When Candyman was released in 1992, Roger
Ebert gave it his thumbs up remarking that the film was “scaring him with ideas
and gore, rather than just gore.” Indeed, Candyman
is almost unique in 1990s horror cinema in that it tackles its socio-political themes
head on. As critic Kirsten Moana Thompson has remarked, Candyman is ‘the return of the repressed as national allegory’: the
film’s hook-handed killer of urban legend embodies a history of racism,
miscegenation, lynching and slavery – ‘the taboo secrets of America’s past and
present.’
In this book
in the Devil’s Advocates series, Jon Towlson considers how Candyman can be read both as a ‘return of the repressed’ during the
George H. W. Bush Sr. era, and as an example of nineties neoconservative horror.
He traces the project’s development from its origins as a Clive Barker short
story (‘The Forbidden’) through to finished picture; discusses the importance
of its gritty real-life Cabrini-Green setting; and analyses the film’s appropriation
(and interrogation) of urban myths. Included in the study are the two official
sequels (Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh
[1995] and Candyman: Day of the Dead [1999])
plus a number of other urban myth-inspired horror movies such as Bloody Mary (2006) and the Urban Legend franchise. The book
features an in-depth interview with Candyman’s
writer-director Bernard Rose.
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