Critics reviews

Craven's bonkers satire of post-Reagan America is one part Do the Right Thing and one part Home Alone... Everett McGill and Wendy Robie (both of Twin Peaks fame) play the incestuous sibling landlords with feverish glee. Their performances, punctuated by a dominatrix costume's recurring appearance, tiptoe the line between campy fun and surreal horror and lend the film its unexpected humor.

Perhaps the best of [Craven's] lesser-loved works, The People Under the Stairs (1991) is a great horror film for and about children. That film, in particular, is an excellent example of Craven's social consciousness, as he rooted the film in the experience of black children in the Los Angeles ghetto.

Operating on multiple levels, the film works as both a timeless fable – the story of children battling evil parent figures is told in a manner reminiscent of a Grimm fairy tale – and a prescient bit of political commentary.. [DP Sandi] Sissel perfectly balances the multiple agendas of the screenplay, heightening the film's surrealistic, allegorical aspects with highly stylized lighting while also bringing her eye for more realistic detail to the material focusing on class struggle.

The People Under The Stairs ends lamely, with a comeuppance that's supposed to be a crowd-pleasing class/racial revolution, but winds up relieving Fool of his movie-long mission to get out of a sticky situation. The concept of poor black people rising up against their white oppressors—as resonant as an apartheid allegory as it is for the social immobility of black people—injects a social significance that horror movies today seem to dodge at all costs.