the candyman movie review

Urban legends tap our deepest fears, and one of the most subterranean involves the call for help that is laughed at or ignored. We cry out again and again, only to be dismissed by our friends, or the 911 operator, or strangers on the shore. At the beginning of Bernard Rose's "Candyman," we hear an urban legend about a woman in a high-rise public housing project, who calls for 911 but is not taken seriously. Not long after, her body is found, savagely slashed to death. The Candyman has struck again.

Who is the Candyman? According to the movie, he is a powerful supernatural being who haunts Cabrini-Green, the housing complex on Chicago's Near North Side. He lures victims with candy, or puts razor blades in Hollywood treats - the details are vague and dreamlike - and his lair is an abandoned apartment on one of Cabrini's upper floors.

All of this information is carefully written down by two researchers from the University of Illinois ( Virginia Madsen and Kasi Lemmons ), as part of a research project that also touches on such matters as alligators in sewers. Madsen, trapped in an unhappy marriage with a philandering professor, throws herself into her work, dragging Lemmons along as they interview the neighbors of the Candyman's latest victim. Oddly enough, their stories seem to support the legend - even though the theory is that these urban tales never quite check out.

Rose is a director who likes stories about supernatural invasions of real life. His brilliant " Paperhouse " (1989), about a young girl whose drawings seemed to influence the life of a boy in her feverish dreams, used images of razor-sharp reality to suggest that the dreams were as real as the rest of the movie. "Candyman," from Rose's own screenplay, based on a Clive Barker story, does the same thing. We think we'll discover that the Candyman is actually a real, live human being - a killer using the legend as a cover. What we do discover is more frightening, and more intriguing. He may literally be a product of the imagination.

What if urban legends became real if enough people believed in them? What if the sheer psychic weight of faith from thousands of people were enough to create a supernatural reality? If everyone believed there were alligators in the sewers, would there be? Are gods the result of man's faith in them? Would the Candyman therefore take a dim view of a researcher's attempts to debunk him? Madsen and Lemmons, courageous and plucky, make sympathetic heroines as they walk up and down the dangerous stairwells of Cabrini-Green, crawling through empty apartments looking for a monster. Rose has been clever in his use of locations. Just as urban legends are based on the real fears of those who believe in them, so are certain urban locations able to embody fear. Empty apartments in the upper floors of public housing projects are, it is widely believed, occupied by gangs. We perceive a real threat to the women, at the same time they're searching for what they think is an imaginary one.

Then the plot thickens. Rose evokes Hitchcock's favorite formula, the Innocent Victim Wrongly Accused. Just as the Candyman's victim called 911 and was not believed, so Madsen is arrested by the police and her story scornfully dismissed. It's all kind of intriguing. Elements of the plot may not hold up in the clear light of day, but that didn't bother me much. What I liked was a horror movie that was scaring me with ideas and gore, instead of simply with gore.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

• Tony Todd as Candyman
• Xander Berkeley as Trevor Lyle
• Kasi Lemmons as Bernadette
• Virginia Madsen as Helen Lyle
• Vanessa Williams as Anne-Marie

Written and Directed by

• Bernard Rose
• Philip Glass

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‘Candyman’ Review: Who Can Take a Sunrise, Sprinkle It With Blood?

The new take on the 1990s cult horror film returns the story to its old stomping ground, this time with Jordan Peele as a producer.

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‘Candyman’ | Anatomy of a Scene

Nia dacosta narrates a haunting sequence from her film that uses shadow puppetry..

Hi, my name is Nia DaCosta, and I am the director of “Candyman.” “You guys want to hear a scary story?” “No.” “Too bad.” So, this scene is Troy and Brianna— they’re siblings— and Brianna’s boyfriend, Anthony— who is an artist— and Troy’s boyfriend. And they’re all together trying to have a nice dinner, but Troy insists on telling a ghost story about the neighborhood that Brianna and Anthony have just moved into. You see Yahya Abdul-Mateen II playing Anthony, Teyonah Parris playing Brianna, Nathan Stewart-Jarrett playing Troy, and Kyle Kaminsky playing Grady. [LAUGHTER] “This is a story about a woman named Helen Lyle. She was a grad student— a white grad student— doing her thesis on the urban legends of Cabrini Green. For research, she came down to Cabrini a few times. You know, asking questions, taking pictures of graffiti, people. And then one day she just snaps.” So, the shadow puppets came about when Jordan Peele, who’s the co-writer and producer on the film, he came to me and he was like, I think we should do shadow puppets instead of shooting actual flashback scenes. And I was super into it because I did not want to shoot flashback scenes, and I also didn’t want to cut in clips from the first movie. And so, we kind of made a decision, O.K., the flashbacks will be shadow puppetry. But then, as I was working with the shadow puppets and trying to figure out where they fit, it turned out they actually were just going to be much more useful. So that’s how they ended up in this scene. We wanted it to be very specific to the teller. So every shadow puppet scene has a very specific style and point of view because it is someone’s way of thinking about the story. It’s not necessarily the truth. “Helen arrives with a sacrificial offering.” [BABY CRYING] And that’s why we wanted to also create that separation between fact and fiction, real and fake. And that’s why you see the hands moving because it’s about these people creating a story— puppeteering the way we think about these people. And for Troy, because he’s trying to tell a scary story, he’s being very hyperbolic. He’s also saying things that didn’t happen. We made the style very jagged and scary and very much not the sympathetic character of Helen that we know and love from the original film. “Is my rosé still in the freezer?” “You don’t want the moscato? Moscato’s a dessert wine.” [CHUCKLES]

By Manohla Dargis

The first time Candyman, the hook-wielding ghoul, hit the big screen it was 1992 and he was making mincemeat out of people in Cabrini-Green, the troubled public housing development in Chicago. Since then, residents have left (or been moved out), and more than a dozen buildings have been razed . Forgettable sequels have come and gone, too, yet Candyman abides, cult film characters being a more enduring and certainly more prized commodity than affordable housing.

The original “Candyman,” written and directed by Bernard Rose, is more icky than scary, but it has real sting. It centers on the son of a formerly enslaved man — Tony Todd plays the title demon — who, once upon a time, was punished by racists for loving a white woman. Now he wanders about slicing and dicing those who summon him. Just look in a mirror and say his name five times (oh, go ahead), and wait for the blood to spurt. Among those who did back in the day was a white doctoral student who becomes a red-hot victim. The pain wasn’t exquisite, as Candyman promised, but it had its moments.

In the sharp, shivery redo directed by Nia DaCosta , Candyman seems on hiatus. The time is the present and the place is the bougie community that’s sprung up around Cabrini-Green. There, in sleek towers with designer kitchens and walls of windows, the gentrifying vanguard sips wine, enjoying the view. Beyond, the city sparkles prettily and its ills are at a safe distance (if not for long). The restless camera clocks the scene, and Sammy Davis Jr. — a Black civil rights touchstone turned Richard M. Nixon supporter — belts out his sticky 1970s hit “The Candy Man” (“Who can take tomorrow/dip it in a dream”). It’s a sly reminder, and warning, that the past always troubles the present.

Sometimes the past also bites the present right where it hurts, and before long the opening calm has been violently upended. As the blood begins to gush and the body count rises, the story takes shape, as does the somewhat tense domestic life of a painter, Anthony (a very good Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), and a curator, the pointedly named Brianna (Teyonah Parris). They soon learn that Candyman never left (well, he is a valuable franchise property). Enter the scares and shrieks and anxious laughs, and the dependably indispensable Colman Domingo , who pops up with a Cheshire cat grin. There are also flashing police lights that aren’t as welcoming as they might be elsewhere.

“Candyman” is the second feature from DaCosta, who made her debut with the modest drama “Little Woods.” She might have seemed a counterintuitive choice for this horror rethink, but while her first movie didn’t fully hold together, it was clear that she could direct actors and make meaning visually. She didn’t just clutter the frame with talking heads; she set (and exploited) moods and created an air of everyday, prickling unease, demonstrating a talent for the ineffable — for atmosphere — that she expands on here. It’s easy to shock viewers with splatter but the old gut-and-run gets awfully boring awfully fast. Far better is the slow creep, the horror that teases and then threatens.

The dread inexorably builds in “Candyman,” which snaps into focus after Anthony learns of the boogeyman. Intrigued, he seizes on the tale of a Black spirit who stalked the area’s disadvantaged residents as grist for his art, which could use a creative kick. DaCosta — who shares script credit with Win Rosenfeld and Jordan Peele, who’s also a producer — nicely fills in the texture, stakes and emotional temperature of Anthony’s milieu with its cozy domesticity, artistic frustrations, gnawing jealousies and crossover dreams. The banter is believable, as are the pinpricks of disquiet and the weird suppurating wounds that increasingly mar this otherwise ordinary scene and its genial hero.

It takes nothing away from DaCosta to note that “Candyman” is of an intellectual and political piece with Peele’s earlier work, including “ Get Out ” and “ Us .” Like those movies, “Candyman” uses the horror genre to explore race (Peele gets under the skin), including ideas about who gets to play the hero — and villain — and why. Peele isn’t interested only in what scares us; he’s also asking who, exactly, we mean when we say “us.” As a form, horror is preoccupied with the unknown and ostensibly monstrous, a fixation that manifests in visions of otherness. Much, of course, depends on your point of view. (The series’ genesis is Clive Barker’s “The Forbidden,” set in a presumptively British slum.)

DaCosta plays with perspective, shifting between Anthony’s and the intersecting, sometimes colliding worlds of more-successful artists, urban-legend propagators and, touchingly, profoundly scarred children. Throughout, she intersperses bits of shadow puppetry that work as a counterpoint to the main narrative, a reflexive device that emphasizes that “Candyman” is also fundamentally about storytelling. We tell some fictions to understand ourselves, to exist; others we tell to turn other human beings into monsters, to destroy. In “Candyman,” those who summon up this ghoul, thereby allowing him to tell his tale, first need to look at their reflections. When they do, they see innocence staring back at them — that, at least, is the story they tell themselves.

Candyman Rated R for horror-movie violence. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters.

Manohla Dargis has been the co-chief film critic since 2004. She started writing about movies professionally in 1987 while earning her M.A. in cinema studies at New York University, and her work has been anthologized in several books. More about Manohla Dargis

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Candyman Reviews

Nia DaCosta and Jordan Peele imbue the horror cult classic with political dimensions that are poignant and darkly comic by turns.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 23, 2024

Nia DaCosta’s direct sequel to the 1992 original, itself based on a Clive Barker story, is plenty scary with horrors imagined and real.

Full Review | Jul 28, 2024

But reframing the legend as a vengeful specter instead of Tony Todd’s romantic, Byronic icon inadvertently erases Anthony’s agency and individuality, and glosses over how Candyman terrorizes his community.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Aug 16, 2023

The film keeps you on edge the entire way through with its different strains of Horror, Body, Psychological, & Slasher! The film might be too short & rushed but its journey was an impressive one

Full Review | Jul 26, 2023

Nia DaCosta does a fabulous job at modernising Candyman; the gore, violent sequences, and general atmosphere are almost suffocating.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 25, 2023

At its core, Candyman (2021) attempts to explore how Black trauma is intergenerational. Exploring how the atrocities inflicted on our ancestors years prior still affect our lives today.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 4, 2022

Candyman has style to spare in its horror setpieces, but the script is far too cluttered and confusing for its social commentary to land, despite director Nia DaCosta's best efforts behind the camera.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Sep 1, 2022

It’s a great idea on the surface, but the story ends up needlessly convoluted and with gaping holes in its logic. And while it seems interested in meaningful topics such as race and gentrification, just referencing them isn’t the same as dealing with them

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 17, 2022

There is hardly a moment when the characters and themes are all that alluring, leaving dissatisfaction at the bungled storytelling that ends on a ridiculous note that is unfulfilling.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/10 | Jun 5, 2022

The ending of the movie doesnt quite work, and comments on contemporary issues such as police violence, gentrification and systemic racism dont always fit with the established mythology of the series.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 13, 2022

CANDYMAN has a lot of exciting ideas on its mind and it continues the classic original pretty cleverly, but as an intense, gripping slasher film it just doesnt completely work for me.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Mar 13, 2022

DaCosta builds upon the thoughtful original to investigate the politics of race, gentrification, and history in a manner better suited to the metaphoric potential of horror, resulting in a far more decisive, clarified, and emotionally involving tale.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Feb 12, 2022

What so easily could have been a bland sequel that is simply trying to make a quick buck on an established character is instead a motivated and inspired final product that is truly one of the best films of the year.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Feb 12, 2022

Candyman is a worthy sequel to the 1992 original. It's well-paced and it builds upon the universes mythology in a meaningful way.

Full Review | Feb 12, 2022

Nia DaCosta's reboot/sequel retains the Chicago setting of its influential 1992 predecessor but relocates the shocks to a bougie-artsy 2021 milieu where talent and education ultimately provide no escape or defense from the racist past or present.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Feb 3, 2022

What's most satisfying about Candyman is just how smart it is without ever becoming smug.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 9, 2022

CANDYMAN is a breathtaking beauty of a horror film. Clever, brutal and entrancing, it spreads its dark wings over you as you watch the colors in front of you.

Full Review | Dec 31, 2021

Viewers of the new Candyman movie get overblown discourse instead of genuine horror.

Full Review | Dec 17, 2021

It's ironic that, for a movie marinating in major issues, the most imagination is exhibited in the kill scenes.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Nov 21, 2021

A tremendous and impressive piece of work, that manages to revive an old horror classic while also charting its own distinctive path through the material.

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Nov 11, 2021

‘Candyman’: Yes, This Remake Is Brutal and Timely. But It Also Overreaches for Relevance

By K. Austin Collins

K. Austin Collins

Be my victim. For the many who’ve seen it over the years, 1992’s Candyman remains an unforgettable, almost unforgivably effective grievance: a film whose terrors are sticky, dense, pleasurably warying, and uncomfortable; whose politics feel knowing and rife with intention, just this side of didactic, yet poisoned at the root by a premise that seemed, always, at risk of slipping somewhat beyond the film’s grasp. And yet that uncertainty remains one of its primary thrills, like watching a train careen toward a fork in the tracks with too much speed, too much force for cataclysm not to feel imminent. 

The story, you may remember. A curious white graduate student (Virginia Madsen) with an interest in urban legends (pun inescapably intended) wends her way into a corridor of Black American despair by way of Chicago’s ill-fated Cabrini-Green projects, which were once home to 15,000 residents and were, over the years, immortalized in popular culture by the giddy, hard-won vibes of the sitcom Good Times and, more urgently, by Cabrini’s firm foothold, in the public imagination, as a totem of everything wrong with public housing — a conversation that might have morphed into real public concern for the lives at stake in that place, in a city whose yawning history of errors toward race and housing have long been documented, but which instead became the terrain of political jockeying, the kind of bandying-about of blame (toward public-housing efforts, toward working-class Black people) that often left those lives forgotten. In wanders this young, book-smart blonde, with her intentions to understand (she is not a student of anthropology; nevertheless, she bears the stench of one) and her vulnerability to her own curiosity, her compulsion to dig where perhaps she oughtn’t. 

What does she find? The Candyman, of course: the American stain manifest. A villain played so memorably, so daringly, by the actor Tony Todd that this hook-handed villain, a monster lurking, literally, within the walls of those Cabrini-Green towers, would emerge more memorable for the things he said, the ways he was , than for the particulars of the murders committed. The movie sets him up, first, like an old-fashioned urban legend, a Bloody Mary-esque dare — S ay his name — that would bear the fruit of murder. But there’s that other subtext, too — S weets for the sweet . The man who above, candies in tow, seemed prone to luring children; that other kind of predator, the kind whose crimes a community reduces to whispers, silently making its way around the unspeakable as if he were a rock in the stream of their lives, better avoided than acknowledged. The terror of the man was that he was so many things at once — and that they all leant themselves to damning silence.

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Probably the least surprising thing about Nia DaCosta’s new Candyman is that it avails itself, not only of the legacy of its cinematic predecessor, but of the fate of Cabrini-Green in the interim , the efforts at so-called renewal that instead fell prey to de rigeur urban gentrification. The new Candyman is aware of that failure. It’s also aware that the upwardly mobile Black professional class is not blameless in sustaining it — and that the artists among that class are in a peculiar, double-edged position, trapped in the crosshairs of a predominately white art world that exploits the raw material of their lives while subject, for mobility’s sake, to participating in their own exploitation. 

So it goes in — and perhaps in the making of — DaCosta’s film, which stars Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Teyonah Parris as Anthony and Brianna, a gorgeous, well-off, art-world couple living in a condo built on the ashes of what used to be Cabrini-Green. He’s an ambitious artist in a creative rut; she’s a promising gallery director. And they were doing just fine until her brother (played Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) tried to scare them with the story of the Candyman — who isn’t real, of course, who’s just a rumor. Until he isn’t. From there begin terrors, which, in this iteration, co-written by DaCosta with producer Jordan Peele , takes the seed of one of the original movie’s social provocations — the Candyman as communal myth, an explanation for why Cabrini’s residents are so terrorized by the everyday that can also, when the cops show up, become the invisible scapegoat that leaves the actual residents blameless — and embeds it in a set of new, contemporary questions, about Black artists and the economy of white interest, about the egotism of class mobility, about police violence as we, especially over the past year and change, are prone to understanding it today.

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Which is to say: The movie’s got a lot going on. Too much, maybe, not least because its 1992 predecessor — which was based on a story by Clive Barker — was already tangled and overstuffed, attractive and repulsive, with ideas ricocheting from scene to scene that can, to this day, lure you in even as you want to hold the film at arm’s length. That movie, it’s worth remembering, used the power of Tony Todd’s singular, cutting figure, towering within the frame, delectably daring, to render the Candyman into not only an effective movie monster — for my money, one of the most disconcertingly charismatic and tempting since Bela Lugosi’s Dracula — but a symbol. Here was the afterlife of an aggravated racial history, a relic of the era of slavery, so uncanny that his mere presence in the present seemed to rip the stitches of a smoothed over, Franken-skinned history. Here was a racialized villain more terrifying for traversing the boundaries of his supposed place in the projects, popping up in white enclaves — outright summoned — as if to say that the problem of Black poverty could hardly be contained to the projects; here he was, luring a white woman into his coven of fear, tapping into that violent history, forcing us all to recognize how cogent and uncomfortable those optics were in the present. The question of whether that movie fully knew what to make of those optics is key to its discomfort.

Also key was its signature visual device, again the stuff of urban legend, but also, obviously, a ready-made social symbol: a mirror. Where do you go from there? What’s initially interesting about DaCosta’s movie is that its hero, Anthony, is a little hard to like, and that the franchise’s signature mirror, for this particular man, is both an opportunity — take a good, hard look at yourself, guy — and a curse. Anthony is complicated: a little full of himself, a little too willing to cop to the wrong demands. He’s an artist whose output has stalled somewhat, who isn’t making good on what white gallery owners see as his potential, until he effectively sells out and gives them what they want: a tour of Black pain, art about “race” — a taste of Cabrini-Green. At base, the film focuses on what begins to happen to Anthony after a visit to the old grounds Cabrini-Green results, partially, in some discoveries, but most notably in a bee sting which — Spiderman-style — begins to morph him into something he would rather not be. Or, perhaps, to expose what he doesn’t yet know that he already is. 

The new Candyman is absolutely aware of the ironies tucked into the linen of its premise, but it doesn’t quite make good on the full satirical potential of what’s at stake, even as it nudges its way there in its deliberately sterile, nearly goofy portrait of the white art world, white critics, white consumption, and Anthony’s willingness to play along. Anthony, having gone digging into the history of Cabrini after hearing about the Candyman, makes an installation called “Say His Name,” in which he dares his audience to do precisely this, into a panel of mirrors, behind which lies a cavern of haunts and images and, well, the promise of a bloody payoff. Anthony doesn’t know, at first, about that last part — it’s just a story, he’s trying to highlight the history of injustice, yadda-yadda. Suffice it to say, he grows hip to the consequences. And DaCosta’s Candyman , at its most conceptually (if not dramatically) intriguing, finds ways to tie those consequences to Anthony’s identity as an artist. There is a price to be paid for the ease with which Anthony exploits Black trauma in his art, and it plays out in so many ways, but most garishly in the transformations that begin to overtake Anthony himself. 

The most memorable scenes of DaCosta’s Candyman are the moments of actual, graphic, repulsive horror — the skin-peeling, rotting, dead-yet-alive uncanniness, the gross-out gore, the willingness to mix a conceptual vision with a powerful reliance on the basics: mirrors, negative space in the frame, the essentials of run-of-the-mill human dread. Unfortunately for many of us, the bees — those goddamned bees — are back, and their body horror theatrics are further heightened here, mostly to promising effect. As if taking its cues from The Fly , Anthony’s bite becomes a more vibrant, viscous, tortured sort of wound, and begins to spread, a change to the body that’s reflected in the changes in Anthony’s mind.

What’s scary in Candyman is the stuff that makes any good horror movie scary: simply put, the basics. But Candyman is too aware of the legacy of its predecessor’s premise. In trying to wrestle with that premise, the movie falls right into its own traps where the original toed a curious line; it overreaches, most prominently for relevance, to the point of raising questions about whether the movie understands its own, initially provocative, questions. It sets up quite a rabbit hole for Anthony to leap into, one that leads to flickers of insight — among them, the idea that violence against Black people, such as that which created the Candyman in the first place, can hardly be limited to one man, one spectacular incident of violence. 

But the movie persists to get in its own way with each new layer of fabricated revelation. Rough backstories, by way of flashbacks and strained connections, crop up without much satisfaction. Historical echoes grow dimmer with each reverberation. Candyman wants to update its predecessor by moving us back into the realm of Black lives contra the original film’s dependence on white fear. But that wisdom keeps meeting its match in hamfisted plays for relevance, immediacy — flaws that have a ring of familiarity, not to DaCosta’s work, in light of which Candyman plays like a promising step forward, a new bag of tricks from a filmmaker whose talent is well worth keeping an eye on. The movie’s most mitigating flaws instead feel in line with the work of its producer, Jordan Peele, whose Get Out has led to a veritable subgenre of Black-centered horror which, as epitomized by Peele’s own productions, particularly Twilight Zone and Lovecraft Country , has reached a point of diminishing returns, whittling the basic, satisfying schtick of his work down to the bone. Get Out was cleverly marketed as a “social thriller,” knowingly putting itself in conversation with horror movies of the 1992 Candyman ’s stripe, movies like Wes Craven’s The People Under the Stairs , which tempered the usual jumpy thrills with a dose of satire. Those influences weren’t unique for mixing horror with the social dilemmas of their time — horror’s entire bag has, for quite some time, been in its ability to move what society relegates to the shadow’s right into the spotlight, making the dreadful, the unspeakable, unignorable. 

To capitalize on this tradition with a sense of novelty is already somewhat suspect. But it’s also what has made Peele’s canon the phenomenon that it is. Get Out ’s success guaranteed reiteration. And DaCosta’s Candyman , which feels strongest when it feels most hers , is a movie at odds with itself, accordingly, a clash between a solid horror spectacle with some social-dilemma strings attached, on the one hand, and a try-hard grab for too much, on the other. If your response to the phrase  “Say my name” is to notice how uncomfortably close it is to the activist slogans of recent memory, the public outcries over police violence against Black people, you’re not alone: The movie is — damningly, to purposes that ultimately undo the movie with a muddle of symbols and an abandonment of coherence — one step ahead of you. 

Candyman is more of a mixed bag than a failure, but what’s disappointing isn’t the fact of its ambition: It’s the outcome. Scenes overstuffed with ideas compete for screen time with the moments in which it seems to remember, all of a sudden, that it’s a horror movie. A standout example is a school-bathroom slaughter late in the movie, involving utter non-characters, that amounts to a whole bunch of nothing, just a bit of gore on the way to the next thing. By this point it’s already clear that the film could not possibly resolve itself in a way that makes its ideas as forceful as they’re straining to be. Yet nor can it be denied that the movie goes for broke in its final scenes, anyway, rightly aware that making sense scene by scene may matter less, when you’re already in too deep, than driving home the prevailing point. 

But the point becomes something of an unfortunate movie target. And the movie falls apart when the questions on its mind come into dire conflict with its own methods of representation — a police shootout late in the film being a case in point. The Candyman of 2021 — which has an extended cast that includes new faces to the franchise, like the great Colman Domingo, as well as a few returning faces, like Vanessa E. Williams — takes its jumble of ideas, from the art world agita to the Pet Semetary vibe of its gentrification themes, to the pure and simple fact of Anthony’s ego, and pulls at the thread… and keeps pulling… until what emerges largely amounts to something of a mess. What the movie’s effortful attempts at symbolism and meaning do most effectively are undercut what’s smart about the questions it raises — and DaCosta’s fine hand at creeping us out. The movie wants to be more than it is. The result is that it winds up amounting to less than it could have been.

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‘Candyman’ Review: A Slasher Movie with a Sharper Social Edge Than the Original

Director Nia DaCosta deepens the 1992 cult slasher film by updating it to our own days of rage.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

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“ Candyman ,” the 1992 slasher movie starring Tony Todd as a vengeful specter in a floor-length fur-lined coat, with a hook for a left hand and a devoted swarm of killer bees, was an urban-legend horror film that was ahead of its time but also, just maybe, a little too much of its time. Todd’s scowling ripper started off as an enslaved person’s son, Daniel Robitaille, who in the late 1800s was a successful artist. But then he had a relationship (and fathered a child) with a wealthy white ingenue whose portrait he’d been commissioned to paint. Her father hired a lynch mob to go after him. The mob tore off his hand and covered him in honey, and a swarm of bees stung him to death. Candyman is the violent ghost he became.

That’s a potentially incendiary premise, but in 1992, amid a swarm of boilerplate sequels featuring Freddy Krueger, Michael Myers, and Jason Voorhees, each of whom came with his own sadomasochistic backstory, “Candyman,” directed by the English filmmaker Bernard Rose (and adapted from a Clive Barker short story), adhered a little too closely to the stylized tropes of the slasher film. The fact that Candyman would be summoned if you said his name five times played as the kind of storybook megaplex device (“One two, Freddy’s coming for you…” ) designed to prime the audience for shock cuts. The movie worked, but like too many slasher films of the time it was more sensational than haunting.

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But now “Candyman” has been remade, by the director Nia DaCosta (I’m pleased to report that Tony Todd is back — he looks a little bit older, and a lot more venerable in his grin of unspeakable pain), and what she has done is to make a horror movie that has its share of enthralling shocks, but one that’s rooted in a richer meditation on the social terror of the Candyman fable. The new “Candyman” references the plot of the original as a sinister fanfare of shadow puppets, as if to say, “That was mythology. This is reality.” It’s less a “slasher film” than a drama with a slasher in the middle of it.

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It stars Yahya Abdul-Mateen II , the actor who just about seared a hole in the screen as Bobby Seale in “The Trial of the Chicago 7,” and Abdul-Mateen gives as searching a performance as you’re likely to see in a movie that’s a voluptuous pageant of fear and gore. He plays Anthony McCoy, an aspiring artist who grew up in the Cabrini-Green housing projects of Chicago, which is where much of the original “Candyman” took place. He hasn’t just heard the legend; he was taken by Candyman as a child. And now, as he prepares a new set of work for a group show that’s being organized by his girlfriend, Brianna (Teyonah Parris), who works for Clive (Brian King), a hipster gallery owner who’s the person in the movie you most want to see die in a fancy way (the film does not disappoint), Anthony looks to the Candyman as an inspiration to leave aesthetic safety behind and create a work that’s daring enough to be true.

The art-world setting allows DaCosta, who co-wrote the film with Win Rosenfeld and Jordan Peele (who is one of the producers), to offer a deft satire of gentrification, with the Cabrini-Green projects paved over — and the knowledge of American economic apartheid they represent buried right along with them. At the gallery show, Anthony’s featured piece is a mirrored installation that, if you look closely enough, contains images of horror from the past; but if you don’t look closely, you’ll just see yourself. (That’s a great metaphor for liberal myopia.) The name of the piece is “Say My Name,” and that’s a disquieting joke — because, of course, it’s a Candyman reference that plays off the rhetorical fire of our own time, in a way that suggests that confronting racial demons isn’t as simple as “acknowledging” the crimes against Black people that have happened on a daily basis. The movie says: You can acknowledge the injustice — but what happens to the rage? “Candyman” presents the return of the repressed for an era that wants to pretend it’s no longer repressing things.

One reason this “Candyman” never feels like a formula slasher film, even during the murders, is that DaCosta stages them with a spurting operatic dread that evokes the grandiloquent sadism of mid-period De Palma. When four young women prepsters stand before the school bathroom mirror and say “Candyman” five times, it’s as if they’re acting out what they think is their privilege; their deaths come at us in a way that’s just oblique enough to get you to imagine the worst. And when a know-it-all art critic (Rebecca Spence) receives her own ghastly comeuppance, DaCosta shoots it from an elegant distance that heightens the horror.

Mad slashers in movies are technically villains, and then, if they hang around long enough (i.e., for enough sequels), they turn into ironic franchise heroes; they’re the icons you want to see. But the whole premise of “Candyman” is that Candyman, from the start, is a supremely un -mad slasher. He’s a walking historical corrective, throwing the violence of white America back in its face. It’s Anthony, the film’s hero, who turns into its most haunting figure. He gets stung by a bee, creating a wound on his hand that starts to grow and rot, spreading over his body, until by the end he’s become a shattering image of what racial violence looks like when it begins to eat you up from the inside. In “Candyman,” there’s plenty of horror, but none of it is as disturbing as the true-life horror that can make people feel like they’re ghosts of the past.

Reviewed at Bryant Park Screening Room, New York, August 18, 2021. MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 91 MIN.

• Production: A Universal Pictures, Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures release, in association with BRON Creative, of a Monkeypaw production. Producers: Ian Cooper, Win Rosenfeld, Jordan Peele. Executive producers: David Kern, Aaron Gilbert, Jason Cloth.
• Crew: Director: Nia DaCosta. Screenplay: Jordan Peele, Win Rosenfeld, Nia DaCosta. Camera: John Gulerserian. Editor: Catrin Hedström. Music: Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe.
• With: Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Tayonah Parris, Tony Todd, Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, Colman Domingo, Brian King, Carl Clemons-Hopkins, Rebecca Spence, Kyle Kaminsky, Vanessa Estelle Williams.

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Common Sense Media Review

Update on classic horror tale is both scary and important.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Candyman is a follow-up (but not a reboot or a direct sequel) to the 1992 movie, which was based on Clive Barker's short story. Directed by Nia DaCosta and co-written and co-produced by Jordan Peele, the movie takes a progressive approach to themes raised in the original -- including…

Why Age 16+?

Lots of blood and gore. Characters sliced up with a hook, killed. Throat slashed

Frequent strong language includes "f--k," "s--t," "motherf----r," "bulls---," "a

Adults drink wine socially, at dinner. Drinking beer at gallery opening. Brief p

A couple kiss and cuddle affectionately. Shirtless male. Passionate kissing/fore

Mentions of Zillow, Whole Foods.

Any Positive Content?

Positive representation of Black characters, showing both successes and trials.

It may take more than one viewing to grasp all themes raised, from gentrificatio

Some characters have achieved success, but no one is a clear role model. Most fa

Parents need to know that Candyman is a follow-up (but not a reboot or a direct sequel) to the 1992 movie , which was based on Clive Barker's short story. Directed by Nia DaCosta and co-written and co-produced by Jordan Peele , the movie takes a progressive approach to themes raised in the original -- including the power of art and storytelling -- and it's both scary and thought-provoking. It has tons of blood and gore, with several killings. Expect to see stabbing, strangling, shooting, throat slashing, broken limbs, jump scares, a gross hand wound creeping up to the rest of the body, a child watching her father die via suicide (jumping from a high window), and more. There's kissing (both affectionate and passionate), cuddling, and interrupted foreplay; a man is shown without his shirt on. Language is very strong, with uses of "f--k," "s--t," the "N" word, and more. Adults drink socially and smoke pot.

To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Violence & Scariness

Lots of blood and gore. Characters sliced up with a hook, killed. Throat slashed. Blood spurts, pools of blood. Bloody carnage. Broken limbs. Strangling. Stabbing. Shooting. Gross hand wound spreading up arm, picking at icky scab, fingernail rotting, peeling off. Child witnesses her father dying via suicide, jumping from high window. Hand sawed off, hook jammed into bloody stump. Finger sliced by razor blade. Arguing. Character smashes mirrors. Broken mirror shards in hand. Scary stuff. Jump scares.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Frequent strong language includes "f--k," "s--t," "motherf----r," "bulls---," "a--hole," the "N" word," "ass," "bitch," and "d--k," and "Jesus" as an exclamation.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Adults drink wine socially, at dinner. Drinking beer at gallery opening. Brief pot smoking. Character briefly drinks alone.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

A couple kiss and cuddle affectionately. Shirtless male. Passionate kissing/foreplay. Strong sex-related dialogue.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

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Diverse representations.

Positive representation of Black characters, showing both successes and trials. Characters are realistic and three-dimensional. Supporting cast includes a loving, mixed-race LGBTQ+ couple. A White art critic tries to tell Anthony's story and define his art through her own experiences, which is clearly meant to be problematic.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update .

Positive Messages

It may take more than one viewing to grasp all themes raised, from gentrification to artistic appropriation, as well as concept of continuing to tell stories to keep discourse alive. Art (and movies) are extremely powerful, can be easily corrupted, the movie seems to be saying -- but keep "telling everyone."

Positive Role Models

Some characters have achieved success, but no one is a clear role model. Most fall victim to supernatural events around them in one way or another.

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Parent and Kid Reviews

• Parents Say (7)
• Kids Say (10)

Based on 7 parent reviews

What's the Story?

In CANDYMAN, Anthony McCoy ( Yahya Abdul-Mateen II ) is an up-and-coming artist who's living with Brianna Cartwright ( Teyonah Parris ), an art curator. At dinner one night, Brianna's brother, Troy ( Nathan Stewart-Jarrett ), tells the story of Candyman, who terrorized the nearby Cabrini Green housing projects years ago. Inspired, Anthony looks into the story further, hoping to create a new series of artworks. Then Anthony meets William Burke ( Colman Domingo ), who grew up in Cabrini Green and had an encounter with the actual Candyman, and learns more. Unfortunately, as Anthony's art is shown to the world, the Candyman legend is reawakened, with horrific results.

Is It Any Good?

Neither a reboot nor a direct sequel, Nia DaCosta 's horror movie responds to elements from the 1992 cult classic and moves forward into the Black Lives Matter era, with chilling, brilliant results. Following up on the promise of her powerful debut Little Woods , DaCosta's Candyman -- with help from co-writer and co-producer Jordan Peele -- follows a bracingly logical path through Clive Barker's original 1985 short story and Bernard Rose's 1992 movie, taking the urban setting and the Black monster (played here, as in three other movies, by Tony Todd ) and examining them further. With swift strokes, like an artist passionately wielding a paintbrush, DaCosta touches on gentrification, artistic appropriation, and artistic objectivity in fascinating ways.

Using silhouette puppets to illustrate flashbacks and a musical score that echoes Philip Glass's 1992 recordings, the movie asks: Are these artists actual creators, or are they merely repeating history? How does location play into the identities of Black residents, especially when that location was designed and built by White people? Can Black people reclaim their own stories? In one striking subplot, a White art critic tries to tell Anthony's story and define his art through her own experiences. Yet in the midst of these and other timely discourses, Candyman manages to be a brutal and powerful horror tale (right from the start, with its mirror-image studio logos), perhaps even surpassing whatever Barker's original story, or any other adaptation, has ever intended or achieved. A final cry to keep telling stories -- rather than burying them, as in the Tulsa massacre of 1921 -- is an imperative crossover from horror to real life.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about Candyman 's violence . How did it make you feel? Was it exciting? Shocking? What did the movie show or not show to achieve this effect? Why is that important?

Is the movie scary? What's the appeal of scary movies ? Why do people sometimes like to be scared?

What does the final message, "tell everyone," mean? What other messages do you think the film is trying to convey about art, race, and identity? The filmmakers have put together resources and organizations that support racial justice and healing; click here to learn more.

Why do you think the movie is set in the art world? How much art is created, and how much is "borrowed" from other places? What does this all mean? What does it mean for a movie called Candyman ?

How does this film compare to the other movies in the Candyman series, and to the original story?

Movie Details

• In theaters : August 27, 2021
• On DVD or streaming : September 16, 2021
• Cast : Yahya Abdul-Mateen II , Teyonah Parris , Nathan Stewart-Jarrett
• Director : Nia DaCosta
• Inclusion Information : Female directors, Black directors, Black actors, Female actors
• Studio : Universal Pictures
• Genre : Horror
• Topics : Monsters, Ghosts, and Vampires
• Run time : 91 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : bloody horror violence, and language including some sexual references
• Last updated : October 16, 2024

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Candyman (1992)

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