Well, it had me hooked from the get-go.
See what I did there?
It starts with the opening strains of Philip Glass' extraordinary score, which immediately gets under your skin. And throughout, it's one part Anton Bruckner ecclesiastical music and one part Phantom of the Opera. And then very beautiful, measured aerial photography of the arteries of Chicago locates us instantly. It's evocative both of insects crawling and it kind of insinuates that we're going to ascend from the quotidian to something like the sublime.
We go from the highways of Chicago to a colony of bees, which becomes a swarm that darkens the skyline. We hear a narrator who delivers an ominous and violent snatch of what we will learn is an urban legend that has made the rounds long enough to have rooted itself in the minds of all strata of Chicagoans from cleaning ladies to PhD candidates, and for good reason — because it's real.
The history of the exploration and excavation of urban legend in horror and its roots in oral tradition have been explored often, from Alvin Schwartz's collected folklore tales in Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, to the Guillermo del Toro film adaptation, which we have discussed here at Scare U. We see this in the jump rope rhyme in A Nightmare on Elm Street to the 1998 film Urban Legend, which starred Freddy Krueger actor Robert Englund himself. These are the kinds of stories shared among children under blankets at sleepovers, but are never forgotten when we reach adulthood. They've been mined—we might even say overmined—for pretty rich cinematic inspiration. From things like The Blair Witch Project, whose power came from its feeling like a documentary to 2009's Cropsey, which was a documentary. And from things like The Mothman to Slender Man and a whole lot of mans.
These subjects are effective because they're immediate and they're familiar. Like a swarm of bees, they're commonplace, they're dangerous, and they can occlude our ability to easily see through them. I think when we first see the luminous Virginia Madsen, she's listening to a recounting of the story of Candyman. But when we first hear that, it's through the lens of a suburban babysitter who's misbehaving with her “boyfriend.” But soon, the grittier and legitimately urban version of the legend emerges. And it fascinates Helen in her academic ivory tower at the University of Illinois, Chicago, where, it seems, the folklore studies program is the ne plus ultra reason to matriculate. Everbody's in the folklore department. And it's her ultimate undoing, as she trades her fears and insecurities and neuroses for bigger, larger, broader, more societal ones.
When I was a kid, we had book fairs at school. When I would go to the school book fair, my favorite books to collect were the ones by a guy named Daniel Cohen, who wrote prolifically for young readers. He wrote over 100 books in total, and he was personally obsessed with the paranormal, the supernatural, and the occult. He wrote a book in 1974 called Curses, Hexes, and Spells, which was one of the most frequently challenged books for young readers up through the 2000s. He wrote encyclopedias of monsters and ghosts, but it was his 1983 book Southern Fried Rat and Other Gruesome Tales that inculcated young me to the concept of the urban legend in a grislier and less picturesque manner than Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. The most disappointing thing about Southern Fried Rat and Other Gruesome Tales was that I finished it before I got home from school the same day.
In the hands of an interpreter like Clive Barker and a re-interpreter like Bernard Rose, the classic Bloody Mary mirror ritual serves as a jumping off point to explore concepts of race and class in the projects of Chicago and the lopsided socioeconomics of urban design and gentrification. The legend of the man with a hook for a hand is its method of delivery and its instrument of dispatching justice.
The cast is uniformly excellent. In the late 90s, much like today, a horror film could feel like a prestige picture. This is the same year that Coppola made Bram Stoker's Dracula with Gary Oldman and Anthony Hopkins. Candyman follows not too distantly on the heels of the Silence of the Lambs having swept the Oscars. So we get a Madsen, we get a Kasi Lemmons (who of course played Ardelia Mapp flawlessly in Silence of the Lambs), we get Xander Berkeley, Vanessa Williams, Michael Culkin, and a genre star-making turn from Tony Todd. His interpretation of the titular man of candy placed the character on not quite a Michael/Jason/Freddy level in the horror villain pantheon, but certainly on the same playing field with Chucky and Pinhead, creating the first and most significant black supernatural horror villain in a mainstream big budget film.
I think the characters come across as realistic, both the advantaged academics and the less well-educated characters who clean their lecture halls and laboratories and whose realities and perceptions ignite the engine that drives the narrative.
Of course, because the story's locus is in academia, it's got this folkloric nature which ostensibly breaks through into objective reality. And because of the time in which it's set, we get to have exposition transmitted to us in the best way possible—through furiously whirling spools of microfilm.
I think Candyman's narrative metaphors are examining social strata. Its visual metaphors pit the internal versus the external, and bring a history of subjugation buzzing, shall we say, to the surface. I think this film was powerful when it was made, and it's ostensibly more powerful now, not just because our contemporary tools for examining iniustice are more immediate and accessible, but because of real stories. Not just the ones which Helen tells Bernadette. An entire community starts attributing the daily horrors of their lives to a mythical figure that feels uncomfortablv similar. And they continue to emerge in the news. In 2021, we had reporting about Samantha Hartsoe, who discovered a hidden apartment accessible through the bathroom mirror of her Roosevelt Island apartment in New York City. The film is also based on a real detail of a murder that was committed in 1987 in Chicago in which a woman named Ruthie Mae McCoy was killed in the projects.
Narratively, I think it seems to posit that one has a choice in victimhood and also a choice in redemption. And as it relates to this story: how far does that idea extend? How much do we provoke the unknown? How many times do we tempt fate to get the answer that we seek that seems just slightly out of grasp? What is the value of sacrifice? What is the function of fear? Do we, in fact, transcend the quotidian as the opening credits tease? Do we touch the sublime? What happens when, as in Lovecraft, we behold that strange and powerful force that we've sought through our obsession? Through our hubris, are we subject to madness? Are we transformed when we walk through the fire to reach the other side of it, like Sergeant Howie on Summerisle, or like Helen Lyle in Cabrini Green? Its horror is harrowing, and it does not discriminate in the way that it's doled out.
To listen to our episode on Candyman, click here.
Bradford Louryk