“Candyman is how we deal with the fact that these things happened, that they’re still happening!”
It’s the explanation given by Burke, played by the brilliant Colman Domingo, for the continued existence of the Candyman, a malevolent spectre reconstituted every few decades for the various crimes of white supremacy. The story typically goes that a black man is killed in a racist hate crime, from the son of a slave being lynched in the nineteenth century for loving a white woman, to a disfigured man in the 1970s being beaten to death by police for allegedly hiding razor blades in Halloween candy. Following this, if someone says his name, “Candyman” five times while looking in a mirror, he will appear and kill them. Burke has come to regard this figure as a necessary evil, a generational reminder of racial pain, but one in need of a new narrative. Director Nia DaCosta and producer Jordan Peele (who together are credited with the screenplay alongside Win Rosenfeld) likewise see Candyman as a symbol of racial pain, and have also decided he needs a new narrative.
The overwhelming consensus regarding this new Candyman is that it is the rare horror remake (or “spiritual sequel”) that is a marked improvement over the original –in this case a 1992 cult slasher film starring Virginia Madsen and Tony Todd. I haven’t seen that film but I can certainly detect where and why this one is better. It fits rather neatly into that Jordan Peele mold of socially critical horror dealing in rather specific racialized ideas. The Horror-of-Blackness-in-America subgenre as it were. But this is not a Peele film, much as he is involved with it and will likely get undue credit for it as the bigger name attached.
This is Nia DaCosta’s movie, only the second for the promising young filmmaker, and yet she demonstrates a substantial degree of directorial skill with vision keenly suited for this genre. She takes otherwise conventional scenes and beats for a horror and finds something new and definitive in them, bolstering their effectiveness. In one of the earliest scenes, a boy sees the Candyman in the laundry room of a rundown apartment building in the Chicago projects -he is introduced in stillness emerging from a giant hole in the wall: his lankiness, sheepskin coat and wide grin far more intimidating than his hook hand or the small sweet he proffers the boy. It’s an exceptionally spooky image, and though there maybe aren’t so many instances as haunting that follow, the film certainly sticks tonally to that spectre of lingering fear -the horror always just within reach, usually behind a mirror.
DaCosta’s film doesn’t totally do away with the continuity of this series. Troy (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) shares an urban legend at the front of the narrative with his friends that recaps the plot of the original movie, and his sisters’ boyfriend Anthony (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) was a significant infant character in that film as well. Anthony is now a visual artist working with a prestigious gallery, who chases the Candyman story as a new source of inspiration for his work -in which he has hit a creative rut due to its’ recent homogenization within conventional topics of “black art”. There’s a palpable frustration to how the movie plays with this (with little of Peele’s usual satirical grain), as though DaCosta personally is venting on the material limitations put upon her art. Anthony also loses his temper a couple times related to this, further illustrating his dissonance within the traditional art world. Virtually everyone he interacts with in this capacity is some stereotypical snob or hipster or critic -but not so much so clichéd that they lose any kind of authenticity.
Anthony’s art is very interesting and conceptually subversive, becoming only more vivid and provocative and violent as the film goes on, his obsession with the Candyman deepening in step with his gradual, gruesome physical disintegration (courtesy of a bee sting received while researching the Candyman’s alleged old haunt). It’s consciously reminiscent of The Fly, as the scab on his hand becomes more and more extreme, growing and mutating in ghastly ways. But it also functions metaphorically, a symbol of the festering racial wounds going back centuries that Anthony is coming to understand the Candyman is a manifestation of. And DaCosta is just as disgusted with it as you are.
Her Candyman seeks not to exploit that trauma, much as it is forced to be referenced by the movies’ contending with it; rather seeking to transform it -take back ownership of it and turn it into an instrument of fury and retribution. That is quite literally the goal of the fanatical Burke, too much scarred by the Candyman and what he has stood for. DaCosta does much the same thing, in taking a film that made use of historic black suffering, but helmed by a white director based on a story by a white author (though in fairness, Clive Barker’s version was centred on class disparity in the U.K.), and re-contextualizing it in a more authentic narrative for a more politically charged climate. Her film is about the relationship between historical black dis-empowerment and the reclamation of black identity, about the cycle of black horrors being birthed from systems and institutions of white supremacy, and about the commodification of black suffering, how it manifests a cultural narrative and how it is wielded in the modern era. And it’s also about ghosts with hook hands slaughtering white folk.
Amid all the thoughtful and deeply potent social, political, and cultural critiques, the film finds more than enough substantive time to be scary -in fact it is very much so within those commentaries. DaCosta sets a strong mood in the scenes precipitating a Candyman appearance, each of which is executed well -the best perhaps being the most narratively incidental: a high school scene that at one point nicely homages Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (another quite chilling one is a death that occurs in an exterior long shot -gradually zooming out in emphasis of the helplessness). And as Anthony’s connection to the demon and his attacks becomes more apparent, DaCosta builds intensity specifically in his every waking moment. We don’t know what it is he’s painting so furiously for a stretch of the film, but it can’t be good. Mateen plays the body horror with considerable anxiety and bottled-up dread, while Teyonah Parris as his girlfriend Brianna acts her own reinvention of a horror movie archetype. Domingo is the films’ stand-out though, turning exposition dumping into an art (and saying “Candyman” in an extremely cool way). The exposition often literally is art, evocative shadow puppetry animation that recalls the paper stylings seen in The Babadook, or perhaps more presumptuously the work of Lotte Reiniger. And given this films’ relationship to art, certain it is that the aesthetic used is intentional.
The ending to Candyman, expressly relevant, political, and inevitable, will be remembered perhaps above much of the film that preceded it. It’s well done and satiates an undercurrent theme that bookends the movie appropriately. But by that time, DaCosta has more than made her point, and made it excellently. And it’s wonderful that the first movie directed by a black woman to open number one at the box office has such a strong foundational ethos, in addition to being as thrilling and creative and technically distinct as it needs to be.
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