Candyman. 1992. USA. Written and directed by Bernard Rose. Based on the novel by Clive Barker. With Virginia Madsen, Tony Todd, Xander Berkeley and Kasi Lemmons. 35mm. 101 min.
Bernard Rose’s adaptation relocates Clive Barker’s short story “The Forbidden” from lower-class Liverpool to Chicago’s Cabrini–Green housing projects, where graduate student Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen) is researching the urban legend of the Candyman, an enslaved person’s son who became a successful portraitist, but was lynched when he and one of his white sitters fell in love. Now the Candyman haunts Cabrini–Green, the site where his ashes were spread, and (in a nod to Bloody Mary) he can be summoned by anyone foolish enough to say his name five times in a mirror—including poor Helen, who becomes an unwilling vessel through which Candyman reinforces his legend. Though the film is far from perfect—it is never made clear, for example, why a Black spirit of vengeance would terrorize the denizens of a public housing project—Candyman ’s barely metaphorical explorations of racial psychogeography, institutional inequalities in urban planning and design, and white fears about miscegenation and “racial purity” are a provocative departure from most genre fare of the era.