Walter Mosley has never been shy about digging into the ugliness of America’s soul, but The Man in My Basement—now a film directed by Nadia Latif—adds something more claustrophobic to the mix: the physical, emotional, and historical weight of a basement that may as well be America’s crawlspace. And as Latif tells me, “Every film has to be personal. You can’t make a movie that’s not personal to you.”
Latif calls the project both a debut and a dare. “No first-time film director thinks they’re going to take on the work of a literary titan,” she laughs. “But also—why the hell shouldn’t you if you find yourself within it?”
She’d read Mosley’s novel twenty years ago and couldn’t shake it. “It stayed with me for decades,” she says. “But when you adapt something like that, you can’t be overawed by it. You have to ask, who am I in this story?”
In her version, Charles Blakey (Corey Hawkins) is a man suffocating under inherited grief—unemployed, losing his family home, and eventually renting out his basement to a mysterious white man (Willem Dafoe). What follows is part psychological thriller, part allegory about the ghosts America refuses to bury. “Charles is completely overwhelmed by grief,” Latif explains. “You can normalize that by saying, ‘We all lose our parents,’ but it’s okay not to get over it. That’s what guided my version of him—what if grief became a paralysis?”
Hawkins, who’s been on a run of shape-shifting performances (Straight Outta Compton, The Color Purple), found the character both grounding and suffocating. “We meet Charles in a very specific moment in his life,” he says. “He’s like water—shaping himself to whatever’s around him. It’s uncomfortable to sit in, as an actor and as a viewer, but it should be.”
Latif made sure that discomfort had texture. “We were meticulous about time,” she says. “Cory and I mapped every scene—what day it is, how long he’s been in this state. Willem, on the other hand, didn’t want to know. His character says, ‘I have no idea what day it is—it’s whatever you tell me it is.’ So time worked differently for both of them.”
That dynamic—Hawkins clawing at reality while Dafoe drifts in moral purgatory—turns the basement into a pressure cooker. “I did a lot of reading about how time and space change underground or in deep space,” Latif adds. “If you don’t see natural light, it messes with your brain. The basement becomes its own orbit.”
The film also plays in a larger orbit—one where horror has become an essential lens for Black storytelling. “A straight-up drama can make people defensive,” says co-star Anna Diop (Nanny, Titans). “Genre lures people in differently. Nobody wants to be lectured, so you use horror or thriller to sneak truth past their armor. It’s more entertaining, but it’s also more accurate. For a lot of Black people, life already feels like the premise of a horror movie.”
Latif agrees. “History itself is the horror,” she says. “When you read about Leopold in the Congo, it’s the stuff of nightmares—because there was no cost to that violence. Telling those stories through horror feels appropriate. That’s how life feels for a lot of us.”
What makes The Man in My Basement so chilling isn’t the blood or the shadows, but the quiet ache between them—the sense that trauma is inherited real estate, passed down like a cursed deed. Latif sees it as both a political and a personal haunting. “It’s about loss, yes,” she says, “but also about the ways we’re told to toughen up, to cut down our boys, to make them strong. What if that isn’t all right? What if that’s where the rot starts?”
Even in the film’s most surreal stretches, she insists the key is to keep it human. “Actors can’t play ideas,” she says. “They play hunger, fear, the fact that Charles doesn’t have anything in his fridge. He’s eating day-old potato chips. That’s the scene. That’s what makes the bigger themes real.”
There’s an irony to it all: a film so thick with metaphor ends up being about the most mundane truths—hunger, grief, the ache of loneliness. By the end, when Charles begins to confront the sins buried beneath his feet, it’s not just his family he’s exhuming. It’s the whole system.
Hawkins smiles when I bring that up. “Yeah,” she says. “History is more frightening than fiction. It’s a horror show.”
Then, as if to punctuate the metaphor with a wink, Latif recalls one of the production’s strangest logistics: maggot wrangling. “We had to count 158 maggots in and out with a clicker,” she laughs. “You can’t leave one behind.”
No maggots were harmed, but plenty of illusions were. The Man in My Basement doesn’t ask whether America has exorcised its demons—it asks how many are still crawling around under the floorboards.
Watch the full interview above and then check out the trailer below.
