The social commentary gets delivered ham-fistedly and the comedy becomes fairly grating (this came out a year after Home Alone and seems as inspired by that slapstick stinker as anything in the horror genre), but The People Under the Stairs nevertheless lingers thanks to its alarming imagery. Written and directed by Wes Craven (A Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream), the movie centers on a boy nicknamed Fool (Brandon Adams) who tags along on a home robbery (the adult thieves are played by Ving Rhames and Jeremy Roberts). Their target: a deranged brother and sister (Everett McGill and Wendy Robie) whose mansion contains a collection of rare coins and, unbeknownst to the robbers, a cellar full of moaning, imprisoned ghouls. Fool joins the heist because his family is about to be evicted by the sister and brother, who own most of the property in Fool’s impoverished ghetto. Craven hammers home the racial and economic aspects of this setup with awkward dialogue and exposition (the venerable Bill Cobbs shows up to give a lecture on greed), when he could have let the visuals do the same work. Those lost souls in the basement—waving flashlights through the slats of their wooden cage, hands grasping for freedom—serve as potent metaphors for many things, including the exploited underclass on which the brother and sister feed. For all the clumsiness of The People Under the Stairs, those shrieking, reaching victims will always stay with me.
(6/22/2022)
