Yahya Abdul-Mateen II in Candyman (2021) (Universal Pictures)
The Candyman films (1992 and 2021) set out to tell a harrowing narrative of historical and modern-day racial violence in Chicago. Oddly, this began when director Bernard Rose bought the rights to Clive Barker’s novella The Forbidden. The Forbidden dealt with themes of class and social abandonment in the UK. Still, Rose, after scouting a Chicago location, was shocked by its social deprivation and saw the opportunity to incorporate racial elements that came from setting the story in the city’s Cabrini-Green housing project. This was the spark he believed would turn the story into something bigger. Considering the resulting film paved the way for two sequels and a 2021 reboot, he was proven correct.
The story follows a graduate student, Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen), on the road to completing her thesis on urban legends and folklore, which sends her to the Cabrini-Green housing project to investigate the murder of Ruthie-Jean, a woman who reportedly died at the hands of the mysterious urban legend, Candyman. There, she meets Anne-Marie McCoy (Vanessa Williams), a single mother raising her infant son Anthony, and learns the origins of Candyman. As the son of a slave, Daniel Robitaille was commissioned to paint rich White families. After falling in love with a client and impregnating her, Daniel was viciously murdered by a lynch mob. This unjust killing led to his rebirth as Candyman. After aiding in the arrest of a gang leader calling himself Candyman, Helen is haunted by the real Candyman, who is now determined to reanimate the fear around his name.
The film found commercial success, grossing over $25 million on a budget of less than $9 million. As a White British filmmaker, Rose used Helen Lyle’s character to his advantage, centering the story around her “whiter savior” complex. Helen, instead of coming into the predominantly Black community and rescuing them from their dire circumstances, stirs greater unrest. As Rose points out, it is an inversion of the trope. The film aims for nuanced subversion that demonstrates why the White savior trope is harmful. After Helen Lyle summons Candyman, he kidnaps Anne-Marie McCoy’s baby, exemplifying how her actions affect the residents of Cabrini-Green.
The most recent Candyman (2021), directed by Nia DaCosta, reimagines the mythos in the modern day, resurrecting Candyman through Anthony McCoy (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), a Black Chicago artist who has moved to a gentrified Cabrini-Green. In pursuit of artistic inspiration, he digs into the project’s history, discovering that he was stolen by Candyman as a baby and rescued by Helen Lyle, essentially continuing the events of the first movie. Featuring a Black protagonist allows the film to focus on a different issue, namely spotlighting the exploitation by Black artists against their community. Anthony paints images of Sherman Field’s (Michael Hargrove) beaten body after he was senselessly slain at the hands of the police. This work does not serve to bring justice for the victim; rather, it is created for the consumption of an unsatisfied art critic and arrogant art dealer.
Director Nia DaCosta had a vision for the film that paid respect not only to the source material but also to the real world that inspired it. Juggling gentrification, cyclical storytelling, racial trauma, and artistic exploitation, DaCosta understood how massive an undertaking the film would be. The film is certainly packed with different social issues. Unfortunately, the density at which these issues are featured in both films does a disservice to the narrative at times. Further, the use of racial violence and trauma itself is worth examining in the larger cinematic context. While Rose has a clear vision that inverts the White savior complex, it does not escape the often-voyeuristic undertones that permeate films featuring Black trauma. It even risks overwriting the true stories that inspire the storytelling.
When the murders in the film are inspired by real deaths, namely Ruthie McCoy, who called 911 to report intruders breaking in through her bathroom cabinet but was ignored, as detailed in an article by Steve Bogira, the film risks overshadowing these cases. Will more people remember the real Ruthie McCoy or the fictional Ruthie Jean? Rose makes a tradeoff when he tells the story from Helen’s point of view. The residents of Cabrini-Green have their voices blunted, with only Anne-Marie getting any backstory. This relegates much of the Black voices to set dressing. Candyman’s history dwarfs all other characters, but it is steeped in tragedy—making his perspective easily exploitable as the antagonist of the film. The Candyman reboot walks a similar line.
Though Candyman (2021) centers on a Black character, rendered an outsider by his class position, it occupies an ambiguous space of where to critique a trope; it participates in it. The spectacle of Black suffering is condemned by the film when Anthony paints Sherman, conveyed by his pretentious and meandering explanation of his work to the art critic and, frankly, mediocre painting skills. Much like the tidal wave of race-based horror that followed Get Out, directed by Jordan Peele, who also produced and co-wrote Candyman, the extent to which the story relies on exploitation lies in the execution. Where does the horror come from? Is it just the brutality that Sherman Fields faces, or is it a layered narrative that asks audiences to reflect on the historical trauma that has woven itself into the fabric of our lives? To that point, who is the film for? While it found success, pulling in over $77 million on a $25 million budget, it is not clear that the film adds enough elements to draw in a new audience. Audiences typically cling to horror films for the fear evoked by their antagonists, but by the end of Candyman (2021), the fear is refocused on a different target.
At the end of the film, the police shoot and kill Anthony, who dies in the arms of Brianna Cartwright (Teyonah Parris), who is promptly arrested. The officer threatens Brianna, giving her the choice to attest that Anthony attacked the officer or risk incarceration herself. The idea of Candyman is turned on its head when Brianna realizes there is only one way—to call his name. Anthony, fully transformed into Candyman, rises and enacts his revenge on the cops, letting Brianna go free as a witness to continue the story of Candyman. By the end of the film, the horror is the police violence itself, and whatever unknowns Candyman may bring falls short of the barbarity she will face at the hands of the police force. But the police present a real-world horror, something many viewers do not need to watch the film to experience. While it offers some interesting notions of internal community policing, Candyman may be more successful if there was more distance between the brutality and the plot devices, allowing the story to embrace story beats that are a little less on the nose.
Central to both films lie themes of collective memory and trauma, though they are approached differently. In her investigation of Candyman, Helen Lyle chalked the story up to the residents of Cabrini-Green, “attributing the daily horrors of their lives to a mythical figure,” flattening the real history into mythos. Rose’s Candyman, while acknowledging the racist and violent murder of Daniel Robitaille, fails to explicitly connect the reverberations of racial trauma in the form of lynch mobs with the ongoing brutality at the hands of the police. Instead, Candyman is consumed with the desire to have his name immortalized in the minds of Cabrini-Green residents, feeding on their fear and devotion. Through killing Helen and baby Anthony, he attempts to achieve his goal.
Candyman (2021) carries on the torch of immortalization in a literal rebirth of Candyman through Sherman Fields, a man wrongly accused of giving tainted candy to a White child and is subsequently brutally murdered by the police. DaCosta complicates the legend with a new Candyman being born of state-sanctioned violence driven by White supremacy—a step the 1992 version did not quite make. This deviation has audiences dig beyond Helen’s interpretation based on the social ills of drugs and gang violence. The myth is turned into a response to external forces rather than internal, fully recontextualizing the myth with Candyman emerging through the bodies of victims of police brutality, thereby allowing Candyman to be revived again and again. If the circle of violence continues, so will the legend of Candyman.
But why make horror on segregation, poverty, and police brutality when these phenomena are already so horrifying? Is the point just for outsiders to ogle at the suffering inflicted on Black communities, reducing it to nothing more than a plot device? There are plenty of movies that do just that. The renditions of Candyman have a vision for their critiques of exploitative art. For those overcoming experiences with trauma, art immortalizes both pain and healing. These films have messages to tell the world about both, but they also want to have messages about many things. When storytellers tell stories of violence and racial trauma that are not personal to them, the intent is secondary to the execution. In the zeitgeist of fictitious films that take inspiration from real exploitation, if they want to do more than take from those already suffering, the work needs to be able to give back. It must captivate audiences, complicate preconceptions, and make audiences ask, “What if?” It should motivate audiences to put themselves in the protagonist’s shoes and examine how they would react in that scenario. Not only is that a key aspect of the horror genre, but also social progress. Just showing the brutality is not enough. At that point, why not make a documentary?
