Every Friday, were recommending an older movie available to stream or download and worth seeing again through the lens of our current moment. Were calling the series Revisiting Hours consider this Rolling Stones unofficial film club. This week: Alex Pappademas on Wes Cravens The People Under the Stairs.
In real life, the house where most of Wes Cravens The People Under the Stairs takes place is a three-story Craftsman-style mansion in the West Adams district of Los Angeles. When the neighborhoods well-to-do white population began moving to the citys west side in the early 1900s, West Adams became a haven for L.A.s emerging black middle and upper class. Before it became a movie location and a protected historical site, the People Under the Stairs house properly known as the Thomas W. Philips Residence was the home of Gone With the Wind actress Butterfly McQueen. In 1945, when white homeowners tried to push the black population out of West Adams by demanding the enforcement of racially restrictive property-ownership covenants, McQueens neighbor and Oscar-winning costar Hattie McDaniel led the coalition that fought them in court and won.
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This horror movie never alludes directly to the ways in which race and class-based conflict have shaped the citys map as long as its been a city. Its aiming for the universality of a fairy tale or an urban myth, and a stronger sense of place might have gotten in the way. But that doesnt mean it doesnt count as an L.A. movie. Like Chinatown, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? or Inherent Vice, Cravens nightmare dreams up a fanciful backstory for the workaday cruelties of development and gentrification. Unlike those movies, The People Under the Stairs puts poor people of color the segment of the population whose lives get bulldozed first when money terraforms a city at the center of its story.
Fool (Brandon Adams), his sister and his ailing mother are about to be evicted unless they can produce money they dont have. This means hes ready to listen when his sisters friend Leroy (Ving Rhames) comes to him with an idea. Leroy and his partner need Fool to create a diversion at the door so they can rip off a cache of gold coins from the creepy old house of the same slumlord whos about to put the kids family on the street. This is the big one, Leroy tells him. Somebody deserves to be robbed. He seems pretty confident, for someone in a movie with a huge skull on the poster.
The house turns out to be a former funeral parlor fortified to repel invaders from the hood. First there are Rottweilers; then it gets bad. Upstairs, the landlord (Everett McGill) and his sister (Wendy Robie) are raising young Alice (My So-Called Lifes A.J. Langer) in traumatized captivity, while hoarding a Scrooge McDuck pile of their communitys wealth. In an attempt to round out their warped family unit with a perfect boy-child, theyve also stolen dozens of the neighborhoods sons, each of whom theyve subsequently mutilated for misbehaving and stuffed into a pen in the basement to grow up big and pale eating garbage and the occasional bloody chunk of raw burglar. Theyre the repressed, and eventually they return; the movie ends on a powerful message about the need for solidarity between the black working class and the large sons that the rich keep as zombielike prisoners in their cellars.
Craven cast Robie and McGill in part because he liked them in the first two seasons of Twin Peaks. McGill was Big Ed, the mechanic who pined for Peggy Lipton; Robie was Nadine, with the eyepatch and the brain on fire with drapery ideas. He was sad and solid, she was nuts. Here theyre both bugfuck crazy and incestuously entangled, although its never made clear if all the murder they get up to is foreplay or consummation. He gets a tension headache with DO MURDERS written all over it. She gets all hot and bothered. Instead of really giving the implications of this relationship time to curdle in your brain, Craven steers straight into gonzo; before the movies even half over, McGill is running around zipped up in head-to-toe S&M leather, blasting away at the kids in the walls. Somehow a lot of this material also has Home Alone on the brain; its almost a fun kids movie about dumb adults getting hit in the head with bricks, except for the parts where somebody puppeteers a flayed corpse.
Unlike those movies, The People Under the Stairs puts poor people of color the segment of the population whose lives get bulldozed first when money terraforms a city at the center of its story.
McGill and Robies characters dont really have names. The script calls them Man and Woman. When theyre chasing Fool and Leroy around the house, horny for blood, they call each other Mommy and Daddy, the way Dennis Hopper made Isabella Rossellini do in Blue Velvet. But in 1991, just two years into the George H.W. Bush administration Craven makes sure we see night-vision footage of bombs over Baghdad on the lost boys TV, so well think about leaders ordering death from above for abstract targets the first couple that those pet names brought to mind was an actual First Couple, Ronald and Nancy Reagan. Sometimes the subtext bursts through the floorboards of the text: McGill has the Gippers Grecian-black swoop of hair, and at one point he dons a very Presidential golfing cap to hide a wound from some numbnuts cops. But Man and Woman arent just caricatures. Theyre avatars of corrupt parental authority whove forgotten to even pretend their pieties are anything but a pretext to drag the weak to hell. Theyre not parodies of the Reagans; theyre what Craven thinks the Reagans look like with their masks off.
This is still a white guys movie from the very early 1990s. Fools neighborhood is the same anonymously grim backdrop you know from a thousand action movies and alley-fight video games project hallways full of zombielike crackheads and mad dogs, a trash-can fire on every corner. But Craven doesnt just want us to see this place as scary. He wants us to consider how it got this way, and who profited from its degeneration. McGills Man is a deranged cartoon of reactionary masculinity, but he has a pretty standard motivation for letting Fools building turn into the residential equivalent of Freddy Kruegers boiler room. He wants everyone to move out, so he can tear the building down and put up a nice, neat condominium for clean people. The character only utters the N-word once onscreen, but as is often the case with that word, once is enough. It happens early. It tells us where hes coming from and where the movies going. Man and Womans fear and loathing of the people in their neighborhood isnt a symptom of their madness its the disease thats eating their brains.
Its been nearly 30 years since The People Under the Stairs slipped in and out of theaters, and it would be great to be able to report that its themes seem dated now. But since this is a movie about deranged racists driven by a virulent strain of midcentury Christian moralism to keep children in cages while conspiring to disenfranchise the poor, thats not going to work. Everything that happens in this movie could happen next month and it would be a one-day cable-news story that Fox would probably not cover. Daddy has already shut us all in the cellar; to think Wes Craven fans used to complain this movie wasnt scary enough.
Previously: Minority Report
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