Cellar Dwellers: How ‘The People Under the Stairs’ Shaped ‘Barbarian’ and ‘Cobweb’

One of the oldest horror tropes in the book, the old, dusty, unfinished basement/crawl space setting has provided a cornucopia of stories about the universal fear of what lurks in the darkest and least-coziest corners of our homes. Yet, in Wes Craven’s 1991 lesser mainstream, still beloved cult favorite The People Under the Stairs, the what’s-hiding-in-the-basement angle is reversed and subverted, as the real monsters are not the othered hiding in the basement, and the home invaders are the heroes. Three decades later, the blueprint for People has imprinted itself onto a couple of other soon-to-be cult favorites, last year’s Barbarian and this summer’s Cobweb— all of which share much more in common than merely their set-ups.

Shifting tonally between biting commentary on social economics and campiness, The People Under the Stairs waivers between Candyman and a Tales From the Crypt episode, as its middle finger to hypocritical, rich Regan-era families is healthily balanced with the outrageousness of leather gimp suits and laughably uncomfortable “Mommy” and “Daddy” kink nicknames. On the border between the projects and a wealthier Los Angeles neighborhood, juvenile Fool (Brandon Adams) is encouraged to join a robbery of an old, rickety mansion nearby which is believed to be hiding gold coins within, and as Fool’s mother is growing sicker, and his family gets closer to eviction. When one of the other robbers poses as a municipal worker and gets permission to enter the Robeson house, he turns up dead, and Fool and his elder associate get locked inside the house of horrors that extends well beyond just the basement.

When Fool encounters the pale, long-finger-nailed, unkempt people living under the mansion stairs, he’s frightened by their means of cannibalism to survive, but he’s instantly made aware that the actual monsters are the Robesons (Wendy Robie and Everett McGill). On the outside, the allegedly married couple is every bit the cliché: polite, properly dressed, cookie-serving all-Americans who believe in all-American family values. Interiorly, they’re kidnapping and abusing children who don’t abide their “see/speak/hear no evil” rules, as well as racists that exploit and profit from their minority tenants. Furious that a Black kid has escaped their grasp within the house and befriends their pristine “daughter” Alice (A.J. Langer), as well as the wall-crawling rebel Roach (Sean Whalen), the Robesons hunt Fool down, eventually to their detriment.

Zach Cregger’s Barbarian contains three distinct acts: a woman arrives at her Airbnb in the middle of the night to find it already occupied; the actor guy who owns said Airbnb loses his next gig and returns to the property with intentions of selling it; the house’s original owner apparently still lives in its basement, with a female creature who’s the product of his abductions and sexual assaults. Samuel Bodin’s Cobweb is more simplistic, telling the story of a young boy who suspects his emotionally stunted parents are keeping a girl who went missing in the confines of their walls. The girl is revealed to be his deformed, spider-like sister Sarah that his parents were ashamed of, who, once unleashed, is a vengeful threat to everything that gets in her way.

Neglectful parenting and broken family structures are omnipresent throughout Craven’s filmography, however, in People, child abuse is taken to another level— made only worse by the fact that “Mommy” and “Daddy” are revealed to not even be Alice’s real parents, but an incestuous brother-sister duo that stole her as a baby. Alice is not only physically tortured with scolding, hot water baths as punishment and other physical attacks, as the film hints at off-screen sexual abuse occurring, as well. Incestuous sexual abuse is also the root cause of the underground monstrosity in Barbarian, as the red herring “monster” is the deformed-looking female creature referred to as The Mother, yet, the actual monster is really Frank (Richard Brake), aka The Mother’s father, whom abducts, rapes, and has kept women and their offspring captive in the basement (not dissimilar to another basement incest horror, Don’t Breathe, as well.) The abuse is less heightened in Cobweb, as Peter’s parents are cold, emotionally distant gaslighters that use intimidation tactics and deprive him of childhood joys like trick-or-treating and socializing. After Peter gets in trouble at school, his parents lock him in the basement as punishment, described by screenwriter Chris Thomas Devlin as the “hermetically sealed environment his parents have created for him.”

Hinted at but less apparent in Cobweb, both People and Barbarian pointedly mention “changing neighborhoods,” in which the houses/basements in question are located within areas outside of major cities that have experienced the phenomenon known as “white flight,” a.k.a. white families moving out in favor of minority families moving in. In the 1991 film, the Robesons note how their L.A. mansion and neighborhood have been getting hit by robbery attempts more often, while the little Airbnb house in Barbarian is located within the real Detroit neighborhood of Brightmoor, which historically became increasingly more crime-ridden and abandoned over time. In a 1980s flashback scene in the latter, a neighbor warns they’re putting the house up for sale because the “neighborhood is going to hell.” The proprietor villains who are harboring hellish secrets within these houses use their properties as a means of hiding in plain sight— no one will suspect the Robesons’ big, fancy mansion has a house full of missing children, and no one is paying any mind to that one, decent-looking Airbnb house in an otherwise rundown neighborhood. Both films even exploit the dressing-up-as-an-ordinary-blue-collar/utility-worker ploy as an excuse to invade a home, to different outcomes. Unlike the other two, the old, seedy family home in Cobweb seems to exist for more aesthetic purposes than pointed commentary, however, like the others, this average-looking house is also used for hiding their secret in plain sight, even if some neighborhood kids’ curiosities lead them to believe it’s the weird house on the block they want to raid. Neighborhood classism is used to each film’s advantage.

Without using violence to convey it, each film depicts the common horror trope of lacking competent police officers, or, at least, purposefully underused ones. Each film is subtle enough that, on the surface, the trope seems like a mere convenient plot device to keep the protagonists in danger, however, specific scenes suggest more pointed digs. In People, Mommy and Daddy put on their best personas to the cops arriving at their house, providing cookies, sweets, and smiles to deter this very easily distracted, very incompetent police force. The massive size of the Robeson house aside, they fail at giving it a good enough search, because they’re so easily manipulated by the respectable veneer of the Robesons. (The idea for the film was based on a real story about a couple of Black robbers that burgled an L.A. home, which inadvertently led to police discovering the bigger issue of children being locked away. It’s also worth noting the film came out eight months after the Rodney King riots in 1991 Los Angeles.) In Barbarian, Tess (Georgina Campbell) gets ahold of a pair of Detroit cops after being held prisoner, only to be dismissed as a likely “crackhead” or a “crazy person.” They don’t believe Tess, therefore they do nothing to assist her, rendering themselves as useless. In Cobweb, nobody calls on Peter’s parents, which is either a convenience or perhaps an implied distrust of cops, particularly from teacher Miss Devine (Cleopatra Coleman), who goes straight to help Peter herself versus calling any outside professional resources.

A glaring trait Miss Devine, Tess, and Fool share in the trio of films is being characters of Color that serve as the films’ heroes. Miss Devine seems to care more for Peter than his parents do, and after saving him and helping him lock his spider-sister/entity in the basement, she adopts him. After the cops bail on her, Tess rescues Justin Long’s AJ, survives his attempt at killing her to save himself, and shoots The Mother dead to escape. And Tess isn’t the only one, as the Black homeless man whom she initially feared was only warning her to not step foot in that Airbnb. Fool blows up the Robeson mansion, single-handedly saves (almost) all the victims under the stairs, and steals the gold coins to give to the fellow impoverished folks in the neighborhood. Undoubtedly a deliberate choice for all three films that have so much to say about who we’re socialized to trust versus who we should actually trust, Miss Devine, Tess, and Fool are exceptions within a genre that has been “historical for excluding the African-American element,” as fellow Wes Craven character Maureen Evans would say.

As the best horror does, the commentary within People, Barbarian, and Cobweb is carefully laid underneath digestible genre fun and wacky reveals, almost like a parent getting their kids to eat broccoli by adding cheese. The outlandish appearances of The Mother, Sarah the spider-like sister, and the kids under the Robesons’ stairs are almost too outrageous to be downright scary. For every moment of gore in People, another moment is slapstick, as even the Robesons themselves fall victim to their own ridiculous booby traps. Something about a man of supposed traditional values hunting down a kid through the walls wearing his gimp suit is slyly comical. The two more recent films set the audience up for something tonally darker, only to lean in on their shared, welcomed campiness, as Barbarian forces them to witness a larger-than-life creature bottle-feed adults and make them her “baby,” and Cobweb has a somber quietness to it before Sarah and her eight (legs?) start racking up a body count in its wild third act.

With their equally entertaining and nuanced perspectives on just how sinister a normal-looking house can be, The People Under the Stairs, Barbarian, and Cobweb will never allow basement horror to feel anything but unconventional again.

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