Candyman (1992)

               I do like Clive Barker but none of the really interesting ideas in this movie came from him. The central horror conceit is certainly his, the idea of a university student doing semiotics research into urban graffiti and stumbling upon the legend and then the reality of the Candyman is directly from his original story “The Forbidden.” Some of the imagery is even taken from Barker’s descriptions. It also keeps a lot of names and incidents and the climax is largely the same with some key details changed. The idea of a killer lingering on as a legend, existing because of belief, didn’t originate with Barker and it’s not really the central point of his story which is basically a sketch of a failed housing estate and some musings on the way systemized violence can become somehow necessary to an underclass. Barker is fundamentally a shit-stirrer, and I think the original story is less an example of class-snobbery and more of a troll-adjacent working out of some ideas knocking around his head. It’s not a bad story but attributing the cultural staying power of this film to Clive Barker is some stolen valor nonsense.

The Philip Glass score makes even this unsettling.

              Everything about this movie that made people take notice came from the director and writer Bernard Rose, with some input from the actors. I was previously completely unfamiliar with his work, which seems to have been fairly important in the development of digital filmmaking. It’s important to note that he’s British, which explains the blunt and incredulous way this movie frames race relations in America as it’s very much the work of an outsider trying to make a point as directly as he can. The script moves the action from the Liverpool housing estate of Barker’s story to the Cabrini Green housing project in Chicago and changes the killer from a yellow-skinned, blue-lipped figure in patchwork clothes to a murdered Black artist in a stylish coat, which radically recontextualizes literally everything about it.

              People in politics fear-monger about crime today, of course, but in the early 90’s US crime rates genuinely were at historic highs. In 1992, the year of this movie, the murder rate for Chicago for 34 for every 100,000 residents, the highest ever recorded. It’s steadily declined ever since, with a huge spike during the pandemic years. By moving the action there and placing the setting specifically in the real-life neighborhood of Cabrini Green the director Rose was Saying Things. Which is exactly what horror movies are for, so this movie should be applauded for simple ambition if nothing else.

              The script was instantly considered a hot item within the industry and several stars pursued roles in it. They originally wanted Eddie Murphy for the Candyman role but couldn’t afford him (I have doubts whether he was ever interested). Tony Todd wanted to work with Rose due to some of his previous films and since he’s partially responsible for the Candyman’s look and background I’d say the production made the right call in casting him. Star Virginia Madsen was originally supposed to play the main character’s best friend Bernadette, with the character of Helen set to be performed by Rose’s wife Alexandra Pigg. At some point the part of Bernadette was changed to be Black, which has some plot relevancy, and that cost Madsen that role, and then Pigg discovered shortly before filming that she was pregnant, and thus Madsen got her part. Which is good because Madsen is great in this. I kept getting distracted by how much she looked like Gillian Anderson, but that’s my fault, not hers. The only other actor of note is Xander Berkely as Helen’s asshole husband Trevor, and he’s only notable because I’ve watched “The Mentalist” like four times from start to finish. Oh, Ted Raimi has a small role, that’s fun.

              The opening scene of the movie is something of a misdirect. We see a couple flirting, clearly leading up to sex, and then the woman dares the guy to say the name Candyman in the mirror five times. This summoning part wasn’t in the original story which makes me wonder if the whole ‘saying names into a mirror’ idea is an American thing. It does come up again in the movie a couple of times, including a key scene between Helen and a psychiatrist, but it never becomes mechanically important like it can in other horror movies. At no point during the exciting climax does one character yell to another, “We’ve got to get to the mirror before he does!” or anything like that. Turns out that this is a story being told to Helen and Bernadette as part of their research into urban legends. When she’s listening to her recordings later a cleaning lady overhears the name Candyman and volunteers to Helen that one of her coworkers knows something about him, a murder, and Cabrini Green, and we’re off the races.

              The movie is kind of mixed on its attitude towards these academics. Most of the ones depicted are pretentious assholes, including Helen to some extent. Their lives of wealth and privilege are meant to contrast sharply with the residents of the housing project, and maybe professors in Chicago were living in luxury condos in the early 90’s but watching it in 2024 I had to invent backstories for everyone involving trust funds and wills left by eccentric uncles. Certainly Barker in his story and I think Rose in this movie are very aware of the borderline nature of having a white graduate student of semiotics travel to a lower-class area of the city to study their culture, how it can easily unravel into condescension or appropriation, but to me the underlying theory behind her study of graffiti and its connection to the creation and promulgation of urban legends sounds pretty interesting. I don’t think the movie is arguing that what Helen’s doing is inherently bad or that the subject matter is unworthy so much as it’s placing her goals and motivations in stark contrast to the lives of the people who live there. That being said she really only does talk to a handful of those Black residents and they don’t get much to do in the story, so it ends up being a mixed bag.

              This is very much a movie of two halves, bisected neatly at the 44-minute mark by the appearance of Candyman himself. The first half is the story of Helen becoming fascinated by the story of Candyman and his relation to a couple of real-life murders. She finds a news article confirming the cleaning lady’s story about a woman murdered recently in Cabrini Green then travels to the apartment along with Bernadette. She runs across a neighbor who lives next door to the now-abandoned apartment, Anne-Marie. The news story mentioned that the killer broke into the apartment from the one next door through the back of the medicine cabinet, a construction oversight due to insufficient funding for the housing project. They confirm the hole is there and Helen wants to see what’s on the other side. Bernadette flatly refuses. Helen crawls through and finds more graffiti inside, including the repeated spraypainted phrase ‘sweets for the sweet.’ After she crawls through another hole she turns around to see she’s just emerged from the mouth of a striking floor-to-ceiling painting of what turns out to be Candyman’s face. She even finds a little shrine containing candy bars with razor blades inside. She runs out of film and Bernadette finally convinces her to leave. Instead they swing by Anne-Marie’s apartment where they meet her adorable baby and assure her they’re not police, they’re academics. For some reason this persuades her to talk to them and she tells them about overhearing the murder.

              Sharp cut from Anne-Marie’s horrified face to Helen surrounded by her rich friends at a restaurant as they scoff at her research. One of them condescendingly explains he wrote a study on the spread of the Candyman myth in the Cabrini Green housing project ten years ago and also drops the backstory of the real-life man behind the myth. He explains that he was the son of a freed slave who’d gotten rich by inventing a shoe manufacturing device after the Civil War. He’d grown up in polite society and become a sought-after portrait artist. He fell in love with a white woman and got her pregnant, causing a mob to attack him. They sawed off his painting hand then covered him in honey so that bees stung him to death. They burned his body and scattered his ashes over the area now known as Cabrini Green. It’s kind of vaguely implied later in the movie that Helen resembles the woman he’d fallen in love with, which might explain why he fixates on her, but the movie doesn’t really confirm that.

She's about to have a rough few days.

              She goes back to the murder apartment to take more pictures and runs into a little kid named Jake outside Anne-Marie’s apartment. He says he can’t talk about the murder because Candyman will get him but she tells him to trust her. He leads her to an abandoned set of bathrooms by a basketball court and tells the story of a kid who got his dick ripped off by Candyman. While she’s inside taking pictures a group of gang members walks in, the lead one carrying a metal hook. They threaten her a little bit and knock her out, which is dumb because she goes directly to the police and as a middle-class white woman is instantly believed. She picks the gang member out of a line up and the police are more than happy to use this as an excuse to pin all the recent Cabrini Green murders on him. Jake is also there at the police station and he’s mad at Helen for getting him involved in all this. He says he’s still worried about Candyman and Helen explains that he’s not real, it was just that gang member. Jake looks crestfallen that his boogeyman isn’t real, and this doesn’t seem like the lynchpin for the entire rest of the movie but it sure is.

              The second half of the movie is Candyman taking revenge on Helen for making Jake doubt his existence. The kid is only a stand-in for the rest of the residents, of course, you have to compress things for film, but since he’s the only character who is shown losing his faith I like the idea that this vengeful spirit of a murdered 19^th century African American artist was really invested in this one kid’s opinion of him. For a little while getting attacked by gang members while doing research is the best thing that could have happened to Helen: her name’s all over the newspapers, there’s interest in getting her research published as a high-profile book, she’s fielding interview requests, things are looking great. Then Candyman appears to her in a parking garage and her life turns to shit.

              The confrontation itself is very interesting. At no point during this scene does he physically threaten her. For most of it he’s standing on the other side of the garage. But Tony Todd has such a deep, sensuous voice and the dialogue lifted from Barker’s story is so baroque and poetic that instead of feeling threated Helen kind of drifts off into a reverie. Apparently this was done by Madsen actually getting hypnotized before these takes. Her eyes flutter and sort of drift closed and then suddenly she’s lying face down in a pool of blood on an apartment floor while a woman is screaming in the other room. She stumbles to her feet and out of the room, finding a dog with its head cut off and a huge knife lying next to it. She picks up the knife and wanders towards the screaming. She finds herself back in Anne-Marie’s apartment with the woman herself standing above an empty, bloody crib, howling. She sees Helen and attacks her, demanding to know where her baby is. Eventually Helen cuts her arm with the knife in an effort to get her to back away and that’s when the police burst in.

              Just about the entire second half of the runtime is original to the movie and it’s very interesting in that context. When Helen’s arrested they include a scene where a female officer disdainfully orders her to strip so they can catalogue her clothes, and the scene deliberately lingers on her humiliation and confusion. The detective who was happily chatting with her earlier about locking up the gang leader is now treating her with contempt. She wastes her one phone call on her husband, who’s not home because he’s cheating on her with an undergrad. When she’s finally released the next day there’s a press swarm outside and she’s told the only reason the police haven’t charged her yet is that they’re waiting to find the baby’s body to charge her with murder.

              While she’s recuperating, she enlarges some photos she’d taken earlier and finds Candyman in the background of a shot. She goes to the bathroom and looks at herself in the mirror. We see her decide to deliberately not say his name five times in the mirror, and then his hook hand comes through the medicine cabinet anyways. He hits her with that whammy again and while she’s lolling in a stupor on the floor Bernaddette stops by and lets herself in. Candyman rips her apart, and when Helen comes to again it’s in a condo full of policemen. This time she’s taken directly to a mental institution and gets put on some high-quality anti-psychotics. When she finally meets with the shrink working for her defense she discovers she’s been there a month. Madsen has a great moment when the psychiatrist asks her if she has any proof of her crazy story and we watch the expression on her face change as she comes to a decision. She deliberately turns her face to a mirror and says “Candyman” five times. He obligingly shows up and kills the shrink for her. He rightly declares, “You are mine now,” frees her from her restraints, and flies backwards out of the window. Helen quickly escapes by knocking out an orderly and stealing her uniform.

She has had a rough few days.

              The last half hour of the movie is pretty good, but I want to focus on just a couple of things at the very end. Due to shenanigans Helen rescues the baby (still alive in Candyman’s clutches after she’d been admitted for a whole month, all right) and destroys Candyman with fire but dies in the process. In the original story the residents of the estate were aware of Candyman and complicit in his existence, the story even refers to them as conspirators. The movie changes it to where the residents are victims and are grateful for Helen’s rescue of the baby, to the point where Anne-Marie and the rest of them pay their respects at her funeral. For some reason Jake is accompanying her, and in a gesture of some kind drops Candyman’s hook into the grave onto her casket. I guess after the ghost burned up he left the hook? After that we watch Trevor grieving and regretting the way he treated Helen. He mutters her name too many times while he’s looking at himself in a mirror and accidentally summons her vengeful spirit. She’s now holding the hook and uses it to murder him. I’m fine with this, he was an asshole. Then we cut back to what’s presumably Cabrini Green and a new graffiti mural depicting Helen as a spirit in the same way that Candyman previously was.

              I get the idea behind this, that one urban legend has been replaced by another, but I’m not sure how comfortable I am with a Black cultural figure with a concrete historical connection to the region getting easily replaced by a random outside white lady who did one admittedly nice thing. They must’ve given her a mulligan on that decapitated dog. I do like how they keep using Jake as a stand in for community sentiment because it lets me spin up a scenario where the kid’s secretly a reality-warper who brings stories he’s been told to life and Helen’s going to get replaced in a couple of years by a deadly Pikachu.

              I’ve drawn a line under including any more modern remakes of classic horror movies in this month than I’ve already scheduled. I’m only watching three and I already think that’s pushing it. I am tempted to watch the 2021 version, though, because it’s such a perfect candidate for a remake that digs more into the racial tensions of the original, which seems to be what it was doing. Maybe I’ll watch it on my own time. As for this movie, I’m so glad that its reputation was correct. I can absolutely understand how Todd’s Candyman became a horror icon, and while I’m sure I’ve seen Virginia Madsen in other things this is the movie that made me a fan. It has more going on under the surface than any three other movies I’ve watched this month and contains some decently disturbing imagery. Highly recommended.