This
is my favorite time of year, second only to Christmas. Autumn has
arrived, the weather is cooling down, and October becomes the month
long celebration of scary movies called Shocktober. There are a lot of
horror movies out there, but as a genre, horror is still looked down
upon by some mainstream critics and moviegoers. It doesn’t help that,
admittedly, there are so few quality horror movies made but, like
comedy, it’s a very difficult and subjective genre. So, in the days
leading up Halloween I’ll be posting some recommendations for scary
movies to help you celebrate Shocktober.
Night 5: Wes Craven Memorial Night II, "No wonder there's no money in the ghetto..." The People Under the Stairs
The poster art for Wes Craven’s The People Under the Stairs has
stayed with me since I first saw it in the local video stores that once
populated my home town. The skull floating in a dark sky above a seemingly normal
house is a simple image that suggested more danger and potential terror than
the more grotesque posters for other horror movies. Craven has certainly never shied
away from the grotesque (Freddy Kruger’s face is more than enough proof of that), but
the violence and gore in his films, though they are part of the overall
entertainment, is never meant for titillation. The best Wes Craven films are
never about the special effects or the scary scenes. They are about the
thoughts and feelings those scenes release from the dark, ignored corners in
the mind of the viewer.
Written and directed by Wes Craven and released by Universal
in 1991, The People Under the Stairs is a high point in a career with many
peaks and valleys. The main character is a young boy named Poindexter, but
everyone calls him Fool. He lives in a rundown ghetto apartment building with
his sister and dying mother who is in need of an expensive operation. They are
behind on rent and the landlord is eager to evict them so the building
can be torn down and replaced with an office building. Leroy, Fool’s sister’s
boyfriend, played by Ving Rhames, offers to show Fool how to make money to keep
his family from being evicted, which involves breaking a few laws. Leroy and
his partner in crime, Spenser, robbed a liquor store that happened to be owned by
the landlords and found a map of their house that shows a secret room full of
money. They plan a dangerous treasure hunt.
Their plan gets derailed almost right away. After Spenser
enters the house and does not come back, Leroy and Fool sneak into the house. From
the outside, the landlords’ home looks like a normal, nice, big house in the
suburbs, but inside there are many dangers and horrors. The landlords are a
couple played by Everett McGill and Wendy Robie, who also played a couple in
the TV series Twin Peaks. In Twin Peaks they were great as the comically
dysfunctional and lovable Big Ed and Nadine, but here they are great and terrifying as the
cruel and sadistic nameless couple that refer to each other as “Mommy” and
“Daddy.” Fool finds their daughter, Alice, who has been locked up in the house
and never let outside. She explains that “Mommy” and “Daddy” have cruel
punishments if their rules are broken and have already put several boys who misbehaved under the stairs.
The People Under the Stairs is like a young boy’s adventure
dream, complete with a treasure map, turned into a nightmare. The large creepy
house is filled with secret passageways, crawlspaces, and booby-traps that give
Fool’s journey both excitement and terror. The People Under the Stairs implies more horror than it shows. Craven knows that a little can go a long way; something like the full body leather suit that “Daddy” wears to hunt Roach, one
of the mutilated boys that escaped from under the stairs and lives in the
walls, is so odd and strange that it will disturb and unnerve the audience more
than buckets of blood. Craven adds to the strange nature of this movie by
inserting moments of odd humor here and there. In one scene Fool tells Alice,
“Your father is one sick mother,” and in another scene he distracts a dog
attacking Leroy by insulting the dog’s mother.
Craven even gets across some
social commentary on appearances and the gap between rich and poor and the ghetto and the
suburbs, but he keeps it in the background of this horror adventure. His best films have themes and ideas that give them substance but he is smart enough to keep them as subtext and let us notice them on our own. His themes are simple, but that only makes them stronger and easier to absorb. This is a well-executed, entertaining film from one of the
true masters of horror that works by disturbing you with strange, macabre
imagery rather than excessive blood and gore. It may be a Wes Craven film that has
slipped by the wayside over the years, but The People Under the Stairs is definitely worth seeking out and watching.
This
is my favorite time of year, second only to Christmas. Autumn has
arrived, the weather is cooling down, and October becomes the month
long celebration of scary movies called Shocktober. There are a lot of
horror movies out there, but as a genre, horror is still looked down
upon by some mainstream critics and moviegoers. It doesn’t help that,
admittedly, there are so few quality horror movies made but, like
comedy, it’s a very difficult and subjective genre. So, in the days
leading up Halloween I’ll be posting some recommendations for scary
movies to help you celebrate Shocktober.
Night 4: Wes Craven Memorial Night, “All that blood and
violence. I thought you were supposed to be the love generation.”
Like many movie lovers, I was deeply saddened by the recent
passing of Wes Craven, one of the true masters of horror. He had a long and
impressive career, and while he had mediocre films and misses, when his films hit
they hit hard. The Last House on the Left is Wes Craven’s first film, made in 1972, but it
comes across as having been made by a skilled and seasoned filmmaker. The movie
has the look of a low budget exploitation movie, but there are no cheap thrills
to be found here. This is an intense, visceral thriller about the cruelty and
violence of which human beings are capable. The horror in The
Last House on the Left has nothing to do with the supernatural, it comes from the
uncomfortable realism of the horrible, violent acts we see.
The first time I saw this movie was purely by chance. I was
in college and my roommate and I were sent out by our friends to Blockbuster to
pick some horror movies for the group to watch. It was Halloween night, so the
horror section was well picked over. My roommate picked up the case for The Last House on the Left; neither of us had heard of it before, but it was directed by Wes Craven
and the box had a quote from Roger Ebert: “sheer and unexpected terror.” I can’t
remember the other movie we rented or if we even watched it. All I remember is
how we all squirmed and turned our faces and swore at the TV. I remember one
girl got up and left the room. I remember
becoming mildly obsessed with the movie and reading as much as I could find
on the film. I’ve only seen it one time since then and that was a week
ago to prepare for this blog.
The Last House on the Left says it is inspired by true
events, but it is actually a loose remake of Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring. The plot follows two young girls from the country that go into the city
for a concert, but are kidnapped by a gang of ruthlessly cruel criminals.
The girls are sadistically tortured, raped, and murdered. Then, by sheer coincidence, the
criminals seek shelter for the night with the parents of one of the girls. When
the parents find out, they unleash their own brand of revenge. The Last House
on the Left was meant to be an exploitation film, loaded with violence and sex to sell tickets. It was produced by Sean S.Cunningham, who would go on to direct Friday the 13th in 1980, a
movie primarily concerned with kills and special effects. There’s certainly
nothing wrong with slasher films like Friday the 13th and its many
sequels that revel in gory moments and nudity, as long as they still entertain and commit to their lack of substance.
The Last House on the Left certainly has all the elements of a sleazy, low
budget exploitation film, but in going from script to screen it became
something substantial and frightening.
The Last House on the Left has a grainy, unglamorous look
and a cast of unfamiliar faces that give it a feeling of realism that becomes
uncomfortable as the film unfolds. This is a violent film and though the gore
we see is nothing when compared to modern horror films, it is far more effective, awful, and
terrifying. When one of the girls is being stabbed we don’t see
the knife stabbing her, instead there are sharp, quick musical cues which
somehow make the stabbing worse. One of the criminals is aware that what they
are doing to these girls is absolutely wrong, but he’s helpless to stop the
others. Afterwards, there is a scene where a quiet moment passes among the
criminals as they seem to realize the deep cruelty of what they’ve done. It
was a scene that Craven says audiences hated because it humanized the killers.
I think that humanization, slight as it is, is important because it forces the
audience to accept that human beings, not monsters or devils, did these
horrible things.
Watching The Last House on the Left is a tough experience.
There are other horror movies with more blood, more gore, and more death that
are easier to watch. The Last House on the Left, unlike slasher movies, takes
no joy in the death scenes. Even when the parents exact their revenge, it’s not
as victorious a moment as audiences would expect. Craven does not shy away from
showing us what we already know but don’t consciously think about: it is a
horrible, terrible thing to kill another human being. Craven has said in
interviews that he is fascinated by what can come out of ourselves. He says
that the Vietnam War was a big influence on The Last House on the Left. During
that time it became normal to see dead bodies and lists of dead American
soldiers on TV, and to see photos of, or hear about, atrocities committed by
Americans. It’s never good when any of that becomes normal.
Just after Wes Craven passed, NPR’s Fresh Air re-aired a series of interviews in which Terry Gross asks him about The Last House on the
Left.
I always enjoy watching or hearing interviews with Wes Craven because he comes
off as such genial, normal, and even shy person that knows a great deal about
films and filmmaking. He tells a story of when he was a young boy and had a bow
and arrow. He would go hunting for rats and usually never found any, until he
did and shot one with his arrow. The arrow hit but did not kill the rat. It let
out a horrible scream and bled and thrashed. It fought so hard for its life but
it was wounded mortally, and the young Craven was forced to put it out of its
misery. If that rat fought so hard for its life, Craven thought, then surely it deserved to live
and if rats deserve to live unharmed then so do people. The Last House on the Left
is so intense and disturbing because it has a message, and it is a simple one
that Craven does not hit us over the head with or bury in symbolism. He lays it
out plainly resting just below those moving images: human life is precious and
we should all act accordingly, otherwise violence begets more violence and
there is no victory for anyone in that.
