CANDYMAN (DVD)

Release Date: Oct 6th, 2008
Certificate: 18
Running Time: 94 minutes

Director: Bernard Rose

Cast: Virginia Madsen, Kasi Lemmons, Xander Berkeley, DeJuan Guy, Tony Todd, Vanessa Williams, Marianna Elliot, Theodore Raimi, Gilbert Lewis

Before the horror/slasher genre was jump started and injected with new blood in the later half of the 90’s, the early part of 90’s saw the last great moments in a dying breed of horror movies. Along with films such as The Silence of the Lambs (1991), John Carpenter’s In The Mouth of Madness (1994), David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992) and Misery (1990), Candyman ranks up there as one of the final scares.

Directed by Bernard Rose, Candyman is based on a short story called “The Forbidden” written by horror-meister Clive Barker. My first encounter with Candyman came back in 1993 when my older brother had just rented it on video and asked me if I wanted to watch it with him. Sure, why not. I was already used to horror movies by then, having grown up on an unhealthy diet of them by the time I was 10 years old, so Candyman didn’t seem like a big deal. To my surprise and horror though, I found myself only able to watch about 30 minutes of it, I found the suspense and tension coupled with the eerie Gothic music too much to take and always had the feeling in the pit of my stomach that something really horrible was about to happen. It wasn’t until 1995 that I was able to sit down and watch the film again in its entirety and I was glad to finally be able to do it. Although I couldn’t sleep that night.

The film’s protagonist is a graduate student, Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen) researching for a thesis on urban legends. While out interviewing college students about stories and urban myths she gets to hear about the Candyman (Tony Todd). According to legend, Candyman appears to whomever looks into a mirror and calls his name five times. As Helen starts to investigate the story further she finds herself drawn deeper and deeper into Cabrini Green, a run down part of Chicago famous for its poverty, violent crimes and murders and at the same time her own personal life begins to spiral beyond her control. Candyman starts to become a little too real for her especially when she defiantly, and ultimately, stands in front of the mirror and summons him. Unsure of what is real or a hallucination anymore, Helen loses her grip on the world and her mind as Candyman tightens his grip on her. It’s a terrifying, gritty and tragic fairytale, but one that is rich in the world it portrays and the characters who bring it all to life.

I guess what scared me so much about Candyman was that it felt a little bit too close to comfort. As a young teen, I was growing up on a low income housing estate with my family in a run down part of in East London which didn’t look too different from Cabrini Green, but also, I had heard similar legends myself. I remember being told as a little boy to never look into a mirror after midnight. Friends at school once told me a friend of their friend’s looked into a mirror after midnight and saw the Devil looking right back at him. OK, so perhaps I was a wee bit gullible at the time, but the Lord’s honest truth is even to this day I will not look into a mirror once it’s gone past midnight, even if I walk past it I won’t look into it. An important thing to remember about urban legends is that it never happens to anyone you know, it’s always a friend of a friends, or your brother’s mate, or you next door neighbour’s friend’s uncle’s girlfriend it happened to. That’s the main identifying feature of an urban myth if you’ve ever heard one, and that’s what the film taps into; the ambiguity of it and not being sure at all if the killings are being done by a mere man or a monster from beyond the grave.

While Candyman spawned 2 sequels, it goes without saying that the original is by far the best. The second movie is worth seeing after though; it takes place in New Orleans and manages to take the story a little further, explaining more about Candyman when he was a man and what happened to his family after his death. It paints a very vivid picture of life in deep south during colonial times and of New Orleans pre-Katrina, as much as it did with Cabrini Green and I think that is the strongest thing about these movies; they show you how these horrors are created, and not just Candyman, but the real horrors such as poverty, crime and violence.

Candyman was one of the last few great horror movies of the early 90’s, in the days before the post-modern slasher movie, the reality TV show angle and the post 9/11, based-on-video-game and nuclear fallout/zombie zone movies of the 00’s took over. Just don’t say his name in front of the mirror, no matter what you believe!