Random 'People Under Stairs' Is A Brilliant '90s Horror Film That Deserves More Attention (12 items)

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  (#8) Its Themes Of Race-Based Intolerance And Income Inequality Were Both Timely And Prescient

  The People Under the Stairs is both a movie firmly mired in its own moment in time (that flickering green footage of the shelling of Baghdad on the TV in the basement) and a prescient warning about our current state of race-based tension and income inequality. The wealth gap has only widened in the years since the film was released.

  Craven's script directly links the greed and aggression of its villains with a sense of class and race-based superiority. They are slumlords who price their poor tenants out so that they can get "clean" people in. They dismiss Fool and the rest of his community as "filthy" and the N-word, while taking children in an effort to create a "perfect" (white) family - which is, itself, built upon an unethical foundation, both literally (the basement full of their maimed "failures") and figuratively (the picture-perfect family unit replaced with an inappropriate brother/sister relationship).

  This sense of superiority is not presented as a symptom of their derangement, but as its source. It is what allows them to live in their fortified and decaying mansion, which Fool remarks has "room for 10 families," and hoard wealth they do not need and will never spend, while preying upon the poorest and most neglected in the community in order to hoard even more wealth.

  Craven has said that the massive house in People Under the Stairs, with its seemingly endless corridors, hidden passages, perilous traps, and basement dungeons, represents "the whole society of the United States." And it ends with maybe the most literal interpretation of forced redistribution of wealth you could imagine. It's no wonder that the film has proven inspirational to cinematic social provocateurs like Peele.
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  (#3) Think Of It As The Anti-'Home Alone'

  In Home Alone, which was released just a year before, the son of a wealthy white suburban family repels some goofy crooks at Christmastime using a variety of slapstick methods. In The People Under the Stairs, the crooks are the good guys, especially our main character, Fool, played by child actor Brandon Quintin Adams, who has to break into the house of the slumlords who are forcing his family out when he and his sick mother receive an eviction notice on his 13th birthday.

  Unfortunately for them, they break into a house that is designed to keep people from ever getting back out. It seems that beneath the veneer of genteel respectability, the couple who own the house are dangerous psychopaths who keep a variety of maimed and cannibalistic children - the eponymous People Under the Stairs - in their basement, and slay anyone else who ventures inside.

  Once Fool is trapped in the house, the slapstick antics of Home Alone are turned on their head, as he and other characters use dropped bricks, an electrified door, and even a slingshot to comically incapacitate his would-be captors and their Rottweiler. 
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  (#11) The Scene Featuring Alice And The Bathtub Is Truly Horrifying

  Thematically, there's a lot going on in The People Under the Stairs, which tackles everything from prejudice and income inequality to child cruelty, in the form of Alice, the villainous couple's "adopted" daughter, not to mentioned the maimed failures that they keep under the titular stairs. For a movie featuring cannibalism, a flayed body, dungeons filled with skeletons, and a towering culprit in a gimp suit, some of the most terrifying moments in the film come from the domestic melodrama of Alice's agonizing existence within the house.

  Perhaps the most chilling scene is one in which the Woman forces Alice to clean up blood after an unfortunate incident. When Alice gets some of it on her white dress, the Woman, in a rage, throws her into a scalding bath, demanding that she scrub herself clean.

  A.J. Langer, who went on to play Rayanne Graff in My So-Called Life a few years later, helps to sell the horror of Alice's situation with her wide-eyed expressions.
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  (#12) The Film's Iconic House Has A Real History

  Sure, the house in People Under the Stairs looks suitably foreboding, but it also has a real history that ties in with the film's themes. Today, the Thomas W. Phillips Residence, as it is properly called, is a protected historical site in LA's West Adams neighborhood. In the days of old Hollywood, however, it belonged to Butterfly McQueen, who played Scarlett O'Hara's maid in Gone with the Wind. However, she couldn't attend the film's premiere because it was held in a whites-only theater.

  Back then, the West Adams neighborhood was a "haven for LA’s emerging Black middle and upper class," including actresses like McQueen and her neighbor and Gone with the Wind co-star Hattie McDaniel, who was the first Black person to win an Academy Award for her role as "Mammy" in that film. When the neighborhood came under pressure from white homeowners who attempted to evict the Black population through restrictive property covenants, McDaniel was one of the voices that resisted the attempts in court - and won.
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  (#2) 'The People Under The Stairs' Is Based On A Real Incident

  According to Craven, he got the idea for the story after hearing a news item in the late 1970s. When a neighbor saw a pair of apparent crooks breaking into a home in the Los Angeles suburbs, they called the police. The investigation uncovered something much more sinister than the transgression. It turned out the parents in the seemingly ordinary home kept their maltreated and neglected children locked away.

  "What appealed to me was the thought of a hidden truth that was radically different from the surface appearance," Craven said, "and the fact that this was taking place in a neighbourhood where, supposedly, people were enjoying the good middle-class life."

  As you can see, Craven didn't really have to change the story much to make it into The People Under the Stairs - just turn what was already there up to 11.
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  (#10) It Features A Strong Early Performance From Ving Rhames

  Ving Rhames had been appearing in movies and TV since 1984, but The People Under the Stairs came out three years before his breakout role in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. In People, Rhames plays Leroy, the person who lures Fool into the break-in plot that kicks off the film's story. As such, he gets most of the film's best one-liners as he walks Fool through the ins and outs of the transgression - many of them not exactly repeatable in polite company.

  More than just comic relief, though, Leroy provides the voice of one of the film's various competing philosophies: the "street smart" individual who doesn't see a future for his community outside of wrongdoings and self-reliance, and who figures that some people "deserve to be robbed."

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