In Clive Barker-based movies, the monster’s a tragic/haunted Morpheus who sometimes has to kill or haunt dreams or torture or whatever to get their point across to some Keanu. These Morpheus characters in Barker are glum, professional, and pleasureless, but love to feel seen and understood. Barker movie plots often bracket the story to just this: Keanu’s disbelief/fear/curiosity eventually giving way to Morpheus’s red pill.
How this works is super consistent on a staging level. Here’s a Keanu inside the Matrix, surrounded by regular people doing normal stuff, and dear god is it boring, drab, and filled with petty behavior. Wouldn’t it be great if there were some more vivid world hidden behind it, where a Keanu can have a true purpose? Keanus are always in luck, because the Matrix always has a sketchy hinterland (a cemetery in Nightbreed (The Cabal Cut) (1990); a locked attic room in Hellraiser (1987); an abandoned subway line in The Midnight Meat Train (2008); a graffiti-crushed housing project’s hidden room in Candyman), which is always inhabited by or leads to some kind of Morpheus (the Nightbreed; Pinhead; Mahogany; Candyman), who always eventually reveals a Keanu’s real place within the super-reality. Sometimes the super-reality is better, other times worse, but Keanu always ends up joining Morpheus in it, not defeating him; that’s never Keanu’s job.
Candyman is a pretty drunk rendition of all of this stuff. The super-reality its Keanu gets drawn into is one of cyclical fated reincarnation, that feeds on fear, sacrifice, and vengeance… or something. Candyman is a slave’s son, who invented a way to make shoes, and was a popular painter, but he got into an interracial marriage, and had his painting hand cut off by racists, who replaced it with a hook, and then covered him with honey, so he got stung to death by bees, and then the racists burned him, and because it was on the site of this housing project, he haunts it to this day… I guess. The editing and plotting are exactly this confusing too, and the middle “psychological thriller” portion where the Keanu is killing people (“but is it actually Candyman?”) is totally unconvincing; we know the Matrix is never “maybe just in Keanu’s head,” that it’s for sure definitely Candyman.
So what else do we get, other than some awkwardly-handled race stuff, a harsh 90s-exploitation rendition of “a housing project” and “poverty,” and some very arbitrary ghost rules around who gets comeuppance and when? A few great, bizarre images, and a gothic “obsessed love”/”burn the world” vibe not unlike Wuthering Heights (1992). Conceptually Candyman has nothing on Hellraiser – the mysterious alien presence of the cenobytes and the contours of an extra-dimensional realm of unknowable pleasure and pain are just way more fun to think about to me than the harsh, bleakly regular stuff here – but Candyman somehow manages to be more engrossing to actually watch. Maybe check back in on The Matrix (1999) first, and pair it with as many other Barker movies as you can handle – to me their effect is strongest and most interesting when they’re considered in aggregate, as instances of a platonic “Barker movie” form. Or for maximum flavor just check out Nightbreed (The Cabal Cut) and move on.
I don’t really believe in spoilers for a 27 year old film but this review goes well beyond vague plot points. If this is scary to you, the short review of Candyman is check it out, it’s great.
Candyman is about a white grad student named Helen who summons a ghost by saying his name five times while looking in the mirror. Candyman is the spirit she summons, a black man from 1890 who was killed by a white mob for fathering a child with a white woman. He’s full of bees and has a hook for a hand and lives in an abandoned room in the Cabrini-Green projects. This room can only be accessed by climbing through the bathroom mirror in a layout that mirrors Helens apartment that was a housing project that’s been turned into upscale condos. Candyman steals a black baby, kill her middle class black friend, and gets her locked up in a mental asylum telling Helen that if she ‘believes in him’ that it’ll all end. The movie ends with her crawling through a burning mound of garbage made by the residents of Cabrini Green with the stolen baby in her arms, saving the baby but dying in the process. Horror movies from the late 80s early 90s tended to be unique if they had even a hint of intentional subtext but Candyman bucks the trend and has actual text out the wazoo.
Admittedly, this is pretty dicey territory for two white dudes from across the pond to take on. The original Clive Barker story is set in Liverpool and is about class, a more quintessentially British preoccupation. As much as I would have loved to see Candyman navigate a classic Upstairs Downstairs type of situation, moving it to the Chicago projects raises a lot of questions about who gets to tell these stories. While Candyman is told from a white perspective and would have benefited from an African American writer and director (something which we’ll get in the upcoming Jordan Peele produced remake/sequel) this movie by no means enters Dances With Wolves territory, and can be chalked up to people doing the best that they could with the resources they had at the time (i.e. a studio system that would balk at financing black films).
The movie can be read as a story about how we can make communities invisible or abstract when the idea that they’re made of people becomes inconvenient. While Helen is wandering willy nilly through Cabrini-Green, something she is able to do because she pretends to be a cop, she doesn’t seem super interested in the conditions of the building or the people living in them. That a woman was brutally murdered in the room she’s investigating is a distant concern compared to the idea that it maybe has a connection to an urban legend and would make good fodder for her grad school thesis. The baby Helen saves in the end? It was her fault Candyman stole it in the first place and when she dies it reads more as penance for her creating the problem than the heroic act of a white savior. Honestly there’s a train of thought I could follow that the ending is arguing for reparations. If this seems a little wild for a film that also features a toilet full of bees, let’s just say there’s a lot here to chew on and many different ways the bite can break down. If you’re looking something cerebral that works on multiple levels that’s also a straight-up horror classic then check it out.