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Brandon Quintin Adams, Everett McGill, Wendy Robie, AJ Langer, Ving Rhames ... see more see more... , Bill Cobbs , Sean Whalen , Kelly Jo Minter , Yan Birch , Conni Marie Brazelton , Joshua Cox , Wayne Daniels , John Hostetter , Michael Kopelow , John Mahon , Jeremy Roberts , Theresa Velarde , Eileen Mack Knight , George R. Parker

Wes Craven wrote and directed this surrealistic horror-comedy, which was inspired by a true story of parents keeping their children locked in a basement for years. Fool (Brandon Adams), an African-Ame... read more read more...rican teen, breaks into the home of the wealthy landlords who evicted his family from a ghetto tenement. A fortune in gold coins is rumored to exist inside, but Fool discovers that the mansion is a chamber of horrors presided over by a pair of incestuous, serial killer siblings (Everett McGill and Wendy Robie). The twisted couple has also tried to raise a succession of kidnapped boys. Each botched effort is handled the same way -- the victim's eyes, ears and tongues are removed, and he's sent to live in the sealed-off basement, where a colony of similarly deformed "brothers" resides. Fool is able to avoid the evil lovers as he moves through the house's maze of hidden passageways. He discovers that the occupants have a daughter, Alice (A.J. Langer), who has survived their abuse, so he rescues her and they attempt to free the "people under the stairs." Adams, who made his feature debut with in film, was familiar to viewers as the star of rock singer Michael Jackson's Moonwalker (1988). ~ Karl Williams, Rovi

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42,918 ratings

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18 critics

R, 1 hr. 43 min.

Directed by: Wes Craven

Release Date: November 1, 1991

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DVD Release Date: October 7, 2003

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Flixster Reviews (1,772)

  • TheDudeLebowski65
    September 26, 2011
    TheDudeLebowski65
    The People Under The Stairs is a drastic change of direction for director Wes Craven. Craven known for some of the most famous films in the genre, crafts a film that is eccentric, bizarre and off the wall. With The People Under The Stairs, he creates a totally different horror fi... read morelm. The film, I would say is good, but it doesn't deliver the stunning shocks that Craven has delivered in previous works. Despite the somewhat zany story, Wes Craven manages to pull out a few good jolts out of this unusual horror yarn. The film isn't one Craven's best, but it definitely isn't his worst. The film is marred with mildly effective humor, but at times it falls flat. The People Under The Stairs is still a decent enough horror film, and is fairly creepy for the most part. The talent involved in this film is really what makes this film a must see for Craven fans. Even if The People Under The Stairs isn't Craven's strongest offering, the cast make the film worthwhile viewing. Everett McGill and Wendy Robie, and terrific as the films villains, and they really make this film a must see. Even if it's not perfect, The People Under The Stairs is still a good horror film that Craven fans will most likely enjoy. I really enjoyed the change of direction of this Craven offering, and for the most part, it succeeds at being entertaining, even if it's flawed. But in the end, you have to admire Wes Craven's knack for trying something different. A good horror film with plenty of strange, eccentric moments.
  • garyX
    June 7, 2011
    garyX
    A young boy from the ghetto is trapped inside the house of a pair of ruthless cannibalistic slumlords who keep a group of kidnapped children in their basement. This is Wes Craven's attempt to jump on the ghetto bandwagon with this horror comedy that plays out like The Addams Fami... read morely crossed with Home Alone. There's some attempt at social commentary hidden in here somewhere, as a gang of subjugated whiter-than-white people are kept helpless and voiceless under the control of the capitalist elite who drain all the money from a black neighbourhood, but the Scooby Doo script just has a group of kids running around dark corridors in a spooky mansion looking for buried treasure. The likeable cast do their best with what they have to work with but there's no plot, no context and little in the way of thrills. Juvenile in the extreme and mediocre in its execution, it's still far better than most things Craven has done.
  • FilmFanatik
    June 2, 2010
    FilmFanatik
    This is just classic Wes Craven. The plot may not make a lot of sense, but the execution is phenomenal. His style is written all over it.
  • Stinger839
    February 24, 2010
    Stinger839
    There are some huge flaws in the story and I have to address these before I dig into what's good here. The motivation for entering the house is WEAK - you need rent money so you're going to steal it from your landlords? Poetic justice is nice, but there were too many sensible adu... read morelt characters who could have stepped in and said "hey let's just move". I understand the idea is that this a poor neighborhood ruled by a greedy few, but there are surely other affordable areas in the city. There is still the compelling drive for the main character to save his mother from cancer (they are too poor to afford medical care), but the rent thing is just an excuse to set up the ending where the whole neighborhood gathers to confront the sinister landlords. The oddest non sequitur is Daddy's full leather bondage outfit; why for a people so obsessed with shunning "evil" do they embrace such an obvious symbol of "sexual debauchery"? I don't think it's a comment on the couple's hypocrisy; I think Wes wanted a cool full outfit for the Daddy character and the cheapest option wardrobe could offer was a standard store bought bondage outfit.

    Anyways, once we get into the house, there is much fun to be had. The setting is very strong and you truly feel trapped inside this house with Fool, our main character. "The People Under the Stairs", it turns out, may also be in the walls, and the evil duo's "good child" Alice understands them and the house in ways her keepers dare not dream of.

    One thing Wes does really well is set up action moment after action moment by propping a domino set of sequences. For the most part, it is logic propelling the story from one stressful bit to the next, but there are almost as many too convenient moments moving the story along as well. If you want a horror that keeps up the action pacing, this is your movie, but I found it to be tiring in the sense that some scenes felt re-trodden. Fool falls down the trick-staircase that turns into a ramp too many times, Daddy spends more than one sequence tromping about the house in his leather outfit shooting holes in the wall, both Mommy and Daddy walk away from many "should be seriously injured and immobile, if not dead" to keep the hunt going far too many times, but at least the dog running through the crawl spaces and walls bit is ended pretty early.

    The premise and "secret" of what occupies the basement is wholly intriguing and once revealed, still visually compelling enough for us to still be invested in seeing how things resolve (though I think the reveal comes too early and removes tons of suspense that could have been used to create a creepier film instead of an"ut-oh! watch out!" romp). The "final act" is dragged out into two central climaxes and about 10 mini-climaxes; I think the film could have done with just the one big climax and scrap the whole "going back in" bit. The labyrinthine house is definitely the star here and is used to its full potential.
  • LWOODS04
    November 27, 2009
    LWOODS04
    AJ Langer, Brandon Adams, Brandon Quintin Adams

    A bookish and poverty-stricken young boy becomes involved in a scheme in order to pay for his mother's operation but is met with unsuspecting horrors.
    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
    This was my ... read morefavorite scary movie when I was younger. Loved it so much I bought on DVD. I have seen it so many times I can't count. Love the story line, the creepiness of the characters. The two creepers are a couple who are brother and sister who want children but can not have children and so they kidnap them. But the catch is, when the children misbehave and become imperfect, the couple locks them underneath the stairs and goes on the hunt for other children. The children start piling up underneath the stairs. It's directed by one of the greats (in my opinion) Wes Craven. So you have to see it just for that fact alone. LOL.
    There is a mixture of scary moments, some gore, comedy, and a little bit of cannibalism, oh, and sprinkled with a little bit of incest. LOL..
  • hobster1
    November 3, 2009
    hobster1
    Entertainingly campy horror film is the story of a boy who stumbles upon a group of strange people that have been locked away in the basement of an old house. Shlocky movie effectively blends comedy with scares for an uneven story. Director Wes Craven combines some compelling f... read moreantasy elements with a socially minded story about child abuse for a bizarre tale that is captivating. Actors Everett McGill and Wendy Robie are enjoyably over-the-top as the Robesons, the cruelest parents/landlords ever,
  • matertenebraum
    May 25, 2009
    matertenebraum
    Fool is a ghetto kid about to evicted who decides to break into the house of the greedy landlords and steal enough to pay the rent. Big mistake - the landlords turn out to be a loony-toon brother-and-sister act who live in a labyrinthine mansion and literally eat little boys for ... read morebreakfast. Can Fool get out alive, rescue the imprisoned Alice and save his neighbourhood from the bulldozers ? This is a terrific film, one of Craven's best, and one of a handful of great little horror movies made in the late eighties / early nineties by Shep Gordon's Alive Films company. It works wonderfully on several different levels; it's basically a great horror-adventure film with lots of action and scares, but it's also a weird culture-clash drama, a mythic adventure with a princess to be freed and golden treasure at the end, and even a lefty citizens' rights story. It's gloriously all over the place. The cast are excellent, especially young Adams, who holds the movie squarely on his small shoulders, and McGill and Robie (who played husband and wife on the TV show Twin Peaks) as the thoroughly psychotic Mom and Dad. A great visceral movie with lots of horrible moments - Adams battles with the vicious rottweiler, McGill gleefully chewing bits of Rhames' corpse, the ominous piles of dead flies in the kitchen. The art direction is tremendous; the gigantic, gruesome Bad Place of a house is horrifically cavernous and foreboding, crammed full of crawlspaces, archaic plumbing, ghoulish brickdust and crumbling plasterboard. Full of intriguing ideas and sociological riffs (gun culture, S&M tendencies, incest, racism, class exploitation), this is a movie bursting at the seams with cinematic creativity. Brilliantly written and directed by Craven, this is a fine example of the rare breed of multi-layered movie I adore which is automatically derided by snooty film critics who want to keep entertaining films and intelligent films mutually exclusive - may they burn in hell !!
  • Redlats
    May 9, 2009
    Redlats
    A horror movie. The bad guys are crazy and keeps kids prisoner and kill others to feed to the prisoners. It is an average movie. Full of inconsistencies. The people under the stairs cannot get out after being there for years, but our hero, Fool, figures it out in the space of... read more one movie.
  • 366weirdmovies
    December 24, 2008
    366weirdmovies
    A good-hearted ghetto youth nicknamed "Fool" is dragged along to a burglary inside a mazelike house of psychosis and horror. Interesting but uneven update on the haunted house theme; the attempts at black comedy are often mood-breakers, and the young lead isn't quite ready to ta... read moreckle the role.
  • harrycaul
    June 7, 2008
    harrycaul
    This movie is actually a lot less interesting than it sounds. It's a comedy-horror fairy tale with a social conscience(!), about a ghetto kid called Fool (Brandon Adams) who, threatened with eviction and saddled with an ailing mother, is coerced into burgling his crazy landlords'... read more (Everett McGill & Wendy Robie) house. Caught in the act, Fool is hunted for sport - through a network of improbably vast wall cavities and heating ducts - by the couple's hungry Rottweiler and a shotgun-toting, gimp-suited McGill, whereupon he stumbles across a damsel in distress under house arrest and a cellarful of mutilated cannibals(!!!). Although fun for a while, "The People Under the Stairs" soon deteriorates into a tediously repetitive chase movie, the fairy story element of which lacks magic, and whose well-intentioned social pleas - for the redistribution of wealth, better access to healthcare for the poor, the pulling together of communities to battle evil slum-landlords, etc - are often embarrassingly naïve. Spirited performances and the occasional witty line of dialogue save the day. Craven fans may notice that the use of domestic booby traps harks back to "The Last House on the Left" and "A Nightmare on Elm Street".

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Critic Reviews

Variety Staff
March 26, 2009
Variety Staff, Variety

A pretense of social responsibility and most of the necessary tension get lost in a combination of excessive gore and over-the-top perfs in The People Under the Stairs. Full Review

Vincent Canby
August 30, 2004
Vincent Canby, New York Times

Though the new movie has its share of blood and gore, it is mostly creepy and, considering the bizarre circumstances, surprisingly funny. Full Review

Richard Harrington
January 1, 2000
Richard Harrington, Washington Post

Craven has been directing downhill since his terror triptych of "Last House on the Left," "The Hills Have Eyes" and the original "Nightmare on Elm Street," so it's hardly surprising that he hits botto... Full Review

Owen Gleiberman
November 1, 1991
Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly

If there were truth in advertising, The People Under the Stairs would be called The Not Very Scary Movie Set Inside a Grungy, Badly Lit House. Full Review

Nigel Floyd
June 24, 2006
Nigel Floyd, Time Out

There are a few push-button frights, but a total dearth of mind-disturbing terror; the humour, too, is broad, crowd-pleasing stuff. Full Review

Nick Schager
June 3, 2005
Nick Schager, Lessons of Darkness

Perhaps the most staggeringly incompetent movie in the director's uneven canon. Full Review

Andreas Samuelson
October 28, 2004
Andreas Samuelson, Slasherpool

A very uneven but interesting horror thriller with a social message that's somewhat lost in a script with some effective terror and less working humour and slapstick. Full Review

Jake Euker
June 8, 2004
Jake Euker, F5 (Wichita, KS)

Craven toils under the influence of Lynch and Raimi, but below the surface hyperactivity the results are the same.

Ken Hanke
August 24, 2003
Ken Hanke, Mountain Xpress (Asheville, NC)

A heady horror film (virtually a horror-movie fairy tale) punctuated with occasional outbursts of dark-humored slapstick and all centered on an angry socio-political theme. Full Review

Alex Sandell
March 5, 2003
Alex Sandell, Juicy Cerebellum

Goofy fun for fans of schlocky horror films.

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Facts

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    • Leroy: (talking to Fool about a noise he heard in the vents) Something's in there. As a matter of fact, why don't you crawl in there and see what it is?
    • Fool: Turkey-brain! Are you hitting on me like I'm here to save your ass? You're gonna stick your dumb head in there and lose it, like Spenser!
    • Mommy: (to Alice) Speak when spoken to. That's what good girls do.
    • Mommy: (saying this along with 'Daddy') Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should KILL before I wake. I pray the Lord my soul to take.
    • Fool: (when asked how he feels, at the very end of the movie) I feel like a million dollars.
    • Fool: (screams at the dog) Your mother sleeps with cats!
    • Daddy: (pulls something out of the meat he's eating and throws it in a bowl) Damn buckshot.
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The People Under The Stairs Trivia

  • In what Wes Craven movie does a brother and sister married couple, have a son named roach who lives in the walls?  Answer »
  • A boy who lives in the walls that had his tongue cut off helps out a character named "Fool".  Answer »
  • In "The People Under the Stairs," what is the name of the stolen kid that helps the main characters?  Answer »
  • In this film, a not-so-nice fatherly figure gets what he deserves when he accidentally slays his beloved Rottweiler:  Answer »
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