There is a house in every town about which horrible things are told. Adults talk about it in whispers, and all the neighborhood kids avoid it. Such gloomy houses reek of dampness and death. And there is hardly a brave man who would even dare to approach the dreadful place in the gloom of the night.
But it so happened that one day an ordinary thirteen-year-old boy entered the spooky dwelling. The nightmare that the hero had to experience is impossible to describe in words.
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The beautiful genre of horror includes many subgenres: slasher, zombie movie, vampire movie and others… The list is almost endless. One such sub-genre is the ‘scary house’. Let’s start with a bit of history. The story of the haunted house is very interesting. Ah, it all started with ‘The Amityville Horror’, many would say, but they wouldn’t be quite right. The sub-genre has been scaring us for 93 years now. Perhaps, yes, the most popular examples of the genre have been that ‘Amityville Horror’, the Kubrick-King ‘The Shining’, ‘House on Ghost Hill’. But there are other, equally good films. One such is ‘Men Under the Stairs’ by Wes Craven, the creator of Freddy Krueger and ‘Scream.
‘Men Under the Stairs’ is interesting first and foremost for the name of the director, who is world famous for his films. Now Craven is self-stamping remakes of his wonderful films, but back then he was making good, not always literally quality, but interesting, unusual and mesmerizing movies.
The plot is very intense. From the very beginning of the film, the viewer is inundated with the problems of an ordinary black family from the ghetto. The main character is a guy named Jester (from the English word “fool”). His mother is sick, she has a tumor, and they need a lot of money for an operation. But they have nothing to pay the rent and will be evicted tomorrow. His older sister has a lot of children who are also strongly opposed to living on the street. Jester has a friend named Leroy, who offers him a cunning way to get rich – to rob his landlords, the rich. After a long and serious conversation, Jester agrees. And lo and behold! They enter the house. The backstory is original, I personally have not seen this in haunted house movies. Next, too, no trivialities. Naturally, the house is not abandoned – it was clear from the beginning, but the mysterious couple living in it looks suspicious.
The jester is a colorful character that will be remembered for a long time. The little boy was cowardly at the beginning of the film, but he’s perfectly understandable, because it’s not every day that regular thirteen-year-olds break into houses. But by the end of the film, he is completely transformed (a real personality development) from a cowardly little thief to a brave little brave man. The key word here is ‘brave’. He creates the image of the bravest little boy in the world, which one wants to look up to! All his actions are true, all the steps he takes are calculated in advance, and you begin to involuntarily envy the boy, because every man wants to be like him. I think that Craven wanted to show us with this character that a black boy can be braver than five white men, and no one believed it back then.
The family living in the house is very frightening. They affectionately call each other ‘daddy’ and ‘mommy’, but what they really are, it is up to our hero to find out. The actors playing these two vindictive lovers of children did an excellent job. Besides them, we also liked Ellis, the couple’s ‘daughter’. Her acting isn’t great, but she deserves praise, because it’s very difficult to play a fearful, withdrawn little girl. In conclusion about the actors and their character: there was not a single superfluous, interfering character, also I did not notice bad acting – no one falsified, and this is very much welcome.
The camerawork is also very good. The camera doesn’t jump or twitch, and at the appropriate moments it shows us everything we need to see. I would also like to thank Don Peek, who wrote wonderful music for the film, heavy in terms of atmosphere. The whole film, partly thanks to it, keeps the viewer in the strongest tension, which ensures good impressions left after the finale.
Wonderful, subtle, damn clever and beautiful work of Wes Craven, revealing to us the next drops of our human nature. After all, in a difficult and seemingly hopeless situation, we must not fall. We must climb our way out of the darkness–the light.
Info Blu-ray
Video
Codec: HEVC / H.265 (80.4 Mb/s)
Resolution: Native 4K (2160p)
HDR: Dolby Vision, HDR10
Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Audio
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 (48kHz, 24-bit)
English: Dolby Digital 5.1
Subtitles
English SDH, English.
