intertribal (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
intertribal) wrote2010-06-29 10:34 am
intertribal) wrote2010-06-29 10:34 am
The People Under The Stairs
I just watched this on Netflix Watch Instantly, and holy shit: how have I not seen this movie before?
Basic plot: People are getting evicted from their apartments in the ghetto so that the buildings can be torn down and turned into offices. Fool, age 13, is coaxed to help his older sister's boyfriend and another burglar break into the house owned by the apartments' shitty landlords, since apparently they have a stash of gold in there. Well, plan doesn't go so well because it turns out the people inside the house - Mr. and Mrs. Robeson - are batshit psycho murderers. The two adult burglars end up dead quickly and Fool is trapped in the best-secured house in the neighborhood with the Robesons, their daughter Alice (who has survived because she sees no evil, hears no evil, speaks no evil), a whole bunch of mutilated, enslaved, and cannibalized People Under The Stairs, and a vicious but beloved Rottweiler.
It's a sort of uniquely childish nightmare, the "puzzle house" that you can't get out of, and the action/chase sequences are very much that kind of hysterical, booby-trap-laden adventure that amusement parks try and fail to replicate. And yet adventure is the wrong word, because even though it's a lot of fun to watch, the danger posed to the kids always seems real and shocking. They actually do kill one child (not one of the main two). Fool tells Alice, "Your father is one sick mutha. And your mother is one sick mutha too." And vice versa: these are not the kids from Jumanji. By the end both Fool and Alice are ready to bash some brains in. Are there plot holes and inconsistencies? Quite frankly, this is a movie in which I neither noticed nor gave a fuck.
So just in that basic respect, the movie is already a success. But what really makes this movie awesome is everything going on conceptually. The big one, the most powerful and obvious one, is race and class. First off, the movie sets you very firmly in the POV of the black, urban, and poor. Period. And that in and of itself is worth noting. Visually, most of the movie is essentially two upper-middle class white adults screaming at and trying to kill a black child. But of course, not any adults and not any child - the adults are already effectively destroying the child's neighborhood, with the excuse that it isn't a real (white, well-behaved) neighborhood anyway. When the (entirely white) police are called to the Robesons' mansion to investigate child abuse claims, they're going in assuming that it's a bogus charge and barely investigate anything, while Mrs. Robeson plies them with pithy politeness and coffee. At one point Mrs. Robeson says something about, "It's almost as if the criminals have the run of the neighborhood, and we're trapped inside." Of course not only hugely ironic but a typical ridiculous white-flight sentiment. And all this just escalates and escalates and escalates.
But then on top of that you have the religious zealotry of the Robesons - "may he burn in hell" is their favorite phrase, it seems - and their abuse of Alice, who's expected to be a pure and perfect girl-child. You first see her in a turn-of-the-century girly, ribboned dress, terrified because she's lost her dinner fork. Mrs. Robeson shoves her in boiling water to keep her clean and Mr. Robeson - who has this psycho leather dominatrix war armor thing - is in charge of corporal punishment, and it's strongly implied that he will eventually (if he doesn't already) start sexually abusing Alice. When the Robesons figure out that Alice has been helping Fool they call her a whore, while Mr. Robeson says "they did it, I know it!" Because of course he owns Alice's sexuality. This too, escalates and escalates and escalates.
I would never expect to see all of this in ANY horror movie, let alone a 1991 Wes Craven movie that seems targeted to kids. Not only is this one hell of an action-horror, but it's one hell of a piece of social-horror too. Thought went into this. And I'll just come right out and say it: more horror movies need to be made like The People Under the Stairs.
Basic plot: People are getting evicted from their apartments in the ghetto so that the buildings can be torn down and turned into offices. Fool, age 13, is coaxed to help his older sister's boyfriend and another burglar break into the house owned by the apartments' shitty landlords, since apparently they have a stash of gold in there. Well, plan doesn't go so well because it turns out the people inside the house - Mr. and Mrs. Robeson - are batshit psycho murderers. The two adult burglars end up dead quickly and Fool is trapped in the best-secured house in the neighborhood with the Robesons, their daughter Alice (who has survived because she sees no evil, hears no evil, speaks no evil), a whole bunch of mutilated, enslaved, and cannibalized People Under The Stairs, and a vicious but beloved Rottweiler.
It's a sort of uniquely childish nightmare, the "puzzle house" that you can't get out of, and the action/chase sequences are very much that kind of hysterical, booby-trap-laden adventure that amusement parks try and fail to replicate. And yet adventure is the wrong word, because even though it's a lot of fun to watch, the danger posed to the kids always seems real and shocking. They actually do kill one child (not one of the main two). Fool tells Alice, "Your father is one sick mutha. And your mother is one sick mutha too." And vice versa: these are not the kids from Jumanji. By the end both Fool and Alice are ready to bash some brains in. Are there plot holes and inconsistencies? Quite frankly, this is a movie in which I neither noticed nor gave a fuck.
So just in that basic respect, the movie is already a success. But what really makes this movie awesome is everything going on conceptually. The big one, the most powerful and obvious one, is race and class. First off, the movie sets you very firmly in the POV of the black, urban, and poor. Period. And that in and of itself is worth noting. Visually, most of the movie is essentially two upper-middle class white adults screaming at and trying to kill a black child. But of course, not any adults and not any child - the adults are already effectively destroying the child's neighborhood, with the excuse that it isn't a real (white, well-behaved) neighborhood anyway. When the (entirely white) police are called to the Robesons' mansion to investigate child abuse claims, they're going in assuming that it's a bogus charge and barely investigate anything, while Mrs. Robeson plies them with pithy politeness and coffee. At one point Mrs. Robeson says something about, "It's almost as if the criminals have the run of the neighborhood, and we're trapped inside." Of course not only hugely ironic but a typical ridiculous white-flight sentiment. And all this just escalates and escalates and escalates.
But then on top of that you have the religious zealotry of the Robesons - "may he burn in hell" is their favorite phrase, it seems - and their abuse of Alice, who's expected to be a pure and perfect girl-child. You first see her in a turn-of-the-century girly, ribboned dress, terrified because she's lost her dinner fork. Mrs. Robeson shoves her in boiling water to keep her clean and Mr. Robeson - who has this psycho leather dominatrix war armor thing - is in charge of corporal punishment, and it's strongly implied that he will eventually (if he doesn't already) start sexually abusing Alice. When the Robesons figure out that Alice has been helping Fool they call her a whore, while Mr. Robeson says "they did it, I know it!" Because of course he owns Alice's sexuality. This too, escalates and escalates and escalates.
I would never expect to see all of this in ANY horror movie, let alone a 1991 Wes Craven movie that seems targeted to kids. Not only is this one hell of an action-horror, but it's one hell of a piece of social-horror too. Thought went into this. And I'll just come right out and say it: more horror movies need to be made like The People Under the Stairs.
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Stuck in the house = overarching metaphor for stuck in the neighborhood, what with its warrens of socioeconomic complications to navigate. Or something like that.
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However, I really don't think People Under the Stairs was ever actually conceived as a kids' movie. I think that's more a tribute to how our standards have shifted, especially vis-a-vis the MPAA ratings system; hell, The Exorcist is supposedly PG, these days. The last time I saw it in a theatre, people had brought toddlers...and babies.
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Yeah, I suspect so as well. I suppose the other thing is that whenever a book has kids as protagonists, it MUST be YA (which I find very LOL). The Exorcist is rated PG? Are you kidding me? That must be some kind of censored version where she doesn't, you know, stab herself in the vagina. Of course I didn't see it until I was 17, and it grossed me out then.
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If only! No, same old same old. If anything, there was slightly more disturbing content from my POV, because it was the re-edit where they extend the hospital/testing sequences (which I find excruciating) and added the conversation on the stairs between Karras and Merrin back in, which posits that the purpose of possession is to damage the souls of the people around the possessee, thus rendering the possessee's suffering utterly dismissable. But most of that stuff was lost on the audience I saw it with, anyhow--they mainly thought it was hilarious, especially when people were swearing and crying.
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WTF? I don't even vaguely get this. I mean, I do kind of enjoy when the demon argues with the priests (same reason I root for cannibals), but this seems to be stemming from like the ol' "oh I'm so jaded by Cannibal Holocaust, now gore is just funny" mentality. Which I don't really get when people are proud of that. Not that I think their souls are ruined or anything, more just like "you're missing out on a lot of subtext if that's all you can focus on."
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