He is the writing on the wall, the whisper in the classroom. Without these things, he is nothing.
Since its release in 1992, Bernard Rose’s Candyman and the haunting specter at the center of it have existed like a persistent itch at the recesses of horror pop culture. Never quite forgotten (ensured by the movie’s consistent cult fanbase), the titular character and his terrifying presence have bled into the social stratosphere in a way that extends beyond the film’s niche audience. Even if you haven’t seen the movie, you wouldn’t dare say his name five times in the mirror. You know the story, and as it continues to spread, the legend lives. A legend that began with the slow dread of Clive Barker’s original short story, The Forbidden, before contorting into a more familiar, tragic phantom with Rose’s hypnotic adaptation. Now, almost 30 years after the release of the original movie, Nia DaCosta has spun her own tale into the grotesque tapestry with 2021’s Candyman — a movie that contemporizes the franchise while also emphasizing the horrific allegory at the center of the original.
While there’s been much conversation surrounding the vision of the sequel, one thing is immutable — it is Nia DaCosta’s movie. There are certainly flourishes to the movie’s tone that will no doubt be familiar to fans of Jordan Peele and Monkeypaw Productions (due to Peele’s screenwriting credit alongside DaCosta and Win Rosenfeld), but DaCosta brings a spiraling intensity to the film’s atmosphere that feels unique in comparison to Peele’s other horror outings. Where the original was hypnotically and painstakingly paced, the sequel has the drive of watching a fever dream unfold into a full-fledged nightmare, escalated by the frenzied madness of Robert A.A. Lowe’s score. Despite the differences of their execution, however, DaCosta’s sequel is the rare example of a franchise movie that’s not just a narrative continuation of its predecessor, but one that’s also locked in a perpetual dialogue with it.
Unlike Bernard Rose’s subtle approach to the horror of 1992’s Candyman, this most recent installment leans into an abrasive, brutalistic depiction of the titular character’s killings. The violence only begins after Anthony McCoy (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II in a particularly vulnerable performance), a Black painter eager for the validation that comes with success, accidentally resurrects the legend of Candyman by using him as inspiration for his work. Even though the first film was a huge stride in terms of African-American representation in horror, it was always at the center of a paradoxical line of logic: if Candyman is the ghost of a victim of racial violence, then why is his violence inflicted on other underprivileged Black people? DaCosta takes that narrative snag and turns it on its head by having the movie’s Black characters maintain a degree of informed caution towards Candyman’s legend. This leaves his influence to be spread by those with a contemptuous view of his legend, as well as those who are ignorant of the cultural significance of the Chicago ghettos that have now been uprooted for white consumption.
Indeed, many of the movie’s victims were white members of the wealthy Chicago art scene; a culture of people all too familiar with the suffering presented by Cabrini-Green and other ghettos, but none too enthusiastic to accept responsibility for its transformation. Teyonah Parris sums it up best as Brianna (the resident art curator and Anthony’s girlfriend) by saying “white people built the ghetto and then erased it when they realized they built the ghetto.” Candyman’s power is in word of mouth, the virulent spread of an idea, and who better to spread that legend than the very people who are eager to digest and dissect the cultural impact of a place and a people they don’t truly understand.
Despite the film being hyper-focused on its critique of gentrification, one of its biggest flaws is the way by which it presents its argument. Many of the characters in the movie offer open and frank discussion on the host of problems created by the erasure of Black spaces, but unlike the 1992 original, we don’t visually get to spend much time with those spaces. Helen Lyle was forced into Cabrini-Green itself; we saw her encounter its poor residents, and we saw the proof of the building’s neglect within its very walls. In 2021’s Candyman, the few glimpses of Cabrini-Green we do get are while Anthony is exploring the neighborhood and talking to Colman Domingo’s Burke, a wiry resident of the neighborhood with a very intimate awareness of its history. Cabrini-Green, like other ghettos, is a well of suffering to be drawn from and dissected by hopefuls like Anthony as well as the culture vultures surrounding him and Brianna.
It’s in this never-ending phenomenon that the movie’s central thesis starts to take shape — a metatextual examination of our culture’s obsession with Black pain as a vehicle to turn a profit. Desperate for a chance to be artistically relevant again, Anthony catches wind of the legend of Candyman and at its root finds a traumatic core that he can splatter onto his canvas for the sake of notoriety. Even with a contextual understanding of the violent cultural upheaval caused by gentrification, Anthony still craves the spotlight that comes from having the white gaze casted onto his work. He’s almost giddy with excitement after a newscaster reads the name of his artwork during a report on a ghastly double homicide, and the more that Anthony continues to plumb the depths of Cabrini-Green’s past for inspiration, the more he begins to lose himself both physically and mentally to the trauma he’s exposed to. Some of the movie’s most grotesque physical horror takes place here, as the fruits of Anthony’s labor start to manifest as horrific rotting flesh, growing up his arm and creeping up his neck. DaCosta builds some truly disgusting sequences here that feel at home in one of Cronenberg’s video nasties, and by the time Anthony realizes the chilling implications of what he’s brought back to life, it’s too late to save him from the figurative and literal scars made on him by the impact of his work.
This is something that Brianna is all-too familiar with. Teyonah Parris’ performance is arguably the emotional centerpiece of the film, and she plays it with a quiet unease that slowly escalates along with Anthony’s despair. In a scene that the movie frequently references in slivers of flashbacks and quick acknowledgements in dialogue, we learn that her father was a painter who committed suicide after struggling with depression for most of his life. In a movie a little less crowded, this subplot could have been explored with far stronger conviction, but here it’s implied through Brianna’s immediate apprehension to Anthony’s sudden attachment to such a traumatic well of inspiration. She fully understands the psychological toll left behind by vivid impressions of trauma, and we get the impression from her that she’s tired of being surrounded by people who seek to conjure it up as part of a long-con. Throughout the movie she seeks to advance her career as an artistic curator, but everywhere she turns another critic and art historian wants her to use her pain, to harness it like a dark battery she can flick on whenever she needs to focus. Both Brianna and DaCosta understand it doesn’t work like that. Gazing back into an abyss of violence and pain only serves to hollow a person out and fill them with that same void. We see this regularly in artists who talk about working on projects with disturbing subject matter as well as the collective cultural response to Hollywood’s yearly fixation on movies that feel like trauma porn.
Literally and metaphorically, the legend of Candyman represents this. In the original, Bernard Rose and Tony Todd crafted the story of Daniel Robitalle — a free Black man murdered by a lynch mob for falling in love with a white woman. His story carries on the specter of his vengeance, and it ebbs and flows through each generation. In the sequel, the screenwriters seek to connect his story to others — to weave a living tapestry of pain in which victims are connected by the horrific legacy of American lynching, transforming them into a story of undeath and retribution. No longer is Candyman the spirit of one individual, but instead the collective consciences of a legion of lives snuffed out in anti-Black violence. There’s a reason the movie’s rallying cry is “Say his name.” This is a chant that carries generations of murdered young men and women, people who have been exploited post-death and turned into static images — pieces of artwork, the subject of films, marketing logos. Victims of violence have become martyrs, names to be digested, exploited, and ultimately forgotten by the very culture that killed and commodified them in the first place.
While the myriad of ideas that Nia DaCosta seeks to explore might leave one feeling overwhelmed by the sum of its parts, Candyman’s central question is one it explores right up to the final minute mark: What is the utility of Black pain? What is the purpose of this horrific interconnected story, this generational legacy connecting us to the bloody foundations this nation was built on? Anthony believed it to be a resource, only for it to literally graft itself onto his skin. Burke believed it to be a weapon, a sword to be wielded against the very mobs responsible for its creation. But in the end, only Brianna survives long enough to discover the truth of the matter. Black pain isn’t here to be exploited, weaponized, digested or devoured by those seeking a quick fix of intellectual stimulation. It’s here to be remembered, to be felt and processed by those bound to the tangible possibility of becoming the next chapter in a long and macabre story. It’s the writing on the wall, the whisper in the classroom. It’s the smell of blood carried by Black people across the globe, and especially here in America. Candyman is a meta-textual retelling of that long-familiar story, one that urges you to say the name, never to forget it.
