Written and directed by Craven in 1991, The People Under the Stairs (hereafter People) came after The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988) and Shocker (1989), followed by a three-year hiatus from cinema (he directed Night Visions and Nightmare Café for television) before Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994) and Vampire in Brooklyn (1995), making it the center film in a loose trilogy of Craven projects directly engaging Black culture. Although marketed as a horror film (the voiceover for the trailer begins: “In every neighborhood there is one house that adults whisper about and children cross the street to avoid. Now Wes Craven, creator of A Nightmare on Elm Street takes you inside … “ implying an experience very similar to Freddy Krueger), the film was not a “new Nightmare” but rather a critique of gentrification, capitalism, and systemic racism (particularly in the urban real estate business) of the Reagan/Bush era.

Taking place in Los Angeles (rather than the Mid-west suburbs in which many of Craven's 80s films were set), the film depicts two adult burglars, Leroy (Ving Rhames) and Spenser (Jeremy Roberts), and their thirteen-year-old accomplice Poindexter Williams AKA “Fool” (Brandon Quintin Adams), breaking into the home of a wealthy white couple (who are unnamed, called “Man” and “Woman” in the credits, but referred to in the narrative as “Mommy” [Wendy Robie] and “Daddy” [Everett McGill]), who are slumlords. The burglars then learn about a number of children held prisoner in the basement (the eponymous “people under the stairs”), before all of them except Fool lose their lives at the hands of Mommy and Daddy. Fool then works with Alice (A. J. Langer), Mommy and Daddy's “daughter” (their victim whom they kidnapped), and Roach (Sean Whalen), one of the people under the stairs who has escaped into the walls, to expose and defeat Mommy and Daddy and save not just the kidnapped children, but also Fool's family, who are equally trapped by the housing system Mommy and Daddy manipulate.