THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS
For Hollywood this has been a season of surprises, mostly disappointing ones. This is the time of year when what passes for “serious adult” films –not dramas necessarily, but films that tackle grown-up subjects–are supposed to thrive at the box office, a rule of thumb that has been hammered by the relative and outright failures of Billy Bathgate, Other People’s Money, Frankie & Johnny, The Butcher’s Wife, and Little Man Tate. The one positive surprise has been The People Under the Stairs, a shocker from horror veteran Wes Craven. Expectations on the part of Universal were so low that the film was released without preopening press screenings, yet it quickly became the number-one box-office performer in the country.
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Still, in a field where brand names count for a lot, Craven has managed to insert his name in front of his movie’s titles, an indication of the seriousness with which he at least takes his work. In fact, low-budget horror is one of the last genres whose directors Hollywood is willing to allow a modicum of individuality. George Romero still works far from California and keeps his expenses low to be able to do what he likes, and John Carpenter scampered back to the protection of impecuniousness for Prince of Darkness and They Live, his best–and least molested–pictures in years.
The People Under the Stairs finds Craven again mounting a bloody sociopolitical assault, only this time attacks on the general social structure have been replaced by an attack on the values of the Reagan era. By contrasting inner-city vulnerability and suburban defensiveness, Craven has inverted the usual criminal-victim equation of right-wing law-and-order rhetoric, depicting a world in which white, middle-class heterosexuals mount a horrific assault on the poor, the young, and the disenfranchised, mutilating and discarding anyone who doesn’t adhere to the strict ideology of their material hell. As attractive as this sounds, however, the film falls victim to Craven’s inability to stretch his premises through a whole movie. In A Nightmare on Elm Street he was able to counterbalance a conglomeration of effects with a thematic coherence; in The People Under the Stairs he loses control of his effects about midway, settling for Petit Guignol until his final shot, a powerfully grim caricature of post-Reagan urban America.
With the imprisoned boys, who have only carefully limited moments on-screen, Craven has developed a motif that is at once accessible, sympathetic, and gruesome. The Man and Woman have deliberately kept their charges’ protein intake low to encourage the boys to eat the flesh of murdered intruders, so they are both stalkers and victims, cooks and cooked. When, in the cataclysmic climax, these beastly boys finally get out of the house, their easy escape into the crowd of poor people–which Craven has indicated includes criminals–is a clear statement of the film’s convictions about who exactly is responsible for creating the conditions that make crime one of the few possible options open to the victimized poor.
