Making a Legend: Candyman, Revisited
In 1992, the camera looks from the sky, an aerial view tracking the highways that divide the city, the impeccable minimalist score by Philip Glass underscoring a general unease. If the white gaze emphasizes the divide of the city, in 2021 the camera flips the urban landscape on its head, projecting views from the ground up on prominent Chicago landmarks, vanishing into the clouds.
The opening credits map Chicago. In 1992, the camera looks from the sky, an aerial view tracking the highways that divide the city, the impeccable minimalist score by Philip Glass underscoring a general unease. If the white gaze emphasizes the divide of the city, in 2021 the camera flips the urban landscape on its head, projecting views from the ground up on prominent Chicago landmarks, vanishing into the clouds.
Thus open Bernard Rose and Nia DaCosta’s interpretations of Candyman. Bernard Rose’s film in 1992 adapted Clive Barker’s story “The Forbidden” for the screen, telling the story of graduate student Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen), a white woman researching urban legends in Chicago. Along with her partner Bernadette (Kasi Lemmons), she finds herself drawn to Cabrini-Green where she learns about Candyman. This is the stuff of myths: if you say his name in the mirror five times, he appears behind you and rips you from the gut up with his hook-hand. And the story is given to us as the stuff of myth. She and Bernadette interview students who have connections to the story from their cousin’s girlfriend’s brother. When they interview a Black janitor whose cousin lives at Cabrini-Green, they get plunged into the story of the housing projects. Helen assiduously photographs graffiti when they visit and interviews a young mother, Annemarie (Vanessa A. Williams), to learn more.
Rose’s vision of Chicago, and the Black community of Cabrini-Green, is one that fetishizes. To some extent, the film holds Helen at a dubious distance — we’re meant to critique her fetishizing of the graffiti and engagement with the Candyman mythology for her own academic gain. However, the film also reinforces her savior complex. Regardless, Rose’s Candyman gained a cult following. It was one of the films that firmly solidified my interest in horror.
Horror is such a powerful vehicle for social commentary, and Candyman, so imaginative and dark, grievously bungled its message.
Enter Nia DaCosta’s 2021 update. The new film, though, is not a simple remake. It reimagines the story within an existing tangle of lore. Anthony (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) and Brianna (Teyonah Parris) are a young, Black couple navigating the art world of Chicago. Anthony an artist, Brianna, a successful gallery director. Through visually striking shadow puppets, DaCosta swiftly invokes the story of Rose’s film and situates her narrative in relation to existing mythology. As the story of Candyman is handed down to the modern day, Helen gets called out for her behavior.
In a beautiful essay for The Atlantic, Carvell Wallace writes, “During the making of it, [DaCosta] was intensely conscious that Black pain has always been a lucrative source of content for Hollywood but is rarely handled with enough consideration to keep it from effectively and constantly re-traumatizing Black viewers.”
DaCosta situates her film explicitly in relation to the original. Her storytelling makes meaning alongside, in contrast to, the first.
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Drinking wine in Helen’s upscale condo one night, planning the paper they want to write, Helen reveals to Bernadette that her unit is modeled the same as Cabrini-Green, just covered in better drywall and upsold to wealthy white families. They say Candyman’s name five times in the mirror, though Bernadette does not join Helen for fateful number five.
Rose’s film accelerates into its psychological excavation of the myth. Helen begins seeing apparitions of Candyman (Tony Todd). She blacks out and finds herself in Annemarie’s apartment next to a beheaded dog. Annemarie’s son, Anthony, is missing. The film is the pinnacle of psychological horror: is Candyman real or is Helen, in a fugue state, the culprit?
The story surrounding Candyman is multilayered, messy, its handling of race misguided. Helen falls down a rabbit hole with her research, entwined more intimately with Candyman, who wants her to “be [his] victim.” She cannot escape him as the body count grows. Yet, as she becomes more enmeshed with Candyman, she lays claim to a Black mythology beyond her. What could’ve been an anti-racist movie about white people and savior complexes gives too much oxygen to the savior complex. Helen saves baby Anthony and the community of Cabrini-Green throws his hook on her grave at her funeral. She becomes the new monster to terrorize people in their dreams.
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A Candyman cult fan will notice DaCosta’s film nods early on to the original storytelling. There must be a reason the protagonist is named Anthony, right? And the art dealer he’s beholden, a white man who hopes Anthony will be the artistic vision of Black Chicago, is named Clive, homage to Barker’s story. Tony Todd and Vanessa A. Williams appear to reprise their roles.
DaCosta’s addition to the Candyman canon swiftly grapples with the fallacies of Rose’s film, acknowledging the ways in which white people have taken over a story that emerged within a Black community. Initially, Anthony becomes enraptured by this ghost story that centers Helen Lyle, the white grad student who went mad and tried to kill a baby in a bonfire. He and Brianna hear about it from her brother, Troy, and his boyfriend, who come to their swanky apartment for drinks. The telling of the Helen mythology unfolds alongside the story of gentrification in Chicago; white people build the ghetto, then erase it and develop everywhere around it. In a wink to the original — Bernadette asking Helen, “How much did you pay for this place?” — Troy’s white boyfriend notes that the apartment they’re in is the very example of the development around the ghetto.
Anthony is held rapt by this urban legend. This has every marker of a good scary story. He can’t stop reading about it on his phone before bed.
He descends into an artistic fervor. He begins painting these dark portraits inspired by the violence of Candyman and tells Brianna, “I feel really connected to this. I’ve never felt this clear before.” Just as Helen is pulled to the story instinctually — carried on by a bridge from a past life — so too Anthony perceives a bond to this story. As he draws closer to the story’s core, he visits Cabrini-Green and learns how Candyman originated within the community. His artwork darkens the more he learns. A cut opens on his hand. Bees start following him.
Where the original situates Candyman physically in the world of Helen, DaCosta’s film beautifully employs mirrors to locate him. Of Anthony’s mirror piece in a gallery, David Sims writes, “DaCosta gives the reference a slick, artistic sheen, turning it into a clever bit of commentary on the way stories get remade and burnished as time passes.” Candyman is enlisted to the world of reflections, carrying on invisible, just waiting for us to say his name. Anthony even entitles his work, “Say His Name.”
DaCosta’s film joins a conversation, and Candyman becomes a film about the conversation itself, clarifying how the original mis-stepped, and how these missteps might be understood today.
Both Candyman films are about mythology and storytelling, how ghosts and legends can organize our fears. The retelling neatens some of the story’s confusions while creating new loose ends of its own, offering different possibilities for the space horror can open for its viewers. DaCosta’s film joins a legacy and creates a new one.
