Retro Review: Candyman (1992)
Urban legends are a subject that I never get tired of. They function in many of the same ways as fairy tales, with an oral dissemination that makes them feel ever more real, even if there is no basis for them. When they do have a truth, it makes it all the more interesting. Now there are the collective basins of them online with creepy pasta, but they still manage to keep that murky undefinable shape.
Candyman is a film that’s got an amount of nostalgia that endears it to the general populace. To say it didn’t earn that is to not appreciate the great work that went into the film, but to say that it is everything everyone remembers is to fall for that nostalgia.
It opens on a legend reminiscent of Bloody Mary. If you repeat the name “Candyman” five times into a mirror, he’ll appear to you and kill you with his hook. It’s simple and familiar to most people.
We then see it’s a study by two grad students, Helen and Bernadette, for their thesis. Janitors in the college happen to hear an interview and comment they’ve heard about the Candyman, and that he’d killed a woman in their apartment building, in the projects Cabrini Green.
Helen researches the story she and Bernadette heard and discovers it was real. With this break, they have something unique. They go to investigate Cabrini Green where they discover incredible graffiti and meet Anne-Marie, a single mother attempting to live her life.
While at dinner with her husband Trevor, a professor, and his fellow academics, Helen is laughed at and belittled about covering the topic of the Candyman, as one of the other professors has covered it in depth before. He shares the origin of the story: a talented slave that falls for a wealthy man’s daughter, who has his hand chopped off, replaced with a hook and is murdered by bee stings.
Helen returns to the projects to further document everything and gets brutally attacked by a man with a hook. She files a report and identifies the man in a line up.
Soon after, Helen is visited by an ominous man that knows her name. He reveals a hook in place of his hand. Helen recognizes him or something about him. He reminds her of the art and graffiti she’d been documenting.
She passes out and wakes up in a bathroom in a pool of blood and someone screaming outside. The screaming is Anne-Marie’s and the blood is her dog’s and her infant son is missing. Police break into the apartment finding Helen holding a bloody meat cleaver over Anne-Marie.
Helen is taken into police custody and her life begins to spin out of control and it is revealed her relationship to the Candyman is greater than she thought.
Candyman is based on Clive Barker’s short story The Forbidden. While the two are similar in theme, the film expands on the story and adds more than was ever in the short. The most prominent of which is the theme of race. The Candyman of The Forbidden doesn’t have a slave past and is set in England in a council estate. Whether it be due to the changing of the setting from England to Chicago, the casting of Tony Todd, or a choice purely from the writer and director, the inclusion of the slave past infuses the story with energy and relevancy that the original never had. It also feels like a natural inclusion and something that is absolutely American. In classic ghost stories, the past is drummed in order to manifest the horror
Further, in following the source material, the graffiti and urban legend is found in a poverty stricken area, which in the US is regularly disproportionally occupied by minorities. This marriage of themes works perfectly.
On that note of perfection, the role of the Candyman is performed by Tony Todd, in a career defining performance. Todd imbues the character with stature, pose and a voice that is mesmerizing, haunting, and dread inducing. The performance is comparable to Robert Englund in the Nightmare on Elm Street series or Christopher Lee as Dracula where their simple presence carries power.
That said, the amount of horror plays very different from the standard fair. Candyman doesn’t seem to care about scaring you outright. It has a story to tell you with elements of horror but it puts them together in such a way that it isn’t ever really surprising. The first appearance of the titular character comes rather late and then he terrorizes Helen by being present and murderous in the light of day, invisible to everyone but her. Todd is brilliant and terrifying and the direction and decisions make it work but it’s much more of a tragedy horror film than something scary. The horrors are more cerebral or possibly a dread that sticks with you, but it’s much more contemplative than a slasher or something that wants to live in the dark and be an unknown force of evil. Candyman wants to be understood. In the film he wants to be remembered literally.
One of the strongest elements of the film is the music composed by Phillip Glass. Glass’s simple repeating themes building into orchestral works with choirs is on its own worthy of admiration. Beyond matching the mood and tones of the scene, his compositions set them.
The dissection of urban legends and their role in society is a theme carried over from The Forbidden. The Candyman himself here is motivated to dive that home to Helen after she destroys his legend by identifying her attacker. The movie wants the viewer to think about this all. The Candyman needs to reconstruct his legend in order to reclaim his power and the way to do that, and to punish Helen, is through Helen.
Along with this is the theme of race. Helen is a white woman in the middle of an urban legend set in a black ghetto. It understands this and points it out for what it is worth, having Helen comment on the attack on her getting the police to find the perpetrator while they couldn’t do anything when the black female resident was murdered. This is a film that was always wanting to talk about race and marginalization. Helen and Bernadette are surrounded by male scholars. The innocents that we meet in Cabrini Green are Anne-Marie and Jake, a young boy.
I bring this up because of comments made about the topic of race and the new film. Anyone that didn’t notice the theme of race in Candyman (1992) was not paying attention.
Candyman is an excellent film but not the film nostalgia might drive people to remember. I’d dare anyone that remembers it so well to re-watch it. It’s still got a lot to say, and maybe even more than you remember, but the outright horror isn’t there like in other Clive Barker works like Hellraiser or Midnight Meat Train. What is there is a film with a great idea and performances that is a commentary on society and a horrifying urban legend.
