On a dare, you enter the bathroom with a friend. You turn off the lights. You look into the void where your face should be and say his name: “Candyman. Candyman. Candyman.”
A noise startles you. Raspy breath, the buzzing of an insect. Did it come from behind you? From in front of you in the mirror? You clench your fists and say it again: “Candyman. Candyman.”
You see a shape stir in the reflection and scream, but you leave the bathroom hot-cheeked and giggling. You and your friend are so silly. No one could ever come through the mirror.
The latest adaptation of Candyman, directed by Nia DaCosta, is as thrilling and terrifying as the original.
The film has more innovative cinematography and sustained long-takes of Candyman cutting his victims to pieces while he can only be viewed in a reflection.
The 1992 film, featuring Tony Todd as the murderous ghost of artist Daniel Robitaille, tells the story of the vengeful spirit of a lynched man with a hook where his hand once was.
Candyman’s most terrifying aspect is its connection to real life.
It’s based on the 1987 Chicago murder of Ruthie Mae McCoy (namesake of Candyman characters Ruthie Jean and Anna Mae McCoy), who called police to report someone was coming through her bathroom mirror.
Her calls were ignored and Ruthie Mae was found over a day later, shot to death in her Abbot Homes project-housing apartment. Her story was later made famous by a Sept. 1987 Chicago Reader article.
Though the specter of state neglect hovers over DaCosta’s Candyman, her addition to the franchise explores more recent abuses at the hands of police, directly recalling the 1991 police beating of Rodney King and the 2016 shooting of Philando Castile.
Nia DaCosta’s continuation of the Candyman franchise is a timely and brilliant examination of police brutality, gentrification and state violence as both Black heritage and Black destiny.
Rather than creating a film that simply displays violence against Black people as plot, DaCosta forces us to look deeply into the mirror and face the sinister practice of commodification and consumption of collective Black trauma as art.
Xavier Burgin, San Jose State U film and TV lecturer, said he’s looking forward to seeing DaCosta’s version of the horror classic.
Burgin is the director of the critical documentary on Black film history, “Horror Noire.”
“Horror Noire” is the definitive documentary on Black representation in and creation of horror movies.
The film examines the changing image and narrative of Black people as seen through the white gaze and the eyes of Black filmmakers, and chronicles what many have hailed as the “Black horror renaissance” ushered in by “Candyman” producer Jordan Peele.
“[Candyman is] a story helmed by a visionary director,” Burgin said. “Black horror has the ability to intersect with the daily struggles, triumphs and tragedies of the Black experience in America.”
DaCosta masterfully repurposes the themes and symbolic devices of the original 1992 film to weave together a story that is at once a mirror to reflect Black struggles and a hammer to shatter the false narratives constructed around Black experiences.
While she doesn’t do away with the original film’s use of bees as a horror device, she repurposes the terror of the swarm.
DaCosta’s Candyman takes on a different form than murdered artist Daniel Robitaille. Through a new iteration of the classic villain, DaCosta examines police brutality against disabled people.
A misunderstood man with a prosthetic hook for a hand, the new Candyman is murdered by a swarm of cops.
DaCosta immediately confronts ableist societal fear of people with limb differences and the mob mentality of police.
DaCosta’s faceless men in blue present not as sober-minded individuals, but as faceless members of the horde. Her murderous police come across as the most modern zombie interpretation yet: a hive mind bent on death, unfeeling and lacking in reason or empathy.
The youthful new beating heart of the series, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, plays Anthony McCoy, the baby rescued by saintly Helen Lyle in the original film.
Ignorant of his past, Anthony McCoy is a struggling artist who is sought after not for his prowess as a painter, but because the art world is hungry for more of the Black struggle. The more gore and pain, the more the viewing audience can breathe in stories and images of Black oppression and fear, the more they come alive.
Candyman is not the same without the velvet-voiced Tony Todd, but for as much as we think of Tony Todd as the center of the Candyman franchise, the original film centered not Todd’s Candyman, but Virginia Madsen’s Helen Lyle.
Lyle, a white woman and bourgeois academic, entered the violent world of the Cabrini Green projects as a voyeur looking to capitalize on the murder of Ruthie Jean, a parallel to the real-life murder of Ruthie Mae McCoy.
In her film, DaCosta puts our collective voyeurism on trial and centers Anthony McCoy’s struggle with his past and his fate. Rather than centering white-dominated perception of Black generational trauma, DaCosta forces Anthony McCoy to examine his relationship to its legacy.
White characters don’t get to examine Black pain from within, like interloper Helen Lyle. Instead, DaCosta’s white characters reside in institutional positions of power from which they actively oppress Black characters, then consume art born of their struggle.
The shocking ending creates ripples that alter both our understanding of the original film and our understanding of Candyman as a towering terror icon as he moves into the future.
DaCosta’s Candyman is not just a horror villain. He is transfigured. He transcends. Already a master horror auteur, DaCosta has created a Candyman who will change film history and future Black representation on-screen.
