Film Review

Candyman (2021)

The legend of the Candyman continues to haunt the now-gentrified Chicago neighbourhood where it began…

Clive Barker was described as “the future of horror” by Stephen King in the mid-1980s, and after turning his own novella The Hellbound Heart into the extraordinary Hellraiser (1987) it seemed like the British author’s extremist approach was going to be the future of horror films too. That expectation was met by Bernard Rose’s incredible adaptation of Barker’s short story The Forbidden, Candyman (1992), about a university student investigating an urban legend, which transposed events from a rundown English council estate to the housing projects of Cabrini-Green, Chicago.

Rose’s own screenplay also added many elements that weren’t in Barker’s story, such as making ‘Candyman’ (Tony Todd) a handsome black man instead of a gaunt white man (which led a lot of the movie’s racial themes), giving him a sympathetic and tragic backstory (as the victim of a racist murder by white men), and even threw in a variation of the macabre Bloody Mary party game where saying ‘Candyman’ five times into a mirror conjures him into…