Behind the Madness of The People Under the Stairs: Wes Craven’s 1991 Cult Classic
There’s no doubt that the late Wes Craven was one of our great masters of horror… but he did make some weird movies on occasion. Sometimes he’d deliver an undisputed classic like The Hills Have Eyes, A Nightmare on Elm Street, or Scream. Then, sometimes you’d get a strange one like Deadly Friend, Shocker, or Vampire in Brooklyn. And let’s not forget the dog flashback in The Hills Have Eyes Part 2.
One of his oddies-but-goodies is the 1991 film The People Under the Stairs. Where did this crazy story come from? What was Craven’s biggest concern during post-production? And what was the important character moment that got cut? We’ll dig up the answers to those questions and more as we find out what happened to The People Under the Stairs.
The Inspiration Behind the Story
Craven could never be accused of being a superficial filmmaker with nothing to say. He gave deep thought to all of his projects. He was mindful of themes and subtext. Like A Nightmare on Elm Street, this film was inspired by a newspaper article he read in the late 1970s. While a respectable couple was away on vacation, neighbors saw someone breaking into their home. When the police arrived, they didn’t find any burglars inside – but they did find the couple’s children, who had been imprisoned in the house their entire lives.
Craven explained to Cinefantastique magazine that he was intrigued by the idea that “beneath the surface of apparent normalcy can be found strange aberrations of behavior: two people that appear to be well-behaved can still, in secret, perform atrocities on their own children.” Neighbors thought outsiders, burglars, were bringing depravity into their decent world… but the depravity had been there all along, hidden behind locked doors.
The Story of The People Under the Stairs
Craven wrote a screenplay about a young boy named Poindexter, though his tarot-reading sister has given him the nickname Fool. His family is poor and facing eviction from their apartment in the ghetto, so Fool is roped into a robbery scheme by his sister’s friend Leroy and his criminal associate Spenser. They plan to break into the landlord’s mansion and steal an extremely valuable coin collection. But once they reach the mansion, they find that it’s a very strange place.
The doors are electrified. The windows are covered with screens, padlocked from the outside. There’s a boy living in the walls. And a group of tortured cannibals locked in the basement.
The owners of the mansion are a bizarre pair of siblings. They call each other Mommy and Daddy, and they’ve been trying to adopt the perfect child. Boy children always disappoint them in some way. They see or overhear something they weren’t supposed to, or they talk back. So Daddy cuts out the bad parts and tosses them into the basement. One of them, called Roach, has managed to escape into the walls. With his Rottweiler Prince by his side, Daddy hunts him through the house, carrying a shotgun and wearing a leather bondage outfit. Only a girl child named Alice has managed to stay in Mommy and Daddy’s good graces, sort of, by not seeing, hearing, or speaking evil.
Leroy and Spenser are taken out of the picture early on, leaving Fool to try to find a way out of this seemingly inescapable house. At least he has the help of Alice and Roach… and when he learns just how twisted Mommy and Daddy are, he begins to feel sympathy for the people under the stairs as well.
Writing and Filming Challenges
Craven worked on the script for years, writing and rewriting. The problem was, he couldn’t figure out how to get Fool to the mansion quickly enough. In early drafts, which sported the title The Puzzle, he wouldn’t reach the house until sixty or even eighty pages in. Fittingly, the answer finally came to him in a dream. A lucid dream that allowed him to go over the story multiple times. In the finished film, it only takes Fool eleven minutes to get to the mansion, and he’s trapped inside by the twenty minute mark.
After he finally cracked the script, getting the movie made turned out to be fairly easy. He had a two-picture deal with the production company Alive Films and distributor Universal Pictures, and full creative control on the movies he made under this deal. Shocker had been the first, and the executives quickly gave him the green-light to make The People Under the Stairs the second. Filming began in March of 1991, less than a year and a half after Shocker was released.
Cast and Characters
The main children roles of Fool, Alice, and Roach went to Brandon Adams, A.J. Langer, and Sean Whalen, each of them turning in strong performances that make you care about their characters. There’s also:
Kelly Jo Minter as Ruby, Fool’s sister
Bill Cobbs as Grandpa Booker
Ving Rhames as Leroy
Jeremy Roberts as Spenser
Yan Birch as the Stairmaster (often mistaken for Dave Pirner of Soul Asylum)
Wendy Robie and Everett McGill as Mommy and Daddy
Craven lifted Robie and McGill right out of the cast of Twin Peaks. Their characters are so off-the-wall, they feel like the actors were still in David Lynch mode when they reported to this set.
The Rottweiler Prince was played by four dogs: Brutus, Bubba, Schultz, and Zeke. It’s not clear which dog was used for which scene, but their combined efforts made Prince a memorable menace.
The house used for the mansion exterior can be found in Los Angeles, but the interiors were all built on set, and Craven had a specific vision for them. For him, the interior of the mansion represented the human mind, with madness depicted in the different spaces within the house. “The outside seems quite normal, and the first floor seems luxurious and appropriate, yet the farther in you go, the more unexplained or bizarre.” If that weren’t enough, he also said the house and its occupants represent “the whole society of the United States.”
The people under the stairs, howling and trying to crawl up through cracks in the foundation, represent the thoughts of insane people. They try to suppress these thoughts, but they can’t be contained. Fool and other children escaping from the insane parents’ house represent the next generation liberating itself from the madness of a previous generation. Craven considered the film to be a positive social statement about minorities and children who have been oppressed by adults finding their freedom. Like we said, he was a deep thinker.
Post-Production Concerns
Once The People Under the Stairs was in post-production, Craven started worrying. He had some bad experiences with the MPAA ratings board before, and he was certain they were going to give him a rough time with the film. It’s about child abuse. It has underage children in terrifying situations. The NC-17 rating had just been created, and he feared they were going to slap that rating on his movie. All that worrying was over nothing. The MPAA only objected to one bit of KNB-supplied gore: a shot of Daddy biting into a human liver. Once Craven snipped that out, they gave the movie an R.
Test screening audiences encouraged Craven to make two more cuts. Originally, there was an epilogue in which Ruby gives Fool a fresh tarot card reading and reveals that, since he has undergone a rite of passage, his nickname will now be upgraded from Fool to King. But viewers didn’t want to sit through another dialogue scene after the climactic action, so that character moment was removed. Daddy was also supposed to return for an ending jump scare, but Craven decided to take that out. He had done plenty of ending jump scares in his career, and he was tired of them. It also implied that the door was open for a sequel, and he had no intention of making one. It’s better off that way.
Release and Reception
The People Under the Stairs is a very unique horror film that stands alone, telling a complete story with a satisfactory ending. Craven brought his story to the screen with a specific type of insanity and dark humor that couldn’t be replicated. Moviegoers saw the charm of it when it reached theatres on November 1st, 1991… an unusual release date, coming in right after Halloween. That didn’t stop it from being the number one movie its opening weekend. It was made on a budget of six million dollars, and earned just under that in its first three days. It remained in the box office top ten for an entire month, ending its theatrical run with over thirty-one million dollars.
A good number of critics gave it positive reviews, admiring its sense of humor and socially conscious subtext. It has been called a parody of conservatism and a satire of late capitalism. Other descriptions include “creepy,” “disturbing,” “deranged,” and “surprisingly funny.” In fact, some felt that Craven went too far with the humor.
Legacy and Remakes
This may not be one of his most popular movies, but it is a respected entry on his filmography. And it has never lost its place in the pop culture consciousness over the decades. Mommy and Daddy’s house has inspired a Halloween Horror Nights maze at Universal Studios Florida. The film was featured on the drive-in movie screen in the Twister…Ride it Out attraction. It has remained in viewing rotations thanks to DVD and special edition Blu-ray releases… And in the late 2000s, when he was producing remakes of The Hills Have Eyes and The Last House on the Left, Craven considered giving The People Under the Stairs the remake treatment as well.
It didn’t happen as a feature film, but in 2015 it was announced that Craven was rebooting The People Under the Stairs as a TV series for Syfy. Sadly, he passed away just four months after the announcement, so that project was scrapped. In 2020, Universal brought in Jordan Peele and Win Rosenfeld of Monkeypaw Productions to produce a remake… but that still hasn’t gone into production.
Maybe we’ll see a new take on the concept someday. In the meantime, the 1991 film still holds up as a one-of-a-kind cult classic. Inspired by a horrific real-life case and guided by a dream, Craven brought us an entertaining movie with its own vibe. He made some weird stuff… but sometimes weird is exactly what you’re looking for.
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