History, Collective Memory, and More in “Candyman” (1992)
This post has spoilers! Trigger/content warnings include anti-Black racism, lynching, classism, urban neglect, murder, assault, and occasional swearing.
Let’s start with something fun. I was researching the 1992 Candyman film and found this gem on Letterboxd:
I don’t know the reviewer’s race, but they’re not wrong! And the gummy worm line got me.
Anyway, we’re here to talk about the classic Candyman movie and the short-ish story it’s based on.
The original film was based on a 1985 story by British author Clive Barker called “The Forbidden.” (1) The movie stays very close to Barker’s story, keeping key elements like main characters’ names, the design of the Candyman mural, and certain plot points. But the movie also changed a lot: the setting moved from Liverpool, England to Cabrini-Green in Chicago, USA, and accordingly, the Candyman became Black. Barker was involved in the adaptation with 1992 writer and director Bernard Rose.
(Side note: Clive Barker also wrote one of my favorite YA books of all time, Abarat, which I haven’t read in years but might have to pick up again. The appeal of leaving everything behind for a whole different world, no matter how dangerous, was irresistible to me as a teenager, and I read that book at least four times. I didn’t know he wrote adult horror until I was older and read another of his short stories for a college class.)
In addition to executive producing Candyman, Barker also directed Hellraiser in 1986, which was based on another of his short stories, “The Hellbound Heart.” (2) He’s collaborated on or directed several other adaptations of his works, but these two are probably the best known.
I saw Candyman for the first time when I was 18. My freshman urban history college class watched it together and I couldn’t look in bathroom mirrors for a few days afterwards. (I’m generally terrified of mirrors in horror and in real life, but that’s another story.) It completely freaked me out and made a major impression on me. I’ve seen it twice since then and I’m still fascinated by it.
Summaries and Differences
In both “The Forbidden” and Candyman, an academic named Helen intrudes into a low-income, city-managed housing project/council estate to do research for her graduate thesis. In the short story, she’s studying graffiti, leading to her accidental discovery of the Candyman story. In the film, her work actually focuses on folklore and urban legends and she goes looking for Candyman on purpose.
Helen goes back and forth between the “projects” she’s studying and her regular, academic life. We see her talking and fighting with her husband Trevor and having dinner with colleagues. Several times, she’s forced to defend her work to both Trevor and other pretentious men (*cough cough* Purcell *cough*). Their disdain fuels her determination to uncover these communities’ secrets, to her detriment.
In both stories, she is persistent to the point of recklessness. Her hubris stands out among the residents of these communities, who are either portrayed as just wanting to get by or (in the case of Barker’s short story) a sinister, coordinated group who consciously sacrifice innocents to their boogeyman. Helen dies both times in a bonfire the residents have built after surrendering to Candyman — becoming his victim.
Notably, in “The Forbidden”, Helen isn’t able to save Anne-Marie’s baby Kerry from the Candyman. In the film, the baby (now Anthony) survives: Helen crawls out of the bonfire, scorched and hairless, delivering the baby to his mother. In this version, Helen also takes over Candyman’ role, eviscerating Trevor with her own hook after he cries her name in his bathroom mirror five times. “The Forbidden” ends with Helen and Candyman consumed by the bonfire flames as she watches Trevor ask the Spector Street residents about her. In both story and film, one of the central messages remains that collective memory and reverence are incredibly powerful.
But another major difference is that in “The Forbidden,” the residents of Spector Street and Candyman himself are white, while in the film, almost everyone except Helen and most of the people in her circle (except Bernadette) are Black. So the major divider in Barker’s story is class, while in the Chicago of the film, it’s race (in addition to class). In both settings, Helen is very obviously and intentionally an outsider. She’s an intruder into a society that has its own rules, customs, and, importantly, dangers that she doesn’t see or respect at first. She only comes to understand these rules, customs, and dangers through violence and victimhood.
“Projects”: The Spector Street Estate and Cabrini-Green
A solid sense of place is essential to a good story, and these stories are definitely grounded in their settings. “The Forbidden” takes place in the fictional Spector Street Estate in Liverpool, England and Candyman in the infamous Cabrini-Green housing project in Chicago, Illinois. But both settings are viscerally shown as run-down, neglected, and dirty. Most importantly, the residents are somehow at fault for or complicit in their living situation.
(Side note: I love that the estate in “The Forbidden” is called Spector Street and Candyman is, well, a spector himself. I think that’s fun.)
According to the Cambridge University dictionary, a housing estate in the United Kingdom is “a group of houses built together in a planned way, sometimes by the local government of an area in order to provide houses for people to rent or buy at a low cost.” (3) On the opening page of “The Forbidden”, Barker speculates about the fictional city planners and architects designing, then abandoning, Spector Street. He describes them living in “restored Georgian houses” and leaving their creation to its own devices, with no systemic support. (4)
The U.K. has a long and contentious history with public housing. As in the U.S., there have been decades-long conversations about the necessity of affordable public housing for low-income or impoverished people, but the execution has often been flawed.
The lack of governmental support for the residents of Spector Street transfers to Cabrini-Green in Candyman. Unlike Spector Street, Cabrini-Green Homes was a very real place, until it was demolished between 2000 and 2011. (5) Located on the North Side of Chicago, Cabrini-Green began as the Frances Cabrini Homes, constructed by the Chicago Housing Authority in 1942. (6) The William Green homes were added 20 years later in 1962 and ultimately, Cabrini-Green became a massive complex of 23 high-rise towers (many of which were 15 or 16 stories tall), plus row houses. (7)
Despite grand promises of low-income public housing, (8) the CHA severely neglected Cabrini-Green and its residents. (9) This systemic disregard is on display in Candyman, both in the visual depictions of the crumbling and graffiti-covered buildings themselves and in the behaviors and comments of the fictional residents.
There’s some discussion in both “The Forbidden” and Candyman of the residents being abandoned by the authorities and the system (usually meaning the cops and their respective cities). But there’s also an overpowering sense that the residents themselves are both individually dangerous and collectively sinister.
Poverty and Racism as Foundational Dividers
In both forms of the story, Helen is an outsider, but the people in the communities she’s studying remain the “others.” Because these narratives are told almost exclusively from Helen’s point of view–we as the reader or audience know that she’s very clearly the protagonist, even when she’s implicated in multiple murders in the film–the subjects of her study are supporting characters to her. But really, they’re strategic means to Helen’s end: she uses and exploits Anne-Marie and (in the film) Jake for their information and access to these communities.
The idea of the “other,” especially as it pertains to race, class, nationality, gender, sexuality, skin tone, and culture, has been around for a while. The idea can be explained as: “The other is not someone that is not part of us but is someone or a group of people that are intentionally being situated outside the [dominant] society.” (10) While it’s primarily a concept in sociology, “othering” also has implications for fields like history, literature, and public health. It’s a process that has contributed to innumerable atrocities over the course of human history. (11)
Importantly, an overview of the concept from the City University of New York notes that “The Other is not necessarily a numerical minority.” (12) In both “The Forbidden” and Candyman, Helen is significantly outnumbered by the residents of these communities but still others them based on race and/or class. In these stories, poverty and/or racism serve as insurmountable, fated dividers that irreparably separate Helen from everyone else. But interestingly, in Candyman, the residents of Cabrini-Green accept her as a saint-like figure in the end, acknowledging her sacrifice to save baby Anthony.
It’s an interesting contrast to the ending of “The Forbidden,” in which Helen watches in horror as the inhabitants of Spector Street sacrifice her to Candyman and deny seeing her when Trevor asks them if she’s been there, “staring at the pyre with smiles buried in their eyes.” (13) Throughout the story, the estate residents are presented as uncooperative, strange, and actively threatening. The message is clear, whether Barker intended it to be or not: the impoverished, oppressed, superstitious estate residents are dangerous. Helen, meanwhile, is innocent in both the “didn’t commit a crime” sense and the “disastrously naïve” sense.
Black Men and White Women
There are a lot of contrasts and contradictions in Candyman’s story, and I wouldn’t do the movie justice without talking about how Black men have historically been weaponized against white women, in fiction and real life.
It was definitely a conscious choice by Clive Barker and Bernard Rose (executive producer and writer/director, respectively), who are both British white men, to move the central location from Liverpool to Chicago and to make the historic Daniel fall in love with and fall victim to a white woman in the film. Making Helen Candyman’s fated lover is definitely…also a choice.
Black men’s sexuality has been tainted by stereotypes of extreme violence and hypersexuality for centuries. Black men today remain haunted by the “Mandingo”-buck trope that the National Museum of African American History points out was “conjured by the minds of enslavers and auctioneers to promote the strength, breeding ability, and agility of muscular young black men.” (14) White people in this country and elsewhere have a very long history of imposing threatening physicality on Black men.
Tony Todd, who plays Daniel/the Candyman, is a dark-skinned Black man with a deep, resonant voice who stands at six-foot-five. His classic wide-legged stance when Helen first sees him in the parking garage and elsewhere was, I’m sure, designed for him to take up even more space and be even more physically threatening.
Both Daniel’s love for the white woman he couldn’t have in life and Candyman’s fixation on Helen are presented as intensely sexual: there’s a moment when he’s claiming Helen in an abandoned apartment and lifts the hem of her skirt with his hook as he leans down to kiss her. He has a very clear desire to claim her spiritually and physically (his repeated demands to “be my victim”), hypnotically pleading to “allow me at least a kiss.”
When Candyman premiered in 1992, it wasn’t an automatic classic for all Black people. The Chicago Tribune ran an article on the movie that included criticism from two Black filmmakers: Reginald Hudlin and Carl Franklin. (15) Both expressed concerns around Barker and Rose’s willingness to lean into these stereotypes. Franklin called the film “irresponsible and racist.” Daniel/the Candyman is, of course, Black, as are many of the residents of Cabrini-Green and those he kills. In my opinion, this plays into the “Black-on-Black crime” craze of the time in a way that doesn’t ultimately serve the story very well.
But Candyman’s extreme violence — goring multiple people with a massive hook — is central to his character, almost more so than the violence perpetrated against him in life.
Art and Violence
The film is gorier than the story, with multiple on-screen murders and even more eviscerated corpses shown after the fact (RIP Bernadette). But graffiti and art still feature heavily in the movie, with the mural of Candyman’s gaping mouth becoming a classic central image. And I think these two concepts are heavily related in this story.
Current or former (fictional) residents of Cabrini-Green, for example, immortalized Candyman’s origin story when he was still Daniel Robitaille on the walls of an abandoned unit. And after Helen’s sacrifice to return baby Anthony to Anne-Marie, she’s immortalized with her own saint-like mural.
The Cabrini-Green residents’ practice of portraying Candyman and later, Helen, in art is central to their legacies. Visual depictions of their deeds and lives are powerful reminders of what they mean to this community.
These artworks also speak to one of the larger messages of both “The Forbidden” and Candyman: you never really die if people remember you. Fear you, revere you, worship you, yes — but most importantly, remember you. We’ve lost so many names and personal experiences in the American history of Blackness because the oppressive dominant social structure still doesn’t deem our stories worth telling or remembering. The Candyman, as a Black man, retains power in the afterlife by telling his own story and, yes, forcing people to remember him.
Bernard Rose (the writer and director of the film) chose to craft Daniel’s story as one that’s almost completely reduced to his violent death. Yes, there’s discussion of his great talent as an artist, but that point is still made mostly in service of that talent being taken away through Daniel’s murder and mutilation. There’s no question that Daniel was a victim when he was human, but as the Candyman, he very often commits violence against others.
But there’s definitely a difference between Candyman’s victimhood and Helen’s. And most of that difference comes from divergent ideas of Daniel/Candyman’s and Helen’s personhood.
Being a Person and Being a Victim
There’s an interesting term that’s been going around true crime circles for several years now: the “less dead.” As far as I can tell, it first appeared in a 2018 article in The Cut about notorious serial killer Samuel Little. The story’s author, Jillian Lauren, spoke with both Little and LAPD homicide detective Mitzi Roberts, who caught him. Roberts described Little’s victims, most of whom were Black women and/or worked as sex workers and/or had substance use disorders, as “less dead.” Lauren explained it this way: “people who live on the margins of society and whose murders have historically tended to be not as thoroughly investigated as those of their wealthier, whiter, and perhaps more sober counterparts.” (16)
The “less dead” often become the “less remembered”: in all the discourse about people like Samuel Little and other perpetrators of violence against marginalized people, the victims usually get lost in both contemporary discussions and the historical record. If no newspaper or other publication ever recorded their names in a publicly accessible space, it’s going to be a lot harder to find information about their lives in 50 years.
As a Black man who was mutilated and lynched, Daniel had his limited power and agency forcibly taken away. He would certainly have been considered “less dead” in his own time, and his brutal murder would have been justified as something he brought on himself. But as Candyman, he has become eternal.
Being More than a Person
“I am rumor. It is a blessed condition, believe me. To be whispered about at street corners. To live in other people’s dreams but not to have to be.” — Candyman
This conversation about the “less dead” comes into play with Candyman in the story’s and its namesake’s obsession with (collective) memory. There’s a popular saying I’ve heard that goes something like, “People die twice: once when they physically pass away and again when their name is said for the last time.” Daniel as Candyman is making sure that he lives on — yes, as a violent, fear-inducing phantom, but he’s revered and never forgotten.
This kind of immortality is usually reserved for white martyrs or the “perfect victims.” For the Candyman of the 1992 film, living on in a community’s collective memory means power, status, and control that have tangible, sometimes deadly consequences for the people of Cabrini-Green. Moreover, being a rumor or a phantom affords him the safety he was denied in life.
In both The Forbidden and Candyman, the Candyman is engulfed by flames but lives on. He can’t be harmed or killed — he can’t be erased again. Black people have had our cultural, intellectual, familial, and individual experiences invalidated and erased for centuries. This takes place on both a systemic and an interpersonal level — we know that acts of violence come from both power structures and individual people. But, as Daniel’s story shows, the actions of racist, oppressive systems and individual racists are intimately linked. You can’t have one without the other.
What “Candyman” Means for Black Horror
As I said before, the 1992 Candyman film was written, directed, and executive produced by white British men. Not all Black people who saw the movie then or now thought it was good representation for Black Americans, and I agree that it probably could have been handled better by a Black storyteller. But both Tony Todd and the character of Candyman have achieved icon status in the Black community, and Todd’s performance has significantly contributed to the language and canon of Black horror.
More to think about
Below are some questions to ask yourself and prompts for further research. Don’t forget to subscribe to the blog and the newsletter here on Medium — I’m sending out “extras” on the Tuesdays between posts with things that didn’t fit into the main entry.
And email me at blackhorrific@gmail.com and follow me on Tiktok (@domi_aaaaaa) if you want to talk more!
- Have you seen Candyman or read “The Forbidden”? What did you appreciate or dislike about these stories?
- What’s something about Chicago history or the history of public housing you want to know more about?
- What are some of your favorite works about collective memory or immortality?
Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you in two weeks!
Sources:
(1) Stokes, Phil and Sarah. “Say His Name…”. The Clive Barker Archive, September 5, 2021, https://www.clivebarkerarchive.com/blog/tag/The+Forbidden.
(2) “Clive Barker: Biography.” The Clive Barker Archive, n.d., https://www.clivebarkerarchive.com/clivebarker.
(3) Cambridge University Dictionary, “housing estate,” n.d., https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/housing-estate
(4) Barker, Clive. “The Forbidden,” Books of Blood, Volume 5, Sphere, 1985, pg. 1.
(5) Harpel, Gaby and Lowe, Jet (photograph). “Cabrini Green Homes,” The Hal Baron Project, accessed April 10, 2024, https://halbaronproject.web.illinois.edu/items/show/45.
(6) Harpel, Gaby and Lowe, Jet (photograph). “Cabrini Green Homes,” The Hal Baron Project, accessed April 10, 2024, https://halbaronproject.web.illinois.edu/items/show/45.
(7) Harpel, Gaby and Lowe, Jet (photograph). “Cabrini Green Homes,” The Hal Baron Project, accessed April 10, 2024, https://halbaronproject.web.illinois.edu/items/show/45.
(8) Cancino, Alejandra. “Cabrini-Green: A History of Broken Promises,” Block Club Chicago, Dec. 15, 2021, https://blockclubchicago.org/2021/12/15/cabrini-green-a-history-of-broken-promises/.
(9) Harpel, Gaby and Lowe, Jet (photograph). “Cabrini Green Homes,” The Hal Baron Project, accessed April 10, 2024, https://halbaronproject.web.illinois.edu/items/show/45.
(10) AbdulMagied, Salma Ahmed. “Othering, Identity, and Recognition: The Social Exclusion of the Constructed ‘Other,’” Future Journal of Social Science: Vol. 1: Iss. 1, Article 5. DOI: 10.54623/fue.fjss.1.1.5, https://digitalcommons.aaru.edu.jo/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1004&context=fjss.
(11) Curle, Clint. “Us vs. Them: The process of othering,” Canadian Museum for Human RIghts, Jan. 24, 2020, https://humanrights.ca/story/us-vs-them-process-othering.
(12) “The Other,” City University of New York, Feb. 4, 2009, http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/other.html.
(13) Barker, Clive. “The Forbidden,” Books of Blood, Volume 5, Sphere, 1985, pg. 37.
(14) “Popular and Pervasive Stereotypes of African Americans,” The National Museum of African American History, n.d., https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/popular-and-pervasive-stereotypes-african-americans
(15) “Black Slasher ‘Candyman’ Draws Fire Over ‘Racist’ Depictions,” The Chicago Tribune, Oct. 29, 1992, https://www.chicagotribune.com/1992/10/29/black-slasher-candyman-draws-fire-over-racist-depictions/
(16) Lauren, Jillian. “The Serial Killer and the ‘Less Dead,’” The Cut, Dec. 20, 2018, https://www.thecut.com/2018/12/how-serial-killer-samuel-little-was-caught.html
