Candyman

American visual culture, especially that of the late 1980s and early 1990s, with the rise of gangsta rap and movies, plus white anxiety over street crime, explicitly makes the connection between the urban poor and people of color. Candyman starts the film as a campfire story that a white undergraduate is narrating to Helen. The victims are also white and archetypes of this type of oral tradition: the virginal “good girl” babysitter and the leather-clad “bad boy” punished for their sexual transgression by Candyman, who can only be seen for a split second in the mirror. Candyman becomes, at least to Helen, something more authentic when two Black janitors overhear the story and tell her that he actually lives at Cabrini-Green, where he killed a woman named Ruthie Jean, whose call to the police about someone trying to break through her bathroom wall to kill her had been ignored. It only becomes real to Helen when brought into a space she already equates with violence (the projects), and becomes excited when she finds confirmation of Ruthie Jean’s murder in the archives. Her thesis partner, Bernadette (Kasi Lemmons), admonishes her, saying, “Helen, this is sick. This isn’t one of your fairy tales; the woman got killed here.”

Yet the two go to Cabrini-Green anyway, the desire to beat their male colleagues to the punch overcoming any trepidation. They find it mostly empty but begin documenting the building’s graffiti that chronicles the Candyman myth, and disturb a shrine where residents have left candy stuffed with razor blades in tribute to him. The real trouble comes when Helen begins stirring up doubts in Candyman’s most fervent believers: the children of Cabrini-Green. After a gang leader, who has been dressing up as Candyman, is jailed for assaulting Helen, she tells young Jake, who has been acting as a guide through the complex, “Candyman isn’t real. He’s just a story. You know, like Dracula or Frankenstein. A bad man took his name so he could scare us, but now that he’s locked up, everything’s gonna be okay.”

This is what brings Candyman (Tony Todd) out for the first time, appearing to Helen in the parking lot as she looks through her slides of graffiti, head to the sky—a dark figure silhouetted by sunlight coming through gaps in the concrete structure. He is part of the city, and yet somehow outside of it. He doesn’t belong in Helen’s space, but her disbelief, or, more accurately, her sowing disbelief among his congregation, is what drew him here. Candyman is well-dressed, in his sharp black leather shoes, pinstripe suit, and long, dark fur coat. He is handsome and sure of himself, and his words are power. “You were not content with the stories, so I was obliged to come,” Candyman whispers to her alluringly. “Be my victim. Be my victim. I am the writing on the wall, the whisper in the classroom. Without these things, I am nothing. So now, I must shed innocent blood.” There exists a physical seduction between Candyman and Helen, to be sure, but also a seduction of story, suggesting that to create/embody a narrative is to know yourself and your history in the context of others. It is a desire for origination, and also for celebrity. To be told is to be known. Once Candyman is summoned into reality, there is only one path forward: Helen must become part of the myth in order to make people believe again.

Of course, we didn’t really understand much of this at 14, crowded around a small screen in a dorm room while cracking jokes about pimps with hook hands to dissolve our anxiety, daring each other to repeat “Candyman” five times in the bathroom mirror down the hall. The movie stuck with us, though, the evening becoming part of our own story, still recounted at reunions all these years later. It is easy to see why—bolstered by Philip Glass’s ethereal score and shot by the fantastic Anthony B. Richmond (whose work on 1973’s Don’t Look Now won him a BAFTA), Candyman is a romantic and deeply tragic film that transcends its genre and is, in my opinion, a masterpiece.