Candyman Is Sweet (and Sour for Black Women)
The sticky cultural, social, and political swarm of an iconic horror fixture
Nia DaCosta’s Candyman.
Nia DaCosta’s Candyman.
Nia DaCosta’s Candyman.
Nia DaCosta’s Candyman.
Nia DaCosta’s Candyman.
Perhaps if I/you/we say her name 5 times, she will finally get the recognition she deserves on every media outlet that’s (deliberately or unintentionally) erasing her. In one weekend, her film made back its entire budget in coupled domestic and international sales, making her the first Black female Director with a #1 film at the box office.
With all of this heralded praise and literal buzz surrounding the film, it was sobering to read about DaCosta’s experiences of on-set misogynoir.
“It’s not necessarily overtly racist, but it is shocking the way people have talked to me in my position as a director. People who work for me. Especially on a movie like this, where Jordan was the only other person of colour at the level of decision-making on the movie. And that’s unacceptable, frankly.” She talks of crass comments about Black hair. She recalls a time she was outside waiting for her assistant one night and a (white, male) crew member jokingly asked if she was hooking to make money on the side. “That happened to me so many times, with people who work above me, who work laterally to me, below me. In the moment, you’re just like: ‘Push on.’ You just deal with it. But in retrospect, I will never do that again.” (Source: The Guardian, Interview with Nia DaCosta, 2021)
So…this is a lot to unpack, right?! There’s a double, no quadruple yikes going on here.
Nia DaCosta is being erased from her own film.
Nia DaCosta is being belittled/harassed on the set of her own film.
Nia DaCosta is experiencing a myriad of microaggressions on the set of her own film.
Nia DaCosta is navigating a lot of this on her own (on/off the set of her own film).
…and in the midst of all that disrespectful repugnance, she still had to show up, smile, and serve…
The Internet is free. A lot of this information was a Google search away about who was directing. Many persons either refused to look or ran with the mention of Jordan Peele’s name. *The above Guardian article even had to amend its own featured piece because she was listed as the co-director.*
Sheesh! 🤬
I’ve seen nothing but people shouting from the rooftops on my Twitter timeline to put some respect on her name. AT MINIMUM, WE ALL KNEW BACK IN 2019 THAT NIA DACOSTA WAS GOING TO DIRECT THIS FILM. WE’VE HAD ALMOST THREE YEARS TO KNOW THIS INFORMATION.
This is a brief call-out and call-in before this review, so please cease and desist with the disrespect. Nia DaCosta and Jordan Peele deserve their flowers; they are two of the most prominent Black (horror) Directors in the business, but if you’ve noticed Jordan has taken a step back from much of the press coverage to ensure that Nia DaCosta is front-and-center. So, let’s extend the same deference and recognition to her as an auteur. Thank you.
Warning! If you have not seen the film, there are major spoilers ahead…
“Candyman is a way to deal with the fact that these things happened to us, are still happening!”
The Cabrini-Green Rowhouses. 1977. A young Black child prepares a basket of laundry to take to the more infamously imposing high-rise tower buildings. (The family from Good Times lived in them too.) This everyday scene is peppered with the jarring blue of police cars as their prominent color slices through the brown-stone buildings' flat color palette. They’re looking for a man who apparently has been putting razor blades in candy. By canvassing ‘the projects’, they are exerting their authority as hands of the state over the impoverished and the Black community, not where the initial crime occurred in a white neighborhood or suburb. The child is asked about a ‘suspicious character’, but otherwise does not engage with the police.
As the young boy navigates the stairwells, the minute but gradual decline of Cabrini appears by dimmed stairwell corridors and an ominous hole in the wall across from the washroom. As a horror device forecasting danger, the gaping unknown lingers in our peripheral vision. A shiny gift-wrapped candy clatters into the frame piercing the silence, ratcheting the tension even further. From the inky-grey darkness, a hook and a smile emerges. Lo, the ‘candy man’, impeccably dressed in a flowing yellow coat.
With hand and grin extended, sweets for the sweet.
Instead of amusement, the child is terrified…his screams echo throughout the complex alerting the police outside. Thunderous footsteps boom closer and closer, as the phalanx of police from outside, draws nearer. The child is pushed aside, scarred forever, a bystander to the violence perpetrated against, Sherman ‘Candyman’ Fields.
Oscillating between the past and the present, there is a longitudinal tether to the mythology of Candyman and the hallowed grounds where their spectres reside. With minimal knowledge of the first film from 1992, the initial scenes of violence and where they lead for its Black victims are chilling, but for those familiar an ah-ha moment for the larger narrative has emerged. Any Black man can become a Candyman whom, “at the intersection of White violence and Black pain, is about unwilling martyrs. The people they were, the symbols we turn them into, the monsters we are told they must have been.” (Nia DaCosta, press release)
The film regularly feels like the fever dreams of stop-motion animation’s past…surreal…with silent film qualities that convey the inevitability of a nightmare. The inverted opening sequence floating amidst the foggy skyline of Chicago is a distorted mirror to 1992’s opening credits that were shot from above as opposed to from below in 2021. This remix even features a new haunting thematic cue, entitled: The Sweet, by the film’s composer Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe. *Note, the appearance of this refrain during extremely pivotal moments in the narrative’s progression. It will be seared into your memory, trust me.* The iconic pianos and choirs of Phillip Glass haven’t been completely erased either but melded and remixed into the larger score, alongside meticulously placed drones, organs, pulsating rhythms, and far more that fills and rattles the walls of a theater experience.
Nia DaCosta’s vision of Candyman as an entity, film, and metaphor is dually triumphant and melancholic. For the main character Anthony McCoy (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) reaching this dichotomy is overflowing with painful discoveries. I’ve never felt such unease, let alone such disquieted nausea laced with doom in a film before, but the story-beats of Anthony’s past colliding into his present are all signposts that flash: Dread! Dead-ahead!
The muck and mire of gentrification and displacement are pivotal conversations, although after-school special preachy at times in the script reflect a reality that is inextricably linked to Candyman and Cabrini-Green, which are now mired in the annals of folklore. In 1992, the high-rises stood side-by-side — a highway apart — within the same eye-line and skyline, but now only the row-houses remain like weeds peeking out of the concrete as the shiny-twinkling honeycomb styled housing and office buildings loom above.
Art curator and Anthony’s girlfriend Brianna Cartwright (Teyonah Parris) and her brother Troy (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) are representative of the aspirations of their parents fully realized. Black people who’ve ‘made it’ and are living comfortably, financially, and socially. The banter they and many of the Black characters have throughout the film exposes that their exterior lives make look cushy, but the interior is teeming with anxiety and self-deprecation. Receiving validation and approval from the White power structures that sign their paychecks or ensure their ascent in the art world is like navigating cobblestones. Desirable in theory, but slippery at the worst of times and bumpy 24/7 in aesthetic. Inadvertently planting the seed for Anthony’s spiral into artistic historic fervor, Troy tells the tale of Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen) who supposedly terrorized the community of Cabrini-Green as Candyman, and later stole an infant for a ritual sacrifice. Initially, the story is hand waved to be too far-fetched to be believed, but like most urban legends there’s always a kernel of truth buried therein.
When Anthony’s initial art showcase plans are dismissed as a rehash of previous work, the jolt of the cryptic late-night story and his yearning to delve into Chicago’s past titillate the gallery owner (Brian King) enough to give him a space to exhibit his work. Encasing various artistic vignettes inside a bathroom-styled mirror, which are eerily similar to those from 1992, with the aim to summon the spirit of Candyman does have the desired effect. Many people who attend the display that night most assuredly summon their own demise. The gallery owner and his young paramour are the film’s first victims in the modern era. *And yes, the first appearance of the titular character is brilliant and pants wettingly scary. Precision and panache are the signature flourish of this particular Candyman.
As Anthony has unearthed more and more of the mythos surrounding the legend, he’s had a guide from the old neighborhood named William Burke (Colman Domingo) who explains his hive theory and that there isn’t just one, but a plethora of Candy-men who were all victims of racist violence. However, the first known and recorded in the area was Daniel Robitaille from the 1800s, a famous freeman Black painter who was tortured, mutilated, and burned alive by a lynch mob where the entire Black and White community could see, because his lofty station meant access to fraternizing with a White woman.
The story of Daniel, Sherman Fields from the 1970s, and many more in between and since fuel Anthony’s furious painting streak to memorialize their horrific stories…curiously after a seemingly innocuous bee sting. If you’re squeamish and not a fan of body horror, Anthony’s slow, gangrenous Kafkaesque putrefaction infused metamorphosis into the Candyman is commendable for the practical effects/makeup work but stomach-churning and wretched all the same…so brava and mission accomplished for the visuals; we are most certainly horrified and repulsed. It’s truly a marvel to see the Brundlefly styled transformation scenes where Anthony becomes less and less human and more of a zombified cadaver.
Moreover, beyond the hook’s new grisly curved length, instead of the chest cavity being a conduit/resting place for the bees, they seem to have a symbiotic relationship with whomever is Candyman. Thus, they can move individually and autonomously, while also acting as heralds that can swarm as needed to announce the ‘King Bee's’ arrival. In one of the most arresting scenes from the film, Anthony comes face-to-mangled face, hand-to-hook, with Sherman ‘Candyman’ Fields. The scene is truly tear-inducing when one sees the humanity lost when looking at the countenance of forced monstrosity — each of them reflecting life and death as the damned. Meanwhile, his girlfriend Brianna has been navigating her own familial ghosts of the past while trying to keep their relationship afloat, careers stable, and joint professional acumen from sinking after the murders in Candyman’s name escalate. She eventually follows Anthony’s trail of breadcrumbs back to William Burke, who was the same child from the cold-open, who saw Sherman Fields murder.
His aim is to christen a new Candyman, vis-à-vis Anthony, who was chosen by Daniel Robitaille in 1992 to continue the legend’s legacy that will be a perpetrator of vengeance and retribution for the Black community. I intentionally gave a cliff-notes version of the film because we’ll discuss a myriad of story threads that were left piecemeal on the cutting room floor. The story indeed escalates towards a conclusion rather frenetically that is perhaps meant to show how frightening, swift, without warning, and all-encompassing becoming Candyman truly is (or as mentioned beforehand, there were scenes cut or shortened for runtime). The ending is solemn and traumatic because Anthony who is lying prone in Brianna’s lap, unarmed minus the hook jammed into his arm (by William Burke), is repeatedly shot by the police. They receive a bloody comeuppance as she calls the newly martyred Candyman’s name, resurrecting him from the tombed row houses of Cabrini-Green. This moment was poignant (and if I was amongst a different theater crowd worth uproarious applause). The film closing with a monologue by Anthony ‘Candyman’ McCoy analogous to the original film’s prose was just too sweet for words…and the uplifting baritone of “Tell everyone” spoken by THEE Tony Todd who’d we only gotten glimpses of throughout the film was money Hunny. I cried.
The Cutting Room Floor.
91 minutes. The entirety of Candyman from beginning to end credits is 1 hour and 31 minutes and for the viewing public that has seen the original 2-hour film that should have been a red flag that a lot of elements would be trimmed down or removed entirely from the theatrical release. At this time, there is no information regarding studio interference or a war waged in the writer’s room that eventually decentralized and diminished many of the characters from the arc of the entire film. I’ve been stalling a bit, but here comes the icky part where it's time to disparage the film a bit now so please know these critiques are not being lobbed maliciously, but are addressing a wider issue about Black Women and the film industry writ large. Alright, it’s time to pick up that thread from the beginning of the piece about disrespecting Black Women so 3, 2, 1…let’s go.
Disappointingly, Black Women akin to the first Candyman are given minimal interiority or limited agency in the narrative. Anne-Marie McCoy (Vanessa Williams) was the lynchpin of the original film’s story right beside Helen Lyle and it was an extreme disappointment that her import was condensed to only one scene in the newest entry. It was heartbreaking to have so many brilliant moments about intergenerational trauma visualized or spoken aloud but positioned almost to shame the Black single mother who did her absolute best to protect her only child from the horrors of poverty and prejudice. Her nuanced performance in the scene is powerful and with as many moments given throughout the film where she’s trying to call Anthony, with him, in turn, brushing her aside, his only connection to ‘home’…it shows that there was so much that they barely breached the surface of in the finished product regarding their mother-son relationship. She was dealing with extreme trauma as well and to have that reduced to this blip in the overall story left me feeling cold, betrayed, and a tad angry.
Sitting in the theater and watching the film play out, one could feel the scissors snipping through pivotal scenes of dialogue and backstory. For example, multiple times Brianna Cartwright (Teyonah Parris) is reduced to simply just Anthony’s girlfriend when there were clearly scenes between her brother and her own flashbacks that showed she was grappling with some events in her life and past that she should have been receiving therapy for, at the very least. The scene was brief (and if you were distracted or nodded off in the theater you probably may have missed it) but her Father was potentially a Candyman too. He, a painter (just like her significant other Anthony) was dealing with a mental health crisis and died by suicide in front of her. She was dreaming, so perhaps the moment was meant to convey her reality and nightmares overlapping regarding her love Anthony but the Candyman yellow-colored coat was blatant and intentional, and I opine not just for a wink and window dressing. There was deliberate care and intentionality for many of the decisions involving the Candyman mythos, chronology, etcetera, and the coat her Father wore coupled with his profession wasn’t just an Easter Egg but another part of the script or scene(s) that were given the chop (or gasp! unwritten!) and it’s frustrating to see how that bled into her story feeling hollow and unfinished. She’s regularly folding in on herself for her career, gritting her teeth into forced smiles, literally staying silent to not rock the boat of their stability. That sacrifice is given no time for acknowledgment and it was painful to watch.
*The word ‘woke’ is floating around on the Internet regarding this film and please know it's a dog whistle and a cudgel of anti-Black rhetoric (that’s been stripped of its original intracommunity meaning).* If you really want to ‘go in’ on this film, unpack why Black Women have been sidelined from the horror entirely. Racism and sexism are a thorny thicket to navigate, where scholars like Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw and Moya Bailey have been traversing with the terminology of intersectionality and misogynoir for decades. Black Women’s (horror and trauma) stories matter too. The movie even explicitly mentions Ruthie Mae McCoy by name again just like the first film, a Black Woman, who was attacked and murdered by persons who came into her home from the bathroom mirror whose cries for help to the outside world and the police were ignored. And lest we forget the recent murder of Chicago resident Rekia Boyd, by police officer Dante Servin, in 2015.
To see in many of the press junkets and interviews circulating about the film, the impact of #sayhername and the murder of Breonna Taylor used so casually and interchangeably when discussing the Black cultural legacy of Candyman has been a lot to process emotionally. The film and its sentimental nostalgic cultural attachments still center Black men all of these decades later and that’s not just a movie franchise problem but a societal problem. I’m thirty years old…a sneeze older than the expanse of time between 1992 to 2021 and we still haven’t budged regarding discussions about Black Women’s pain, vengeance, or retribution-adjacent monster narratives. Even though the film is situated in 2019, Black Women and girls were (and are) still being assaulted and murdered by the police or other agencies of the state, e.g., prisons and hospitals. To not see or even be given the glimpse of a ‘Candywoman’ was a huge and significantly missed opportunity and I believe we’re going to look back on this (social and pop-cultural) erasure and grimace.
There’s a dated politic to the way that Black men and women interact in this film and I’m still trying to put my finger on what feels amiss. The scenes where the Black women were admonishing the Black men for testing fate and not interacting with ‘dark-sided’ phenomena was one that made me harrumph. We know that frequently men ‘play too much’ but to see it visualized kind of like a sitcom was kind of jarring and shows the pitfalls in film and reality about why Black women should just be listened to in general (and not just as a horror movie rule). Oooh, and lest I forget how the Black gay character Troy, Brianna’s brother, was kind of used as a prop and a vessel for humorous moments and witticisms…like umm, I thought we all agreed we weren’t doing this anymore? (Did y’all get the memo or was it ever sent out? Maybe the cis-hetero people weren’t there for that meeting.) But hurray silver lining, he wasn’t killed and was left alive with his partner in peace.
Whew, diatribe over…I told you all that was going to be messy but NECESSARY. The film for all of its accomplishments still has pitfalls and it's okay to call them out. We wouldn’t have this Candyman in the first place if we hadn’t been calling these things out in the blogosphere (shout out to Ashlee Blackwell and Graveyard Shift Sisters), word-of-mouth, or academia through Robin Means Coleman’s Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present and its attached Shudder produced documentary from 2019. Truly though, this film is a miracle. A Black-owned production company, Monkey Paw Productions, had a Black Woman Director helm this project and co-write it. This moment in time is momentous and honestly unprecedented! Hence, the news spreading like wildfire across social media and various news outlets about her #1 box office status in horror and the entire film industry writ large. All hands involved deserve a round of applause, especially Jordan Peele who helped get the capital and studio backing for this film. The imagery of the entire experience was a delight for the eyes and the ears, no question, keeping in mind the entire film being in limbo betwixt and between an ongoing pandemic. I have to give the film its proper due, it's jam-packed with volumes of history.
Trying to visualize the horror of Black Americans' relationship with(in) the United States was a momentous task and I will say they succeeded by a landslide. We live in so many haunted spaces and places that it's imperative that we acknowledge them and honor them; films such as this are vital to keeping the memory of communities such as Cabrini-Green alive and dually course-correcting where so much past disparagement has occurred.
To conclude, thank you for engaging with all of my Candyman-related writing this past year, I sincerely and wholeheartedly appreciate it. Its opened incredible doors to the larger horror world that’s kept on giving and I am grateful for all of the opportunities that have arisen as a result. Candyman was one of the first horror films that I ever saw trying to engage with the overlapping dichotomy of Black horror versus Black people in horror, the complicated and bloody history we have with the landscape, and its been an integral force behind all of my writing and reflections about the genre since. Thus, I have an announcement to make…stay tuned for an essay that will be published in a larger collection entitled Labors of Fear: Work in Horror Cinema (date TBA) where I will explore the symbiotic relationship of Get Out (2017) and Candyman (1992/2021) as horror texts that explore the consumption of the Black artist.
In the meantime, check out my previous work unpacking the Candyman trailers, the history of Cabrini-Green, conjure, and the modern zonbi. Plus, see how many theories I had about the finished film that came to fruition.
Here’s hoping the hive can get a Director’s Cut. 🐝
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