Black Horrific Extras: “Candyman” and Urban Legends

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Candyman’s story is very effective as an urban legend. Urban legends are a subset of folklore stories that differ from classic fairy tales or other folk stories in that they include modern elements, like traveling by car. Like other folktales, they also heavily rely on oral retelling for their popularity and survival. (Think scary stories told in a circle at flashlight-lit slumber parties.)

The Encyclopedia Britannica simply defines an urban legend as “a story about an unusual or humorous event that many people believe to be true but that is not true.” Britannica goes on to explain that “The phrase was popularized in 1981 with the publication of The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings, a book by American folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand.”

In 1999, Brunvand explained urban legends like this: “They do have a basis in truth. They are about things that really happen in the areas of travel, pets, business, sex, you name it. However, the whole story that you hear going around from person to person with different variations, attributed to different times and places, never happened.”

The Candyman legend has several traditional hallmarks: a city setting, modern elements, oral popularity, even a hook in place of a hand. And the movie begins with a dramatized rendition of an undergraduate student’s account of a Candyman murder to Helen.

But the Candyman story also incorporates less tangible, less obvious elements of many urban legends. The ones I’m mostly thinking about here are violence and the intent to scare or horrify.

There’s a ritual aspect to the telling of these stories. In Candyman and the short story it’s based on, Clive Barker’s “The Forbidden,” Helen has various sources who tell her about the Candyman and the violence they’ve been experiencing. Anne-Marie and other residents, in retelling these “urban legends,” are also engaging in oral histories of their communities.

The Oral History Association explains that “Oral history is a field of study and a method of gathering, preserving and interpreting the voices and memories of people, communities, and participants in past events. Oral history is both the oldest type of historical inquiry, predating the written word, and one of the most modern, initiated with tape recorders in the 1940s and now using 21st-century digital technologies.” Helen is technically “doing oral history,” but without the respect her subjects deserve.

In many academic environments, lived experiences and oral histories are less valued than peer-reviewed, “scholarly,” published articles. This elitism bleeds into Helen’s relationships in both “The Forbidden” and Candyman. She’s in graduate school and married to a professor. All her friends are academics. It takes her a long time to respect the residents’ stories, even as she circles closer to the reality of the violence they live with. She doesn’t take them seriously at first, to her detriment.

We as readers and viewers watch as Helen’s arrogance leads to her downfall, especially in “The Forbidden.” (There are fated elements of Candyman that make Helen’s entanglement with the Candyman more supernatural, more predestined, and less about her own hubris.) These works are incredibly effective as horror stories, both because they subvert traditional (white, academic, upper-class) understandings of power and history and because they effectively communicate a constant threat of violence in their settings.

Urban legends often include elements of violence, or at least the potential for violence. There’s also often an element of surprise or the unexpected. (If you want a more thorough breakdown of the classic hallmarks of urban legends, look here.) In real life, when they’re told at sleepovers or on podcasts, the fright and the thrill are fundamental parts of the experience. Some of them are modern-day cautionary tales about the dangers of staying out late or picking up hitchhikers. But almost all of them are also a healthy reminder that danger lurks around every corner and, sometimes, in your own home.