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Jordan Peele's Candyman: The Horror of Inevitability (VIDEO SCRIPT)
🕑 Added 2022-10-19 23:30:01 +0000 UTCI wanna talk about Candyman.
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/Candyman is a horror film released in 2021 co-written and produced by Jordan Peele, and co-written and directed by Nia DaCosta. It acts as a legacy sequel to the 1992 film written and directed by Bernard Rose, ignoring the events of 1995’s Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh, and its 1999 direct-to-dvd follow-up Candyman 3: Day of the Dead. It tells the story of Anthony McCoy, the baby that was kidnapped by Tony Todd’s Candyman from the first film. Played by Yahya Abdul Mateen II, he returns to the now gentrified art district where the Cabrini Green housing projects once stood as an artist, and through his latest piece brings back the urban legend that almost took his life./
I’m not gonna lie and say that the initial announcement of Jordan Peele’s involvement didn’t get me interested. And considering that it came right off of his success from Get Out, it was VERY well deserved.
However, to say that I was excited to see this movie after the first trailer dropped for it is a COMPLETE understatement. Because I was HYPE.
If you’ve seen my video essay for the 1992 film, you know that there were things about the movie that while I saw why it made such a big impact within the horror genre, I felt it could’ve touched on to truly make it stand out.
And as I’ve explained in said video essay, seeing the film hint at how redlining affected Cabrini Green caused me to truly look into everything the residents had to deal with over the course of its longevity.
It did so to the point where I truly felt that what was missing about Candyman 1992 was the fact that because it’s such an accurate adaptation of Clive Barker’s The Forbidden, that it in my opinion focused on the wrong people. That the residents of Cabrini Green -- these African American residents who heavily relied on public housing that have been constantly neglected and could only truly look out for themselves thanks to racist zoning systems established to create a form of legalized segregation based off race and class -- were made the background characters of their own story, when they should’ve been up front and center all along.
To me, the idea of Jordan Peele working on a treatment that would take the neglect, the segregation, the racism, and now the gentrification of a community as prominent as Cabrini Green that should’ve been front and center in the original film was something that I was highly anticipating. And what we got was almost that.
“White People Built The Ghetto”
While modern day media has done its job regarding softening its terminology in order to associate it with the likes of out-of-town hipsters, new coffee joints popping up out of nowhere, and painting long-time residents of neighborhoods as nothing but the equivalent of out-of-touch boomers who dislike change, gentrification has proven over the course of decades that it’s more dangerous than it is desirable
That’s mostly because the ones that are initially affected by gentrification -- poor minorities specifically -- are never taken into consideration during the process in any other instance, but as an obstacle that keeps the city from accomplishing its goal of bedding with big corporations by any means necessary.
Because while individual investors are always the beginning signs, the end result is always corporations looking at what said investors have done and wanting a final say.
This results in the city resorting in unethical ways of reclaiming previously owned homes from medium to low income families, landlords gradually increasing the rent yearly to the point that their current tenants can’t pay while others sell said property to the corporation in question without the tenants notice, and the constant neglect of neighborhoods and communities that need help and stability while the focused eye of capitalism is instead placed on the spots of interest from the city’s newly acquired investors.
/As Peter Moskowitz states in the intro of his book How to Kill a City,/ (...In every gentrifying city there are always events, usually hidden from public view, that precede these street-level changes. The policies that cause cities to gentrify are crafted in the offices of real estate moguls and in the halls of city government. The coffee shop is the itp of the iceberg.)
Cabrini-Green, unfortunately, was doomed to suffer this fate once Red-Lining came into play.
Before being deemed a ghetto, it -- like a lot of projects across America believe it or not -- was actually meant for middle and working class white families.
The original row houses, named after St. Francis Cabrini, had stipulations that 75% of the homes had to be occupied by white residents, with the remaining 25% being black residents. The high-rises weren’t given the greenlight until the Housing Act of 1949, in which fifteen buildings were built as an extension and the William Green homes -- named after the president of the American Federation of Labor -- were completed in 1962.
Then things began to play out as I explained them in my video on the original 1992 film.
What started out as the St. Louis zoning ordinance resulted in multiple cities across the U.S. zoned in ways that intentionally kept black families out of owning single-family homes by making sure to prioritize labeling white-owned and occupied neighborhoods that already prohibited African Americans from occupying said homes in order to establish social class elitism as opposed to racial bias, labeling such neighborhoods in green and blue areas in order for them to build generational wealth and receive proper funding for public services.
Meanwhile Cabrini-Green rested in what would be deemed an industrial zone because of the public housings’ proximity to plants that once provided working class jobs that have long since closed down, and the race of the tenants now being predominantly black.
Out of the two industrialized zones, yellow and red, Cabrini-Green was in the red -- the lowest -- and received little to no funding in comparison to the funding that the white-occupied blue and green zones received, giving the city of Chicago -- strapped for cash already -- an excusable out to pull back police patrols, building maintenance budgets and transit services to the tenants who lived there.
Despite these ordinances eventually being seen for the act of racial segregation that it truly was and stopped country-wide, the damage had already been done regarding the city of Chicago’s neglect in Cabrini-Green’s upkeep and well-being of its residents. Factor in other regular forms of systemic oppression against black folk from the 60’s onward like police brutality, and it’s pretty obvious why said residents felt like they were on their own. Because they were.
So after years of city neglect thanks to the after-effects of redlining, prioritizing funding to the communities that qualified under the racist-in-disguised zoning ordinances of yesteryear...
/And years of its residences having to form community of their own in the form of gangs and whatnot because they can’t rely on police to have their back -- something that was also displayed heavily in both the 1992 and 2021 movies/
The eyes of corporations soon began to see the blighted, neglected and -- most importantly -- inexpensive previously red zoned Cabrini-Green not as public squalor, but probability.
With that, the predictable signs of gentrification began to occur. Individual investors snatched up property around the Cabrini-Green area before the city of Chicago received a “Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere” -- or HOPE -- grant of 50 million in order to redevelop Cabrini-Green into a mixed income neighborhood and better accommodate the new investors. One of the corporations that followed them was the Target Foundation.
However, this resulted in a lot of mishandling on the city’s end regarding the relocation of the residents and resulted in major displacement of the community. The Chicago Housing Authority -- the CHA -- was sued by residents of Cabrini Green over the course of the city’s preparation for its private and corporate gentrification, due to rushing its residents into other red zoned, blighted and underfunded areas of the city just so they could get to work on redeveloping Cabrini-Green as quickly as possible, not delivering on any of the promises established on paper regarding placing them in living conditions better than the ones they were forced to reside in.
And while those who participated in this lawsuit that chose to not stay in any of the habitable roadhouses that didn’t meet the same fate as the highrises received either relocation services or housing vouchers for affordable rent elsewhere in the city that took them, others who refused to leave were forced to do so via court order.
So over the course of the years from 1995 to 2011, the highrises were demolished in favor of mixed income housing. A Target was built where two of the highrises named after Green once stood. Districts for tech and artists popped up from the clearance as well, the latter being one of the locations used in the 2021 movie due to the field of work Anthony is in, along with his girlfriend Brianna, played brilliantly by Teyonah Parris.
So you can see how, especially in the case of Cabrini-Green, a true sense of trauma is appropriately generated from the likes of gentrification when it affects you directly. The very idea of a city valuing the profit of corporations over the lives of the citizens that has called it home for years is absolutely horrendous, especially after being forced to make due with the hand you were dealt thanks to hidden segregation practices that intentionally kept you out of the housing market in the first place. The very game that was played with the lives of Cabrini Green’s residents made them feel like refugees in their own home.
/Just like when the topic of Cabrini Green’s gentrification journey was brought up in the 2021 Candyman film.../ (translation: white people built the ghetto, then erased it when they realized they built the ghetto)
So with all of this real-life history Cabrini-Green already had behind it, imagine what a fictional variant of its residents had to endure already having to deal with all of this while learning that a vengeful spirit of a son of a slave had these same people living with the compounded fear of being slaughtered if you’re bold enough to say his name five times in front of a mirror.
That was why I was never really on board with the initial Candyman film. Because of the movie deciding to tell Clive Barker’s “The Forbidden” almost exactly as the short story is written with the obvious exceptions, it focusing on Helen Lyle paints the struggle of the residents of Cabrini Green as nothing but a backdrop in her story, and that is one aspect of my critique of the original film that remains unchanged despite how others are willing to spin the importance of a white woman bringing attention to the suffrage of a people.
/Another point the 2021 film makes when they acknowledge her urban legend thanks to Candyman’s framing of her/ (one white woman dies in the hood and it’s a story that lives on forever)
The more I resonated on this, the more I realized I would’ve loved to have seen a version of 92’s Candyman from ANOTHER perspective; preferably from one who lived in Cabrini Green and experienced the hardships of the people Helen only had to experience second-handedly.
/Like, imagine if Anthony’s mother -- Anne-Marie McCoy played by Vanessa Williams -- were the protagonist of Candyman ‘92 instead of Helen./
We’d see the true sense of community most of the residents had to build in order to survive their day-to-day, what she has to endure as a single mother with a newborn baby working a full-time job, while still being burdened with the racist and classist implications of her situation because she lives in Cabrini-Green.
/And then after seeing how the film tells the real-life similarities of those who live in the projects had to deal with, we learn about Candyman and the plans he has for baby Anthony when he’s kidnapped./
So we see Anne-Marie fight tooth and nail, not just against the cops that never come around unless it’s to beat the daylights out of a black perp, or people outside the neighborhood and across the freeway who think less of her because of her situation...
/But now this living urban legend that thrives off of keeping the already downtrodden residents of Cabrini-Green absolutely frightened of him in order to get her son back alive. And instead of receiving a demonized white savior figure in the form of Helen Lyle, Anne-Marie McCoy could’ve been...the black Ellen Ripley./
This was my hope for Candyman 2021; that it would help course-correct to this point-of-view upon learning that not only the gentrification of Cabrini-Green would play a part in the story of the legacy sequel, but that Anne-Marie McCoy’s son would be the protagonist.
I was ready to see some of the families that participated in Candyman’s banishment that were displaced to different areas of the city. Ready to hear their story of the false promises the city gave them knowing everything they had to deal with naturally and supernaturally.
/I wanted a follow up on characters like Jake, who helped Helen in her research and led the charge in the bonfire to banish Candyman./
How was he and his family treated during Chicago’s half-assed and fast-paced relocation of the highrise residents to somewhere out of sight and out of mind that eventually led to Wallace v. CHA? Would he have kept in contact with Anne-Marie considering the vow? Would he have known Anthony growing up if that was the case? Would he seek Anthony out to help protect him from being claimed by Candyman once he learned that the vow was broken?
/Anthony is already painted as an artist whose main motivation is in exclaiming the social justice of African Americans from the likes of white supremacy in the film. And it made it even better to see him go up against the new white residents of Cabrini Green that are steeped in white privilege and the lack of empathy regarding poor minorities in ways that allow them to hide their racism with classism/
I was excited to see Anthony explore damn near most if not all of these avenues that could have easily been touched upon from the original film now that the focus is on a character that not only comes from and experienced that life...
/But also personally wants to show that these people and voices matter by possibly highlighting the turmoil, the mistreatment, the neglect, and -- upon Cabrini-Green’s gentrification -- the expendability the city of Chicago exposed them to. All while having to save themselves from being plagued by a murderous ghost with a hook for a hand./
And for a while, I thought we were going to get that. Then I saw the movie. And instead, we got something else...
“Say My Name”
Like Halloween 2018 before it, Candyman is an alternate universe legacy sequel that acts as a direct follow-up to the original work and ignores the films that followed it.
And part of the reason why this one exists is because thanks to the franchise being dormant after the direct-to-video follow-up Candyman 3: Day of the Dead, one of the ideas for a follow-up to it was a Candyman vs Leprechaun crossover following the success of Freddy vs Jason, and Tony Todd rightfully responded HELL NAW!
Now while there was an attempt to make a fourth solo Candyman movie afterwards that initially got canned because there were rights holder distributions between studios and Clive Barker, little is known about what initially drew Jordan Peele to the project.
/Y’know, outside of/ (I’m rooting for everybody black)
What mattered was that he was interested, and this especially made a difference after his writer-director debut in horror in Universal’s “Get Out” and the Oscar wins that followed it.
/Tony Todd was one of said individuals who noticed the difference, stating in an exclusive interview with Nightmare on Film Street, “If Jordan wants to do it, do it. I know I’d rather have him do it, someone with intelligence, who’s going to be thoughtful and dig into the whole racial makeup of who Candyman is and why he existed in the first place. I know he’ll give homage and I know that if it gets made, I’ll have a plate at the table one way or the other.”/
Now there was a bit of mix-up regarding Todd’s plate once Jordan Peele and Nia DaCosta’s places in the film were confirmed. Once word got out that Yahya Abdul-Mateen II won the lead role from Atlanta and Sorry to Bother You star Lakeith Stanfield, Tony thought that lead role was in fact the one of Candyman.
So when the record was set straight that he WOULDN’T be playing the titular Candyman but instead the adult version of Anthony McCoy, it was announced almost immediately after said clarification that Tony Todd would in fact be reprising his role as Daniel Robitaile in the 2021 legacy sequel.
/This was backed up further, when we heard Todd’s voiceover stating very iconic lines from the first movie in the just AS iconic first trailer that was released for the film with a horror take of Destiny’s Child’s “Say My Name,” and giving us confirmation that the plot would revolve around Candyman’s business with now fully-grown Anthony being unfinished./
That same trailer gave us a first glance at how Candyman is gonna be haunting Anthony’s life. A lot of us assumed -- and correctly so -- that the plan involved possession; that Candyman plotted to make Anthony his next vessel in order to return to the physical plane after Helen and the residents of Cabrini-Green banished him almost 30 years ago in the early 90’s
And yes, I agree; having to state that the 90’s happened 30 years ago is scary in itself.
The thing about that however, is that the visage of Candyman we saw Anthony emulating in the trailers wasn’t the same one we saw in the 1992 film. The ascot was missing, the fur coat was wrong. It didn’t even match any of the coats he wore in the sequels Peele & co. ignored.
It wasn’t until the movie was released that we learned this figure -- both haunting Anthony McCoy and the gentrified residents of Cabrini Green -- wasn’t Tony Todd’s Daniel Robitaile at all, but someone new
/Meet Sherman Fields. A homeless black man with a hook for a hand that Chicago PD violently beat to death in the laundry room of one of the Cabrini Green highrises in the 70’s, because he fit the description of a man passing out Halloween candy with razor blades inside of them to white children./
/Not only is this the “Candyman” that new character William “Billy” Burke -- played by “If Beale Street Could Talk” and “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” fame Colman Domingo -- grew up with, but this is also the Candyman that haunts Anthony throughout the film after he foolishly undoes the work his mother, Jake and the rest of the past residents of Cabrini Green did in 1992 when he was a baby./
That’s because Candyman 2021 reveals a new bit of lore regarding Daniel Robitaile and the Candyman moniker; that those who die in a way similar to Daniel -- specifically black men through extreme racially motivated violence -- join Candyman’s hive and has the ability to appear as them whenever he’s summoned.
/And despite Sherman Fields being a fictional individual made up for this movie, Candyman 2021 goes on to establish -- both through Anthony’s paintings and Burke’s own words -- that real-life black men across America’s history of racially motivated violence are also part of Candyman’s hive. Men like Anthony Crawford, James Byrd Jr., and 14 year old George Stinny/
Now I want it on record that I completely understand the filming logistics regarding going in this direction. Tony Todd is approaching 70 years old as of the recording of this video, and this addition to the lore of the character allows for more stories to be told in the future without having to rely solely on his health and ability.
/Also, considering that they saved it for the end of the movie to show that this is, in fact, Daniel Robitaile wearing the guises of these slain African American men, the price of utilizing the age progression and reversion technology that Disney and Marvel Studios have been utilizing and have damn near perfected since the modern era Captain America movies I’m sure would have blown the film’s 25 million dollar budget out of the water if they used him as he was in 1992 throughout the film and didn’t explain why his spirit aged 40+ years in order to avoid it./
I mean, I personally have an idea, but I’m gonna wait to explain it because we haven’t reached that segment of the essay yet.
It’s also important to note that the decision for Tony Todd’s depiction of Candyman to have this form of representation when it comes to racial violence against African Americans -- systemic or otherwise -- wasn’t a decision made among Peele, Rosenfeld and DaCosta just for this film.
Ever since the 1992 original was released, the tragic origin story Tony Todd solidified as canon at writer/director Bernard Rose’s request for Candyman has been not only a staple of the character past what Clive Barker was able to add thanks to it initially being written for a white and British gaze...
But the very nature of how Candyman was originally appropriated for both American and African American storytelling allows the character’s obsession with living forever through legacy and belief to serve as a grim reminder of the racial violence African Americans have suffered throughout history that has since shifted to that of systemic. We’ve gone from car draggings and lynch mobs to that of “stand your ground” laws and trigger-happy police claiming they were being threatened. Though the lynchings seem to be making an unfortunate comeback.
What Jordan Peele, Win Rosenfeld and Nia DaCosta did upon applying this allegory that real life individuals initially applied to the already appropriated African American version of Candyman to his actual lore within this new movie, was make him a moniker for generational trauma; a name associated with the constant instances of fatal racial violence African Americans have been experiencing since being emancipated from slavery.
And considering the original 2020 release date the film had before COVID-19 delayed it by a year, the deaths of Michael Brown, Erik Garner, Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Sandra Bland would also be considered among the rank of the Candyman “hive,” the latter starting the notable hashtag Say Her Name...
/Which mirrors “Say My Name,” the title of the art piece Anthony creates for the art show once he learns about the legend of Candyman from Burke./
/As he puts it plainly to Anthony/(Candyman is how we deal with the fact that these things happen. That they’re still happening)
The thing about that line however, is that if you’ve seen the movie, him saying that is a bit hypocritical.
Where the film began to fall for me was near its end when all of the points began to meet at its inevitable intersection.
/By this time, the themes of gentrification’s effects on the black and brown lives they uproot for the sake of the white and rich that I hoped they’d explore in relation to the hold Candyman had on the previous community, were simply made talking points. Either as a side convo for a dinner party, or to vent Anthony’s frustrations with the new privileged residents based on his own experiences with the same traumatic systemic acts of racism growing up in another housing project that the city sacrificed black lives for white dollars that we never see./
Sherman Fields becoming the new face of Candyman thanks to the trio of Peele, Rosenfeld and DaCosta applying real life social allegory to the lore of the character brought separated -- and, in my opinion, a more concentrated -- focus to the cycle of racial violence to the film instead of the themes of gentrification, not realizing that both could be addressed due to how naturally their systemic forms of oppression actually compliment each other; not realizing they are both oils that naturally blend together and showing us as such, they treat one like water instead.
And all of this is spearheaded by the reveal of Anthony’s true connection with the original Candyman Daniel Robitaile, and his mother Anne-Marie McCoy reminding both the audience and himself that he is still a supernatural entity that has done nothing but invoke unnecessary terror to her and her previous Cabrini Green neighbors on top of everything else they had to endure, and will forever only care about his longevity and connection to the physical plane.
/This was done by revealing that Burke knew that Anthony McCoy was the baby Candyman chose and kidnapped in 1992.../ (I knew, it was only a matter of time before the baby came back here in perfect symmetry; a chance for Candyman to take back what’s rightfully his. HIS legend)
/That he knows Candyman indiscriminately kills the ones who summon him even if the color of their skin matches his own, thanks to witnessing his sister and her friend fall to his hook while wearing the mutilated face of Sherman Fields/
And yet despite all of this, he was still willing to sacrifice Anthony to the same cycle of violence he himself said that he associates the legend of Candyman with to make sense of why it still happens.
/Believing that by completing Anthony’s transition to be the new face of a fully reborn Daniel Robitaille, the new white and privileged residents of the now gentrified Cabrini Green will know what it feels like to be at the end of the hook instead./ (Cuz this time, he’ll be killing THEIR fathers. THEIR babies. THEIR sisters)
As you can imagine, despite his reasoning, seeing how willing Burke was to initiate the same steps that cause the needless deaths of African Americans every other day didn’t sit right with me at all.
It just felt wrong and low-key TREACHEROUS watching a fellow black man, pretending to be a white man, call the police on ANOTHER BLACK MAN knowing what’s going to happen if and when they show up, especially with them being CHICAGO police.
But what truly made me numb was that Anthony’s fate is predictably sealed the moment the police arrive. That Candyman successfully wears his visage when Brianna summons him in hopes that there was truth in Burke’s words when she experiences the police being the police.
/That after the cops are eliminated, Tony Todd’s Daniel Robitaile emerges from Anthony’s visage and only spares Brianna because he needs her to spread his legend further -- to restore his immortality after being denied belief for over almost 30 years. And then the depressing shadow puppet performance during the credits that attaches the Candyman legend to the multiple real-life victims of racially motivated violence across America’s history. Each one upon them joining the hive displaying the very nihilism behind the notion of the cycle’s constant real life inevitability./
“We (Don’t) Need Candyman”
While I’m absolutely fine with the movie displaying the battle for Anthony’s soul as a lost one, seeing how the storytellers fit the old, the new, and the intended commentaries had at their disposal together racked my brain regarding how such a conclusion could’ve been achieved, even if unintentional.
Like, I understand that their intention was to address the rise of racial violence by making this addition to Candyman’s lore while using Cabrini Green’s gentrification as the motivator for his resurgence.
But in framing things the way that they did, they instead brought focus on its INEVITABILITY more than generating a proper call to action AGAINST it.
The worst part about all of this, is that they had all the tools at their disposal necessary in order to shine the light on the matter that they initially intended
William Burke is a great human villain for this film. He had within him great motivations to seek the return of the original Candyman, Daniel Robitaille.
/The thing about them is that in order for them to grow into what they were by the time we reach the end of the movie, those motivations have to be personal and vulnerable, and that’s all thanks to the type of character he is overall./
Because not only is Burke angry -- angry at the displacement of his former neighbors, angry at how the city of Chicago has treated them just to get them out of the way of the new development, angry at the new residents taking advantage of the gentrification without them even taking a moment to think about how their lives are being affected in the process -- but Burke is also guilty.
/He feels guilty because his scream was responsible for leading the Chicago police to Sherman Fields. His scream was responsible for the life of an innocent man being abruptly and violently ended by racial violence via police brutality./
And it's in that desire that the movie shows us he has with his want to sacrifice Anthony in a way that fully restores Candyman, that he finds himself turning into something inhumane. And the reason for the loss of his humanity is his desire to transition from being the oppressed to the oppressor. Completely ignoring the fact that the instrument he would be unleashing in order to enact his oppression will also be threatening the lives of those he is seeking to liberate.
That’s because despite this addition to his lore, the motives and methods of Candyman remain relatively unchanged.
Both in Clive Barker’s “The Forbidden” and the constant collaboration between Tony Todd and the original movie’s writer/director Bernard Rose, the spirit of Daniel Robitaille is a combination of a lot of supernatural creatures among the undead.
Some compare him to a vampire, considering his ability to enthrall and beguile individuals with his voice as shown in how the first film matches the creature in question’s hypnotic and mesmerizing gaze.
Even Viginia Madsen -- Helen Lyle herself -- has gone on record saying that she always saw Candyman as “appealing to the African American community because they finally had their own Dracula.”
However, Candyman also requires the belief of those living in order for him to remain in the physical plane.
/He even says so himself in the 1992 film./ (I am the writing on the wall, the whisper in the classroom. Without these things, I am nothing)
And in other ways, the affliction attached to his spirit is like that of a wraith -- specifically how they are depicted in the tabletop roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons.
/A wrathful spirit that upon setting the right affliction to their victim, they will come back as a wraith themselves after death. Even after the one who afflicted said curse has been banished from this plane./ (What’s the matter Trevor? Scared of something?)
Considering everything Burke knew about Anthony regarding his importance to Candyman and his legend, it would make sense that through the means of his inner guilt, Candyman would find a way to cling on to Burke’s belief after the vow was made and over time mold them to his advantage.
/Guilt, because William feels responsible for Sherman Fields’ death. Enough guilt to where he didn’t see David’s face when he saw Candyman killed his sister at 10 years old, but Sherman’s./
Then 15 years later, Burke, as a twenty-something young adult, sees Helen pull baby Anthony out of the lit bonfire and hand him to a young Anne-Marie McCoy, while hearing the cries of Candyman within the fire while everyone else chants for him to burn and forming the vow in question.
Another three years, and the city of Chicago begins the eviction of the residents from the Cabrini Green highrises. Despite being in one of the habitable roadhouses, Burke watches friends, family, and an entire community being given false promises of equal to better living conditions in other affordable housing projects, as he sticks it out there.
He watches building after building get demolished, run down, and forgotten while new construction and new white faces arrive, being catered to in ways that the city of Chicago NEVER catered to him and his own.
All the while the face of Sherman Fields -- both in the basement of the now gone Cabrini Green highrise, and the bathroom of his childhood home that he placed on Candyman because of his own guilt and trauma -- continues to rest in his head. Not strong enough to break the vow that was made three years prior, but strong enough for Daniel to hang on to the cliff of Burke’s mind by the sharpness of his hook.
And as the years go by, enough wiggle room forms for him to let Burke know of the importance of the baby, using his trademark powers of persuasion to manipulate Burke’s feelings gained from having a front row seat of Cabrini Green’s gentrification to justify the want of their destruction, also being given false promises of what Candyman could do to them upon using the baby to fully return once Burke can get him to break the vow.
So now we have a way of acknowledging the real life association of Candyman being a moniker for fatal racial violence against African Americans while not projecting such an interpretation of hopelessness regarding the cycle it perpetuates in displaying its importance.
Because to William Burke, Candyman truly IS his justification for why this keeps happening, while also being his way of coping with the guilt he has for causing Fields’ death in the first place.
And thanks to this more fleshed out version of Burke’s character that properly displays said synergy of gentrification and racial violence, said guilt, anger and inner turmoil can be both displayed and manipulated by the true Candyman, who is wreaking havoc across Chicago in a severely weakened state that resembles the current-aged Tony Todd...
/Thanks to Anthony breaking the vow that his mother, Jake, and the other residents of Cabrini Green that have since been haphazardly relocated all across Chicago made to each other almost 30 years ago./
All while Burke at his behest is preparing Anthony for Candyman to permanently take over him and have his legend spread across Chicago once more. After all, so many people already see Candyman’s vampiric nature in his abilities and some even notice his inner Dracula. Why not give him a Renfield?
But regardless if Anthony’s fate remains damned or is brought deliverance, we need it driven home that no matter the interpretation, we don’t need Candyman.
That just like it was the community of Cabrini Green that banished him and drained him of his power, that same sense of community can combat against a system that aims to separate and disshovel black lives for the sake of white dollars.
That we won’t settle for fast solutions, easy answers or formulaic resolutions in any and all fights for equality in EVERY aspect; civil, commune, social or those rooted in intersectionality.
That lived tragedy can be more than just a purveyor of tyranny for the sake of revenge against our oppressors. After all, “only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both.”
/And just like the movie had the means to make Burke a compelling human villain for the legacy sequel to Candyman, it gave the same tools not to Anthony the protagonist, but the movie’s potential hero./
Conclusion
The residents of the Cabrini Green housing projects before its overhaul into the mixed income housing and art and tech districts they are now deserve to have their stories told. Always have, and always will.
What cities like Chicago all across America have subjected people of color to just because racist white folk didn’t want them living on the same block as them -- whether its redlining, reducing public transportation limitations between the inner city and the suburbs, the creation of the suburbs in the first place -- were already atrocious enough. Uprooting said people of color from the only places they called home because it was impossible for them to go anywhere else just because you need them out in order to get the most bang out of your buck for land one suddenly realized is valuable to a different demographic is nothing less than despicable.
The reason why the Candyman movies created such possibility for any form of these stories to be told was because despite the British roots of The Forbidden, there was finally enough attention given to one of the most blatant examples of this pipeline of modern day racism, segregation and classism, that would eventually lead to disbursement for some. And, for others, an exodus.
But because of Bernard Rose’s commitment to adapting The Forbidden as closely to the source material as possible, we never saw that. And despite the legacy sequel being created by black creatives that can sympathize with the transition Cabrini Green made as well as the people said transition affected, we didn’t exactly get that either
And while I’m aware that it's wishful thinking for me to get the EXACT Candyman movie I want from others if I don’t make it myself, I’m not going to lie and say that because of how the story was carried out, what I received left me...satisfied. Because it didn’t. It left me numb
And, just like I hope was the initial intention with the way Peele & co. went about its ending, all the numbness did was make me frustrated. Frustrated enough to the point where I felt inclined to pick myself up, and do something about it.
