themes is poverty and racism that this film focuses on. Fool’s family is black and living in the ghetto while the landlords are white in suburbia. The simple power dynamics there are crystal clear and have only grown more poignant over the past thirty years.
This film features the two infamously difficult to work with types in film: children and dogs. This might be the only film that Craven did with both dogs and children if my memory serves correctly, and with massive roles at that. The lead character of Fool as already mentioned is thirteen and played by Brandon Quintin Adams respectably. Opposite Fool in several scenes is the landlord’s dog, a ferocious rottweiler that might give Cujo a run for his money. None of the children or dogs ever hinder the scenes.
As for the adults, Leroy, played by Ving Rhames does well as the surrogate father figure of Fool. Rhames brings his charm enough to the character to not hate him despite his foolish choices. The standout performances though are easily Wendy Robie as the woman and Everett McGill as the man. Robie’s performance is calculated and cunning while unhinged enough to make you understand why Alice is so afraid of her. The pair together serve to create the house from something that might just be scary into something that is out of a fairy tale. While the woman never casts spells, she plays a mad queen and uses McGill’s man as the huntsman to capture or kill the children, albeit a berserk huntsman with hints of the minotaur of mythology as he goes about the maze of the house.
The design of the film as an urban fairy tale cannot be ignored too much when looking at one other key film in Craven’s filmography: New Nightmare. A reoccurring element of New Nightmare is old stories being retold in new ways, Craven’s own creation of Freddy being a demon of this. Further, Heather’s young son asks for bedtime stories, wanting to hear the story of Hansel and Gretel, which Heather thinks is too scary until the end, and the motifs of that fairy tale play out in the film itself. With that in account, it makes sense that The People Under the Stairs is a fairy tale all on its own.
The film features a number of traditional fairy tale elements. The first is the treasure that Leroy mentions. The family is a series of them: the daughter is a trapped princess, the mother is a combination of wicked stepmother and witch, the dog is literally named prince. The house in general is filled with secrets similar to bluebeard where the more that the castle is explored, the more the bride discovers the bodies of the previous brides, which in this case are the previous children that failed.
An interesting twist to the formula that makes it uniquely an “urban” modern fairy tale is the clashing of the urban and suburbia. The suburbs serve as the “dark forest” to the house that is a “castle” or magical land that the hero must journey to. The “real” world that Fool lives in is the city. It’s comparable to the reversal in Enchanted with the literal fairy tale princess finds her way to the fantastical world of New York City. The formula is the same but different.
The thing that the film doesn’t have is any element of fantasy. It serves to further blend in the modern urban to the tradition. Our modern world doesn’t have the supernatural and Craven had an excellent history at that time of telling those grounded stories with the likes of The Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes and also the supernatural with Shocker, Swamp Thing, and of course A Nightmare on Elm Street. This is a story that serves his expertise and mastery.
The People Under the Stairs is a brutal and intense film that is horror fairy tale intelligently mixed.
