The Legacy of The Candyman

I used to be equally terrified and obsessed with horror film trailers as a child. Let’s set the scene. It’s 1989. I’m four years old. 7pm hits and the TV is suddenly filled with trailers for the newest Nightmare on Elm Street or Friday the 13th sequel. I live close enough to NYC that our TV feeds were the same, so every art-house release with a big enough budget also bought TV ad time for their one-week release at a tiny theater. The VHS rental business is booming and home video has gone down in cost, so there’s a sense of planting the seed for a longer shelf life than a theatrical release in movie marketers’ minds. I used to run screaming from the room, but then want to immediately watch it again.

That’s a pattern that’s continued (not quite that dramatically) throughout my life. I find something that really messes with my head—a film, a book, a video, a theme park ride—and force myself to confront it. Then I want to go back again and again until I understand it.

Candyman came out a few years later. The trailer would have been released when I was six or seven. I didn’t remember the details until I rewatched it recently, but I knew I couldn’t get it out of my head.

I have to imagine the obsession was a one-two punch. First, there’s the actionable element. Say his name five times and he appears. I could do that. I was too scared to, but I could. Second, the visual language of the film looks quite similar to the on the street footage of the nightly news at that time. I imagine that’s an intentional choice that really works.

It would be several years before I ever saw the original Candyman. I actually saw the sequel Candyman: Farewell to Flesh before the original thanks to SyFy (then Sci-Fi) and their weekend programming schedule of everything but the original film and Cube; you don’t know how many times I watched Cube growing up because Cube was on and I liked Cube.

The original Candyman comes from writer/director Bernard Rose (creator of Paperhouse, another horror film I really fixated on at a young age), adapted from Clive Barker’s story “The Farewell.” That sentence alone sets my interest in the series in perfect context. Clive Barker’s short stories are among my favorites ever written and I really dig Bernard Rose’s style as a filmmaker. It doesn’t explain what scared me so much at a young age, but the obsession scans with the rest of my life.

The Candyman himself is an enduring horror figure even if his film series never quite reached the popularity of his contemporaries. I think that’s purely a matter of timing. Candyman came out in 1992, where a slasher was still commercially viable but the market was oversaturated.

The Candyman’s exact backstory is a bit fluid, with major details changing from film to film. Don’t let that throw you off the scent: pretty much every major slasher threw away the notion of background continuity in the 1980s-90s.

Rose is responsible for the elements of the lore that people remember. Barker’s Candyman was a jaundiced figure announced by bees who smelled lightly of cotton candy. Candyman is summoned by doubt in the story, which still plays out in the films. Rose added in the mirror/say his name element as well as the deeply American origins that force race and gentrification into the forefront of the story.

To be fair, Tony Todd and Virginia Madsen were allowed to fill in a lot of the blanks on the backstory by Rose. He trusted his actors to contribute to the project. Tony Todd can safely be credited for creating the origin of Candyman we know today thanks to the film. His casting literally changed the story of the film by allowing the historical elements that define the story to take hold.

Candyman was the son of slaves. He built a successful career for himself, which set him in the crosshairs of local racists. When he started dating a white woman, the racists decided to lynch him. They cut off his hand and hung him from a tree where bees ate him alive. He now has a hook for a hand, controls the bees, and takes revenge on anyone who summons him. He usually appears in black neighborhoods because they’re the ones who kept his legacy alive and remembered what happened to him. It may take saying “Candyman” in a mirror five times to summon him, but it doesn’t take long for him to start appearing when people deny he ever existed or the wrong people try to tell his story.

Cut to 2020. Jordan Peele is now a modern master of horror, releasing the critically acclaimed Get Out and Us as his first two features. He begins producing horror films through his own company. He gets the rights to Candyman and hires writer/director Nia DaCosta (creator of Little Woods, a film you should find and watch because it’s excellent) to take the reins. Candyman is wisely leaning into the Jordan Peele connection to get people to notice it, but it is Nia DaCosta who will have her star is born moment when the film is released this June.

This trailer blew up last week and I couldn’t be happier. It has all the elements I expect in the Candyman series, only as actual text and not subtext. This feels like the horror film Velvet Buzzsaw wishes it could be, and I liked Velvet Buzzsaw despite its obvious faults.

The new Candyman is riffing on similar territory to the third film, Day of the Dead, with its focus on an artist creating work about The Candyman. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. The first and third film are the stronger entries because of the artistic exploration of the impact of The Candyman. The first film has the main character investigating the mysterious graffiti of Candyman left at murder scenes, while the third film is Candyman trying to convince one of his descendants, an artist, to join him. The use of visual language as a way to warn against a dangerous urban legend where speaking the name gives it power works.

The say the name five times element is back, though the characters performing it clearly doubt its power. We’re swinging heavily into the original short story without losing the social commentary and that’s a great thing. A short story by a British author was transformed into a horror film that could only happen in American and Nia DaCosta is running with those elements. A ritual can be used to actively summon a force in horror; doubt is a renewable resource that could power the world if we could harness it; doubt about race in America could power the universe. An artist encouraging people to perform the ritual as part of an art exhibit is going to lure skeptics like nothing else. Candyman will be very busy in this story, that’s for sure.

The new Candyman hits theaters in the US on 12 June 25 September.