The People Under the Stairs

Directed by: Wes Craven

Release Date: 1991

Finally had the opportunity to watch one of Craven's early pictures at the beginning of 2018. Can I say how relevant this film still is? With mentions of gentrification and racial bias intertwined into the story, anybody in a gentrified city can relate to this film. How did Craven tap into this before my beloved Williamsburg, Brooklyn was even relevant? But I digress.


At the start of the film, we learn Fool and his family have been evicted by his landlords, the Robesons. Fool played by Brandon Adams (Mighty Ducks, The Sandlot, A Different World) gets involved with two thieves to steal from his landlords. It's a horror film, right? With this conflict, you can assume shit goes down and those thieves don't survive in this bizarre maze of a house occupied by the Robesons. Fool is our hero in many ways and represents a person of color in a scary movie who survives and also the awful circumstances a large population of color lives with every day.

The film had tones of borderline exploitation. "Whatchu trying to say about black people and projects, Wes? Huh? That this is their life and they can't have it any better?" But nah, he's just stating the facts. Landlords don't give a shit about their low income paying families and instead of reasoning with them even while they have been good tenants for years and have come down through hard times, they kick out those tenants because money talks. This makes this film timeless, to me, because even in 2018, shit like this is going down in so many messed up ways.

The creepiness of why the Robesons kept these children in the basement was disturbing and also had aspects similar to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. As a Craven film, this was reminiscent of his second film, The Hills Have Eyes, which took place in a desert that was hopeless for this family trying to escape this deranged family. Here, the Robesons are deranged and are bested by this black kid, which I love the most about this film! I mean, there were some horror starring and created by the black community in the nineties. The nineties had a large body of entertainment starring brown and black people then they disappeared on our small and big screens. Seeing Brandon Adams as the lead in this movie transported me back to a time when on every other channel, I saw a black person and every other film had a person of color. Well, I might be stretching it on the film side, but definitely on TV.

Overall, other than this film starring a black kid (surviving) and the obvious themes of capitalism and gentrification, this film was creepy, surprisingly funny, satirical, and timeless. It's one of Craven's best films and definitely worth a watch.