Candyman (1992)
Slasher gals are generally speaking asked to go through a lot, but fewer have to put up with the sheer amount of chicanery that Helen Lyle has to manage. Suspected of a crime she doesn’t recall committing, she becomes flesh for what the broken justice system would call a victory. Bound, gagged, threatened, terrorized, and eventually burned alive, she gains a modicum of karmic justice beyond the grave. Perhaps that is the only way things can be made right in this environment. This speaks of a space where the vulnerable are persecuted and killed by the masses, where social projects fail horribly and are met with apathy at best. Urban America. Candyman as a slasher mixes sadism and sorrow in his quest for victims who call for him. He can be studied, pieced apart, by academia, but he cannot be conquered.
Slasher killers are entitled to their mythos, but Candyman almost suffers from an embarrassment of riches. He has the whole Bloody Mary mirror gimmick, plus the hook hand, plus the bees, plus the sordid past with racial hate crime. It feels like an amalgamation of trauma made flesh, one man burdened with the totality of suffering by an out-group who live in a building condemned to languish on the outskirts of mainstream society. Do what you gotta do, my man.
Chicago is exemplified consummate here, from the stark skylines glimpsed only ever from afar in the projects to the overall attitude. But this extends beyond that, becoming in a sense a very American horror film. Race in this sense is only picked apart and interrogated in this way here. We may try to bury the ugly past and deny it and pretend that DEI is wrong if we’re fascist MAGA heads, but digging at this unique ugliness exposes horror in an American way.
THE RULES
SIP
Someone says 'Candyman' or 'Cabrini'.
Bees!
BIG DRINK
Jump scare (two if you fall for it).
Helicopter aerial shot of a neighborhood or highway.