Candyman (2021 | USA | 91 minutes | Nia DaCosta)

Set in the fast-gentrifying Chicago arts scene, this updated-for-2021 slasher/thriller wants you to know that it’s politics are righteous. If it provides a few thrillers, even better. Overall, I liked it, even if there were often times when the politics felt heavy-handed and took away from the scarier aspects of the thriller, even when I agree passionately with the points the filmmaker is making. Still, there was plenty of horror that came through clearly.

Nia DaCosta’s breakthrough film (she’ll also helm the next Captain Marvel movie) is often unsettling and discomfiting, as a good horror movie should be. The film, borrowing a similar structure as the 1992 movie of the same name that starred Virginia Madsen and Vanessa Williams (that spawned two other sequels), retells the urban legend of a villain, with a hook for hand, who appears when you say “gentrificationCandyman” five times in the mirror and wrecks inescapable havoc with no exit. People come to believe in the legitimacy of the Candyman urban legend only moments after he appears and by then it’s way, way too late. 

We learn in the movie that mob justice took the life of a weird area man who also had a hook-hand, but he was deemed innocent posthumously of the Candyman murders. But the murders continue and the urban legend proceeds because racism of the past continued largely unabated to the present. 

It’s not a surprise that DaCosta’s movie was co-written by Jordan Peele (along with DaCosta herself and Win Rosenfeld), whose horror-satire Get Out was a natural predecessor to Candyman. I also remembered my experience watching Peele’s second (and IMO better) film, Us, a more straight-forward horror film that terrorized my thoughts. When I left my late evening screening at least an hour after the rest of Pacific Place closed on a Tuesday night, the escalators were turned off and the elevator stopped working. My immediate thought was that we were all going to die at the mall because we’d be stuck there overnight and there was nowhere to go (reader, I was not murdered, but I don’t remember how we eventually got out other than that it was an easy solution). There are a few scenes that gave me that same feeling of paranoia and claustrophobia in Candyman, one when some teenage girls wanted to prove to themselves that Candyman is a myth. 

The way that DaCosta films those terrifying scenes are artful, bold, and effective. She clearly knows how to build suspense and deliver terror, and how to get great performances out of her actors. The people who brought this Candyman use horror as a vehicle for pointing out that the true evildoer is racism, but the Candyman is pretty damn scary, too.

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Candyman is in theaters now.

Photo from Universal Pictures.