Candyman (2021)

Score: 5 / 5

As is now in vogue, we've been blessed with another remake that's actually a sequel but uses the same name and ignores previous sequels in its franchise. This time, it's Candyman, and it's bloody terrifying. Beginning twenty-seven years after the original 1992 film, we're introduced to Troy as he tells a spooky story. Bringing his audience -- including us -- up to speed on the lore, he recounts the events of the first film, when Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen) lost her life in an evil night of blood and fire; in describing her as mentally ill and wicked, we see right away the power of folktales and urban legends. As Lyle studied the phenomenon of an urban legend, she herself has now become one. Interestingly, her story is entertainingly retold around an upper-class apartment in Chicago proper, giggled over by wealthy young black adults whose own upbringing in a gentrified district makes them skeptical of the horrors of what was once Cabrini-Green.

Troy is not the main character of this Candyman, though Nathan Stewart-Jarrett plays him very well; I worried for most of the movie that this lovely and flamboyant man or the man-candy on his arm would end up gutted. Horror doesn't usually allow the gays to be happy, and Candyman doesn't usually allow anyone else to be happy. The main character, rather, is Troy's sister's boyfriend: Anthony McCoy (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II from Aquaman, The Trial of the Chicago 7, and Watchmen), an artist whose mindfulness of the gentrification of his home neighborhood informs his art. Thankfully, his girlfriend Brianna (Teyonah Parris from If Beale Street Could Talk and WandaVision) is successful and mostly supportive of his work. As they hear the story from Brianna's brother, they discuss the central problems plaguing that particular historical context in the same way commentators and scholars have since Bernard Rose's original film came out. Brianna pointedly says, "White people built the ghetto and then erased it when they realized they built the ghetto."

Anthony wanders Cabrini-Green looking for inspiration for his next work. Once poked by his muse -- a bee, which of course is more than just a bee -- he creates violent works of the deaths of Black people in the neighborhood. Once put on display in a gallery run by a man named Clive (surely a nod to the short story source material by Clive Barker), things really get scary. Could the blatant capitalist commodification of Black lives and livelihoods have caused the bloody onslaught that takes two white people's lives in the gallery after hours? Or could it have been their flagrant disrespect of legends and a people group they know so little about? Either way, Candyman appears and blood is spilled.

Anthony learns a lot in a short amount of time, and it's in his scene with William (a deliciously sinister Colman Domingo), an older man who knows a little too much about the urban legend. But he's deeply endearing, and says lines that were surely penned directly by Jordan Peele, who serves here as writer and producer. Describing the perseverance of the myth, he notes that many men have died and been caught up in the Candyman story, as if a new horrific death of a Black man is needed to remind people about racism and police brutality. But, he says grimly, "one white woman dies and the story lives forever." William even provides Anthony his own origin story for Candyman, based on a run-in he had with a seedy figure as a child. My favorite line 

And herein dovetail the thematic elements, any of which are fascinating but, altogether, make the film an angry bonfire of an experience. This movie deepens and widens the monster's myth from the original film by carefully situating the intensifying violence on Black bodies by whiteness as its center point. Saying the name of Candyman -- literally the tool of his conjuring -- by the end of this movie becomes a sort of rallying cry for vengeance; it's also the rallying cry of current movements against abusive and deadly police tactics against Black people. Candyman becomes a sort of vindicator whose horrors might be a force for good if the endless cycle continues. In this way, Candyman radically makes use of the explicit fact that the real world is more horrifying than things dreamed up in supernatural fiction. There's a reason Lovecraft Country was recently popularized by HBO.

But that's not to discount the body horror here. The original was scary because of its gory content back when gore was becoming silly; this one fully embraces its skin-ripping, blood-gushing realism and more than once elicited groans and yelps from the auditorium in which I sat. Director Nia DaCosta (Little Woods and the upcoming MCU film The Marvels) harnesses a unique and deeply confident visual style that shook me to the core, one that knowingly and gleefully gooses the audience with morbid humor and jump scares before bulldozing us with existential dread. Her opening sequence, which features Sammy Davis Jr. singing "Candy Man" over reversed studio and distributor logos, leads into chilling shots of a foggy Chicago at twilight, shot upside-down and backwards from the street level. 

And then there's the story itself, which is so profoundly intelligent and unexpected that I gasped often out of sheer viewing pleasure. DaCosta's work is pitch-perfect, as is her direction of an excellent cast. The disgusting sound mixing and riveting cinematography clearly work toward DaCosta's intended vision. And the audacity of this screenplay in humanizing and communalizing the monster we've feared for three decades, while making him so much more horrifying through a wealth of real history that spans centuries, is nothing short of devastating. “Candyman isn’t a he,” William tells Anthony before warning him to stay away, “he’s the whole damn hive.” And if you had told me a sequel that we all thought was just a remake would be able to make the original make more sense rather than add a bunch of crazy new stuff, I'd have laughed at you. Five times. Maybe into a mirror.