Candyman (1992)

There’s something supremely alluring about the gothic. It’s hard to truly define, at least, for me, but a tale has to just feel a certain way to be as such. Perhaps no one knows that fact as much as Clive Barker, who’s made a career out of gothic fiction, even in the most varied of settings. Midnight Meat Train, Jericho, Hellraiser, and, of course, Candyman.

I should make it clear that I actually had seen a grand total of ZERO Clive Barker stories, in any form. The closest I’ve ever gotten is watching the YouTuber Civvie11 play through Undying, and while that game definitely has Barker’s feel to it, it also is a Lovecraftian tale as well, perhaps diluting his own touch in some ways. As such, my first, full encounter with Barker was right here, in Cabrini-Green.

Directed and written by Bernard Rose, Candyman is an adaptation of Clive Barker’s short story “The Forbidden”. While the original tale took place in Liverpool, Rose’s take on it instead tackles inequity in America, mainly centering around Chicago’s notoriously horrible Cabrini-Green Homes. Left in a horrible state of disrepair, the housing development becomes the home of a legend, one of a murdered artist they call Candyman. While we only learn that he was the son of a slave who was killed for having a romance with a white woman, what we really learn in this story is that the current legend is of a man with a hook for a hand and a penchant for murder.

The most interesting part of this story is that it centers much more around the power of a legend than it does on what one might expect to be a slasher plot. In fact, Candyman kills very few people throughout the story, at least compared to most of his horror heavyweight contemporaries. Instead, Candyman’s main drive is to live forever through myth. Essentially, he himself doesn’t need to kill anyone, so long as people continue to believe that he does.

This means that, when protagonist Helen Lyle, a semiotics student at University of Illinois Chicago, starts tracing the roots of his legend, she unintentionally steps into his path. To her, Candyman is a myth that can be easily explained through study and folkloric interpretation. As such, she spends much of her time as a nonbeliever, unfazed by the horrors that are put to the Candyman title. Surely, there must be an explanation, something like a killer who uses the legend to get away with his misdeeds.

Candyman, however, is none too happy with this, and makes his ire known to Helen. The remainder of the movie is a woman scrambling to find a way out from under the bloody shadow of a supernatural killer, one who continually leaves blood on her hands. This is the best part of the story to me, as Candyman’s very voice induces a trancelike state in Helen. Rose wanted to nail this feeling so much that he brought a hypnotist on set, who would hypnotize actress Virginia Madsen before takes where Tony Todd’s legendary killer would ensorcell her.

This got to the point where Madsen told Rose she simply wouldn’t do it anymore. She was routinely losing hours a day to this process, despite originally holding skepticism over the practice. While that surely must have been terrifying for the actress, its effect on the film is irreplaceable, as Helen’s reaction to the mesmerizing voice of the Candyman is unlike anything in horror before it. While most slasher victims screech and wail, Candyman’s victims are intoxicated by his presence.

This, combined with a fantastic soundtrack by Philip Glass and cinematography that stages every shot with a sort of flourish, makes Candyman feel like a Shakespearean tale, one drenched in the haze of the fair folk and dripping with prose and decadence. It’s truly unlike any other horror movie. Even its first two sequels would fail to fully capture that essence, that melodrama.

It may be strange to look at a horror tale from the last few decades like this, but Candyman invokes the weight of the Universal monster flicks of old. He carries as much extravagance with him as, say, Dracula does, with the character himself playing his victims as though they were simply players in a stage work of his own design. No one could have delivered it quite like Tony Todd does, either, who lets every syllable drip with honey befitting the character’s sticky end.

It’s a truly evocative movie, one that could easily catch someone who might have been expecting a slasher (like myself) off-guard, and one that deserves its exhibit in the museum of horror’s finest works.