Don't Look In The Basement

Charlotte realizes that her life is in grave danger, and she tries to escape. The judge informs her that they all know Masters is a patient, but they think Charlotte is also a patient. Charlotte finds that all the windows and doors have been boarded up by Masters, preventing an escape. Sam then leads Charlotte to the basement, where she is startled by a man grabbing her ankle and beats him to death with a toy boat. She realizes that it is Dr. Stephens, but not before finishing him off. At the direction of Masters, Sam leads Charlotte upstairs, apparently, so the judge can axe her to death. Sam thinks Charlotte murdered Dr. Stephens on purpose, so he helps restrain her. However, he has a flashback from his lobotomy (which Masters had assisted with) and lets Charlotte go. He then leaves the room as Masters cowers in a corner. As Sam leaves, the other inmates enter with weapons, and the judge brutally axes Masters to death. Sam is deeply disturbed, grabs the axe, and kills all the other inmates except Mrs. Callingham, who is not in the room. Charlotte is already outside, having been told of a secret exit in the basement by Sam. She wanders around outside as the camera goes back to Sam, who cries to himself while eating a popsicle and viewing the carnage.

I know I got this movie on VHS in a tape trade back when I was a teenager and kind of fast forwarded through it just to check it out. It looked really boring and so I never actually watched the full movie.

While BRINKvision originally announced DON'T LOOK IN THE BASEMENT as a solo release, the subsequent BD50 disc turned out to be a double feature with Tony Brownrigg's DON'T LOOK IN THE BASEMENT 2. Forty-odd years after the Stephens Sanitarium massacre, lone survivor Sam (Willie Minor, I COME IN PEACE) who was lobotomized and has the mentality of a child but was held responsible for the murders of the other inmates is transferred to the Green Park Clinic in Tehuacana, Texas. "Dragon Lady" administrator Emily (a returning Camilla Carr) assigns his case to New York transplant Dr. William Matthews (Andrew Sensenig, WE ARE STILL HERE), much to the consternation of colleague Dr. Lance White (Frank Mosley, UPSTREAM COLOR) to whom Sam has gravitated. Whether Sam has brought ghosts with him or they were always there in the dreaded room four in which he is housed, the other patients start behaving more aggressively and the staff more strangely. This is first noticed by orderlies Bishop (GHOST HUNTERS INTERNATIONAL's Scott Tepperman) and Billy (Jim O'Rear, VOLUMES OF BLOOD) as Matthews and White believe colleague Dr. Lucy Mills' (Arianne Martin of Brownrigg's debut RED VICTORIA) sudden promiscuity to be a side effect of a supposed alcohol problem, the sudden psychotic break of Dr. Westmore (Earl Browning III, HATE CRIME) the onset of delayed PTSD, and Will's own hallucinations involving his dead wife seem to be grief exacerbated by the change of environment. Tightly-wound nurse Jennifer's (voice artist Megan Emerick) sudden "babying" of Bishop, on the other hand, is harder to explain as is Lucy's spiral into nymphomania. Looking into Sam's past, Will discovers too late that the Green Park Clinic was originally the Stephens Sanitarium and Sam's room is where the murders occurred as the doors and windows lock themselves and it is up to rest of the staff to contain the patients while Will ventures into the dreaded basement.

Far from a cheap cash-in, the sequel is no sleeper on the level of the first film but it does appear to have been a passion project that is better thought out than it seems on the surface. Without overburdening the film with exposition and a minimum of grainy black-and-white flashbacks from the original, it should become apparent to viewers with a more than vague recollection of the first film that the patients and staff members seem to take on the personalities of the patients from the earlier film when possessed, and there are novel reversals of expectation when it comes to the identities of two characters who are not inmates running the asylum but have other reasons for their actions than the likely ones ascribed to them by others. Brownrigg is less successful when striving for emotional resonance with regard to Will's mourning or in making the film's patients anywhere as dimensional, sympathetic, or pitiable as those in the original film. The presence of O'Rear and Tepperman was not an encouraging sign given their earlier collaborations on the execrable HOSPITAL films, but Brownrigg shows restraint with regard to gore and violence and the performances are overall likable enough that one wishes a bit more script had been devoted to character before things kick into autopilot for the climax in which various characters wander around in pairs to be attacked and/or killed before Will discovers the new secret in the basement. Whether or not Brownrigg Sr. would have been proud of the sequel as it turned out, it is not a bad companion feature for the superior original (as opposed to the first BD-R release of the sequel in which the original was an extra).

Shot on one of the Red model cameras, DON'T LOOK IN THE BASEMENT 2's HD image looks slick on the disc's 1080p24 MPEG-2 2.40:1 widescreen encode while the lossy Dolby Digital 5.1 track does a serviceable job with the identikit modern horror movie sound design. The film is also accompanied by an audio commentary by Brownrigg who discusses the development of the sequel, his attempts to carry over elements and cast members from the original (necessitating turning Carr into a different character since her original one was killed), Tepperman contacting him and offering to do anything else on the production in order to get to be in it as an actor because of his love of the original film, the cast which includes some voice actors and other indie film writers and directors, and shooting in the same location (although the climax necessitated a different location for the basement scenes). The seventy-minute behind the scenes featurette is actually a series of video diaries by O'Rear and Tepperman for each day of production with their commentary over behind the scenes video. We get a look at the location without the film's moody color correction, the bedrooms in which the cast and crew camped out during the shoot, the cast joking around, and proof that Tepperman did indeed geek out as he explored the house. The disc also includes the film's trailer (2:01), a slipcover, and a seven-page booklet. (Eric Cotenas)

Let's face it. The darkness is scary. Even if you aren't terrified of it by itself, it can sometimes give you a horrible feeling that you're Being Watched, because you just can't see if there's something there. Children everywhere feel nervous about the closet or the space under the bed, but while those little bits of darkness are unnerving, there is a place yet creepier. A room where the darkness is the color of pitch, with no little lights anywhere, where even standing still and waiting for your eyes to adjust doesn't help. That room, home of the really, really really scary dark, is the basement or cellar.

Perhaps it's the fact that most basements are built into the ground, or how the dank, sparsely furnished ones seem horribly reminiscent of some kind of tomb or prison. Being cluttered with old junk, broken toys, dangling tools and a clanking furnace doesn't help. And those spiders that like to hang out in the cracks and corners spinning their sticky transparent webs probably don't help much.

It should be noted that for a lot of people, this trope is Truth in Television. However, nothing impedes a house owner from averting the trope entirely by making the basement a clean, well-lit and light-hued living area, even with ground-level windows for natural illumination- and filled with cool stuff, from TVs to bars to pinball tables. Many bedrooms are done that way, in fact.

See also Torture Cellar. If there's a monster locked down there, see Madwoman in the Attic or Room Full of Zombies. But there is no inherent connection between this trope and the Basement-Dweller; although it's possible for a Basement-Dweller to be creepy (especially if he's a Psychopathic Manchild or someone's uncle), there are many Basement Dwellers who are as pleasant as you could wish, and in general, the non-creepy characters live in a non-creepy basement.

Comic Books Sensation Comics: A horticulturist grows "octopus plants," in his pitch-black basement as the things are killed by sunlight. He feeds victims to them and they develop blooms that mimic their faces. Wonder Woman and Steve Trevor rescue the Holliday Girls from the things when they end up trapped in the basement while looking into the suspicious character who owns the place. Sullivan's Sluggers: When Casey and Smith go into the basement of a farmhouse while searching for stuff to use, they find the basement filled with corpses of the townsfolk's previous victims.

Fan Works There's one in Child of the Storm. The fact that it's in the basement of one of HYDRA's bases is creepy enough. The fact that Gravemoss uses it as a lair/laboratory makes it a lot more so. Very few of the minions who are unlucky enough to get sent in come back out - and those who do are very rarely in the same shape as when they went in.

Podcasts In The Magnus Archives Martin, one of the archivist's assistants, goes to investigate a house to follow up a statement about an alleged supernatural encounter and ends up in a dark basement. It doesn't go well. He seemingly gets out safely, but his problems are only just beginning.

Urban Legends A classic horror story set in Southeast Asia (implied to be Malaysia or Singapore) had a field day playing around with this trope. The story revolves around two siblings from a rural town, whose grandfather repeatedly forbids them from venturing into their house's poorly-lit basement. The siblings, refusing to believe their grandpa, venture into the basement anyway, only to find various empty boxes, dusty cupboards, and broken shelves... until one of them finds a spherical, rusty, metal object they cannot identify. They end up calling their dad over to investigate, at which point the dad immediately informs the police to bring along a bomb disposal team - turns out the metal object is an old, WW2-era unexploded ordnance, left behind during the Japanese occupation. The kicker though? When the siblings tried getting their grandpa to convince him there's nothing in the basement, the dad replies with this Wham Line: "What are you kids talking about? Your grandpa died years ago before you were born!" 781b155fdc