Wes Craven establishes the context of The People Under the Stairs with impressive concision. It begins with close-ups scanning tarot cards as one child explains the meaning of the cards to her little brother (Brandon Adams), focusing on the card that gives him his nickname, the Fool. Craven pulls out to show that tarot cards aren’t the only deck stacked against Fool: trapped in the ghetto with a mother who needs cancer treatment she cannot possibly afford, Fool and his family also face eviction for being only three days late on the rent. The draconian economic oppression is a ploy by property owners to force out black tenements in order to build gentrifying office buildings. As a brief rundown of the racial dynamics of late capitalism, the film provides the basic thrust of Frederick Wiseman’s recent, three-hour documentary In Jackson Heights in about 10 minutes.
The film truly gets underway when Fool accompanies Leroy (Ving Rhames), a local ne’er-do-well, to the suburban home of the landlords. The contrast of paint-chipped, addict-filled tenements with the gigantic living room of the owners, itself larger than several of their apartment units combined, says everything, and Craven’s decision to place a gigantic manor within a suburb only compounds the image of sheltered white money directly profiting off the induced poverty of minorities. When Fool and Leroy start snooping, they uncover a grim house of horrors ruled over by the landlord couple, who call each other Mommy and Daddy (Wendy Robie and Everett McGill, better known as equally messed-up couple Nadine and Ed on “Twin Peaks”).
Mommy and Daddy are an incestuous, kinky couple who blend greed and religious fanaticism, and they push the satire to absurd degrees, embodying every exaggerated trait of insular whiteness and its ensconced power and entitlement. Craven has a field day exploring the parameters of their daily life, with rooms cluttered with opulence, booby-trapped doors and a brutal attack dog that they set against any intruder. They control their child, Alice (A.J. Langer), with strict cruelty, repressing the girl to the point that her living quarters look like an oversized dollhouse, with furniture she outgrew at six or seven. Robie and McGill cut loose even more than they did on David Lynch’s TV show, but they also know when to dial it in to maximize the underlying thrust of the film. For example, when Fool and Leroy’s white cohort Spencer (Jeremy Roberts) poses as a meter reader to get into the landlords’ home, Robie comes to the door looking like an arch-villain, all beady-eyed squints and aggressive confrontation. Yet when she asks for proof of Spencer’s ID, she drops her voice low and mentions a rash of robberies, adding “Neighborhood’s changing” with mock timidity in such a way that it’s unmistakable just what element of the neighborhood looks different to her.
The film falters, however, when it actually get to the people under the stairs. Comprised of children maimed and discarded to the basement for insolence, the sallow-skinned, feral creatures who confront Fool in his adventures in the house generate no suspense. This can be attributed in part to their general status as background zombies instead of active pursuers, but primarily to the fact that they have no relation to the metaphor and social commentary that the film painstakingly outlines around them. They are supposedly children abducted from the community that the villains exploit, yet they are uniformly white, a necessity of the text of two white “parents” raising kids as their own that undermines the subtext. Furthermore, all of the effort that Craven and his art department put into laying out the open spaces of the house is lost in the anonymous corridors and hideaways, which suggest a labyrinthine network of passages within the walls but are more straightforward and simple than the normal rooms. By the time Fool briefly escapes the house an hour into the movie, all of the air has been let out of the movie.
The material involving Mommy and Daddy’s warped kids puts Fool in the middle of a demented fairy tale, something in the same family tree as The Night of the Hunter. This is telegraphed from the first scene, where the sun on the Fool tarot card is analyzed as a rite of passage: “Just the boy part get burned up. The rest come out the other side a man, and no one calls him Fool again.” Craven always enjoyed seeing plucky kids dupe terrifying adults into harming themselves, and he clearly relishes scenes of Fool’s quick-thinking causing the villains’ rampages to backfire. But this slightly innocent quality clashes horribly with the film’s R-rating for gore and profanity, crafting a frothy children’s film that kids couldn’t see. This split identity scuttles a promising beginning, and when the film finally returns to its political side for a conclusion of gold and money scattered into the jubilant hands of the oppressed community, it does so with a mixed message that closes one of Craven’s most promising features on a weak note.