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

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  (#1) 'People' Inspired Jordan Peele's 'Get Out' And 'Us'

  In 2017, Jordan Peele programmed a series of films for the Brooklyn Academy of Music that he called "The Art of the Social Thriller," which inspired his own forays into horror filmmaking. Alongside established genre classics like Rosemary's Baby, Night of the Living Dead, and The Shining, he programmed The People Under the Stairs.

  It's easy to see an echo of the eponymous People in the feral, forgotten doppelgangers of Peele's Us. However, even in Get Out, he was tackling a lot of the same social themes that animated Craven's film, from class inequality and race-based divides to the more literal plot of seemingly well-to-do (white) people with a terrible and oppressive secret in their basement.
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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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  (#6) Wendy Robie And Everett McGill Make A Comically Evil Pair

  As the film's villainous Man and Woman, Craven cast Everett McGill and Wendy Robie after seeing them both in Twin Peaks. The deranged sibling couple (one of the film's big reveals is that they are, in fact, brother and sister) are the "tail end of the craziest family you ever heard of." The duo are vicious and, as Grandpa Booker has it, "evil, plain and simple," but they are also comically bungling. When McGill's Man first appears in a full-body gimp suit carrying a firearm, it is a moment both terrifying and laugh-out-loud funny.

  It's a tightrope act to walk, having the film's villains vacillate between horrifying and ridiculous, and Craven doesn't always come down on the right side of it, but by making them ludicrous and monstrous, he makes a statement about the banality and vulgarity of evil, greed, and hypocrisy. A statement that feels extremely resonant in a time when many of the worst people in the world are also the most ridiculous. That the combo works as well as it does is a testament to the scenery-devouring performances by McGill and Robie.
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  (#5) It Cleverly Plays With Ideas Of Urban Legends And Folklore

  "When I was a kid," Grandpa Booker (Bill Cobbs) tells Fool, "none of us ever walked past that house." While nobody seems to know just what is going on inside the fortress-like house of the Man and Woman, there are "all sorts of rumors" that have never been proven because "the police never took it serious," and everyone in the community knows to avoid the place.

  Urban legends were a big part of the horror zeitgeist in the '90s. Candyman, in which a contemporary anthropologist studies urban folklore that turns out to be dangerously true, came out just a year after The People Under the Stairs, while Urban Legend, which took the whole idea of urban legends and used them as the gimmick for a post-Scream slasher flick, was just eight years away. With its fairy tale imagery in an unassuming house where something is horribly wrong, People was, if anything, ahead of the curve.
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  (#9) It Acts As A Primer On Gentrification

  Grandpa Booker, played Bill Cobbs, gives a speech late in the movie that essentially sums up the entire problem of gentrification in a few short sentences. "Then they got their fingers into real estate," he says, of the wicked family that the film's two villains are the last scions of, "started making a lot of money taking over people's homes. The more money they got, the greedier they got. The greedier they got, the crazier they got."

  Later, Ruby puts it perhaps even more bluntly when she arrives at the door of the house. "You and your brother are landlords of over 50 buildings in this city, all of which you've allowed to deteriorate into rat-infested hellholes while you guys get rich charging ridiculous rents. Then, you evict anyone the minute they can't pay rent so you can tear down their homes and build some more office buildings, isn't that about right?"
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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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