The beauty of good horror movies is that they reflect on human character in times of desperation and challenges. Some of the greatest horror makers have known this, birthing 20th century classics such as Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and modern landmarks such as Ari Aster’s Midsommar. Oftentimes, these films are also a reflection of a deeper, real fear, molded after folktales that allude to a historical period and human realities that are sometimes neglected.
This, particularly, is what makes the Candyman series so great.
Candyman not only touches on the supernatural as well as human attitudes in times of fear, but also serves as an allegory to a horrible, often-neglected reality — a comment on the multignerational horrors of American slavery, unfolding procatively in a modern world of racial injustice as a haunting past plagues the present. Thirty years after the first Candyman movie came out, Jordan Peele — a modern film titan and Black trailblazer — couldn’t have found a better time to bring the iconic film series back.
Candyman. Candyman. Candyman. Candyman…
The premise of the entire series, which is based on the novel “The Forbidden” by Clive Barker, is simple: if you say Candyman five times in front of a mirror, a tall black man will appear behind you and slash you with his hook. This story in itself sounds uninteresting, similar to the dozens of overtold mirror-appearances tales that speak of Blood Mary, Beetlejuice, and even Lady in White. But, there’s one aspect of this story that jumps at one immediately: our story’s central character and terrifying slasher is Black.
While this sounds like every pre-21st-century movie ever made, where the racially-charged message is that black men are ultimately harmful, violent in nature, and uncontrollable subhumans, this is not the case with Candyman. Candyman became a monster because of his blackness — but not in the way that was aired on the big screen up to the 90s.
His story is traced back to post-slavery America in the 19th century, where a black son of a former slave was kidnapped, beaten, had his right hand sawed off, and got honey thrown at so that bees could sting him as he bled to death by a group of white men, women, and children — and this was all because he fell in love with a white woman, who reciprocated his love. This innocent man, guilty of the most human vulnerability, then became the much-feared slasher Candyman, seeking revenge while bearing a troubled soul.
Centuries later, he haunts anyone who dares say his name, particularly targeting those who doubt his existence.
The story in itself is a convoluted masterpiece that paints against a backdrop of racial relations. From a black man suffering for a white woman, to the horrors of slavery-era racism haunting the present-day Black America, to the threat that all white complecency represents — Candyman shifted the paradigm of storytelling, launching a new kind of real human horror to the big screen.
“[The original film] was always about the cyclical nature of violence…. How violence begets violence and how urban legends are created from these really horrifying moments in our history and a community’s history and our collective conscious,” said Nia Dacosta, the Director behind the Peele-produced re-make, in a press interview.
As if making a remake of the much-revered first movie wasn’t enough, Dacosta is the first black woman to direct a major horror film — a big celebration for all. Tony Todd, the original Candyman and post-Duane-Jones Black icon in horror, is reportedly going to reprise his role too — a long-awaited reprisal that all fans are eager to see.
The movie was supposed to come out this month, but it was postponed due to the pandemic. Now it is scheduled to come out in 2021 — and in a time where the world is fighting against racial injustices, the awaital of the movie comes as a plus for the conversation of racial realities. Candyman, in all its glory, serves as a representation of the implications that this country’s past has in contemporary times, serving a tangible meaning to the word horror.
In this sense, the frightening terror is that, most of the time, we don’t have to conjure his name for Candyman to appear.
