A Return to Cabrini Green

While the original Candyman was a solid film that performed reasonably well at the Box Office, the fortunes of the franchise very quickly dipped afterwards. Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh performed poorly at the Box Office and was critically panned, while Candyman: Day of the Dead didn’t even bother going to theaters at all. Which was fine, as it’s a terrible film. After two less-than-stellar sequels, everyone was fine with the franchise drifting away. We got one good flick, and no one ever has to speak of the sequels if they didn’t want to. That’s fine for a horror franchise.

But there were still warm feelings for the original film. In part because lead actor, Tony Toodd, became a horror icon and managed to build a solid, respected career. And, honestly, the first film is just such an effective and thrilling piece of horror storytelling. It’s solid in a way that many horror films can never really manage. The iconography of the Candyman is evocative and interesting. It’s the kind of film that sticks with you and remains thrilling many years, and many rewatches, later.

In short, it was due for a revisit from a production team that really cared. Thankfully, after a little over twenty years, in hibernation, the series found the right production team to handle the task. With Nia DaCosta attached to direct, and a screenplay by Jordan Peele, Win Rosenfeld, and Nia DaCosta, the series had everything required to pull itself together and get the sequel it always truly deserved. Arriving in August of 2001, the new Candyman (yes, with the same title as the older film) is everything fans of the original could have hoped for.

Nearly thirty years after Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen) dies saving a baby from the fires of the Candyman, artist Anthony McCoy (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) learns of the legend of the haunt. How the Candyman was an artist in the late 1800s who fell for a rich, white girl. He was killed for their love, lynched by a mob (hand cut off, covered in bees, then set on fire), but they say that his specter has been haunted the area ever since. Over the years other men have fallen into the myth of the Candyman, killed by mobs, tortured by their hate. It’s a perpetual cycle.

Tapping into the story, Anthony creates a piece of art about the Candyman. But also, while learning about the story, he decides to test it for himself, saying the boogeyman’s name five times into a mirror. While he thinks it’s a joke, his girlfriend, Bri Cartwright (Teyonah Parris), wants nothing to do with it. As we should expect, after he says the name into a mirror he summons the Candyman, who slowly starts stalking around again, killing people associated with Anthony and building up fear around a new wave of killings. But for Anthony there might be a deeper connection. There might be a reason why he was drawn to the Candyman legend, and his saying the name and creating the art may have all been part of a new round of the inevitable cycle…

The original Candyman was, among various factors, a tale of racial inequality and injustice. Helen was a white woman living a comfortable life which was contrasted by the people she was talking to for her research study, living in the low quality housing of Cabrini Green. It plays with the tropes of the “white savior” story, except instead of saving anyone, Helen becomes haunted by the Candyman, and he starts killing people and framing her for the crimes. Call it possession or spectral murder or whatever you will, Candyman essentially punishes Helen for her hubris and makes an example of her. And then if we look at the follow-ups, we continue to see white women in the lead roles, always haunted by the Candyman and he uses them to further his goals.

Anthony’s story is different. He’s a black man, which allows the film to comment differently on the racial politics of the series in a way it couldn’t before. Now the lead character isn’t someone the Candyman is stalking so he can fulfill some kind of beyond the grave love affair. Instead he’s someone that is more in line with who Candyman formerly was, a black man and artist who couldn’t escape what white people thought of him. It’s notable, in fact, that the people the Candyman kills in the film this time around are all white. There’s a very clear line about who will be a victim of the Candyman.

The story is honestly really well thought out and detailed. It’s subtle, building the elements of the story, having Anthony slowly fall into Candyman’s web. That idea of the cycle, of black men getting blamed for crimes and then getting lynched, is echoed through the film, and as Anthony digs in and peels back the layers of history more and more of what happens around him makes sense. The film is building up a legend around him, about how the Candyman works, about who becomes his victims, about why he kills at all.

I would almost call it a reboot or retcon, honestly, because the film has a different idea of the racial politics than even the first film. It uses its elements differently, building a different kind of narrative, a different purpose around the Candyman. Naturally this also reboots away the other two films, the two sequels that no one wanted and now never have to worry about. Their stories don’t take place around Cabrini Green, which is the Candyman’s territory. They feel disconnected enough that they are, effectively, removed from continuity entirely. I think the series is better for it.

But even comparing this film to the original it’s pretty clear that the creative team had a very different story to tell. The original film was based on a Clive Barker story, the author a British white man with a far different perspective than the creative team of DaCosta, Peel, and Rosenfeld that worked on this reboot-sequel. They come to the story with what feels like a deeper and more invested perspective on the characters, and they use the Candyman, in a way, as a kind of spirit of vengeance, a ghost haunting those who would commit evil against his people. Understandable considering what he went through and how he was killed. I think, considering his backstory, this perspective works a lot better in a Candyman film.

The movie is also pretty solid when it comes to scares and gore. It uses its few moments of outright horror sparingly, but to great effect. Often it keeps the killer spirit hidden, sometimes not even giving us the action in close up. It wants us to feel the killings like a removed spectator. We know what he’s doing but we don’t always get to watch and revel in it. It’s more important for us to feel the fear without seeing the gore. It builds the tension in a different, and in some ways more effective, way. Certainly it makes for the most effective horror film in this series since the first movie.

And I really think, in all ways, this is just a far more effective film than anyone could have expected from this series. The franchise had been lost in the weeds for years, with fans online saying it was impossible to make a good Candyman film. The sequels had even done the trick of tarnishing the original, making it less effective because they were so bad. But now we have the 2021 version and it brings the horror back. This is a solid, well directing, well written horror film that takes the character and his story seriously, building a new mythology around him in the process. I thought the film was great and it does what I would have considered impossible: it makes me hopeful for another Candyman after this.