One of the most significant alterations that writer-director Bernard Rose made to Clive Barker’s short story “The Forbidden” when adapting it for the screen was the switch in setting from a council estate in Thatcher-era Liverpool to the Cabrini-Green housing project in early-1990s Chicago. This brings thorny issues of both class and race into sharp focus. Rose also shifts the protagonist’s area of academic inquiry from the study of graffiti to the sources of urban legends. Candyman thus explicitly becomes a horror story about the power and fascination of horror stories.
Rose adopts a slow-burn approach, taking us through the researches of grad student Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen) into the titular hook-handed bogeyman, who can only be summoned by repeating his name five times in front of a mirror. An early glimpse of the Candyman’s handiwork—but not of the man himself—turns out to be a story being told to Helen by one of her informants. Another 40 minutes will pass before the Candyman (Tony Todd) makes his grand entrance. This deliberately incremental approach may put off viewers more accustomed to contemporary techniques in pacing and editing, but it definitely pays dividends when it comes to establishing an atmosphere of mounting dread.
A tip from a university cleaning woman (Sarina C. Grant) leads Helen and her research partner (Kasi Lemmons) to the Cabrini-Green projects, the site of all too real urban horrors. Rose is keen to trace some of the sources to poverty, the plague of drugs, and isolation from the surrounding society. Several murders are attributed to the Candyman, but it’s not until a white woman is attacked by a drug dealer calling himself the Candyman that the police take action.
In an interesting side note, it’s revealed that the apartment Helen shares with her professor husband (Xander Berkeley), was originally intended for a housing project identical in layout to Cabrini-Green. But there weren’t the same municipal boundaries that separated it from Chicago’s glamorous Gold Coast, so it was turned into condos instead. This doubling between structures is just one instance of literal or figurative mirroring that runs throughout the film. Here going through the looking glass takes you into the realm of lore and legend.
One way of reading this gratifyingly ambiguous film would have it that there’s no Candyman at all—that his horrors are all taking place inside Helen’s increasingly disordered mind. Sudden shifts in time and location could well represent fugue states. Murder weapons have a peculiar way of finding themselves in Helen’s hands. Even the scene where the Candyman intercedes to free Helen from her restraints in the psychiatrist’s office could simply be a delusion on her part, where she somehow manages to struggle free from shoddily fastened cuffs. The film thus teeters on the threshold between what literary critic Tsvetan Todorov calls the uncanny and the marvelous, the illusory and the actually occurring. This gives a whole new meaning to the writing on the wall in the final scene: “It was always you, Helen.”
The film’s final act shifts gears in style, as though we were in a whole other kind of horror movie. Gone are the decidedly urban spaces that have predominated: condos, housing projects, university lecture halls. The gothic mode has taken over, with Candyman’s lair looking like something out of a Hammer horror film. Indeed, when Helen stumbles across him, he’s laying asleep like Dracula in his coffin. The bonfire roaring outside also reminds one of The Wicker Man, and there’s even a torch-bearing mob straight out of Frankenstein. The gothic is all about the baleful influence of the past upon the present, so this shift seems entirely appropriate to the story of a woman who becomes engulfed by the very legend she seeks to explain.
Image/Sound
Shout! Factory’s three-disc package includes the theatrical and unrated cuts of the film on their own Blu-rays, then both together on one UHD disc. The latter naturally kicks up all the native strengths of the already excellent HD transfers. Fine details of costume and décor really stand out, and though the palette is generally muted and wintry, flashes of bright hues (graffiti, copious amounts of blood) truly pop. Elsewhere, blacks are deep and uncrushed, skin tones look increasingly lifelike, and grain levels are properly cinematic. On the audio front, there are three options: Dolby Atmos, 7.1 Dolby TrueHD, and 2.0 DTS Master Audio. To these ears, the 7.1 track sounds the best, cleanly putting across the dialogue, and really opening up Philip Glass’s incredible score, which relies heavily on ominous organ and ethereal choir.
Extras
A rich bounty of extras are spread across the two Blu-rays, while the UHD disc has only two of the four available commentary tracks, a trailer, and nothing else. The theatrical cut hosts all four commentaries. Two of them involve permutations of the cast and crew, and they’re laden with informative and often amusing production anecdotes. A third track features film historians Stephen Jones and Kim Newman, who delve into Clive Barker and ’80s literary horror, the horror cinema of the ’90s, the connections between source material and finished film, and the legacy of Candyman. The final track has writer-director Bernard Rose in conversation with podcasters Adam Green and Joe Lynch. They cover a lot of the fine details of the filmmaking process, leavened with broad and often pretty crass bits of humor.
There are also several making-of docs and on-camera interviews with cast and crew members, involving unsurprising moments of overlap with the commentary tracks, as well as several interviews that shine a light on folks who weren’t included on the commentaries. Among the more interesting interview subjects: Barker goes into his early days in Liverpool, his literary and cinematic influences, and his career up through the making of Candyman; literary historian Douglas E. Winter discusses Barker’s writing in general, and “The Forbidden” in particular; and academics Tananarive Due and Steven Barnes dissect the racial and class issues touched on by the film. Finally, the disc with the theatrical cut is rounded out by a number of TV spots and stills galleries, as well as a copy of the original script available as a BD-ROM.
Overall
Bernard Rose’s bloody and hypnotic Candyman gets the definitive UHD Blu-ray treatment.
Since 2001, we've brought you uncompromising, candid takes on the world of film, music, television, video games, theater, and more. Independently owned and operated publications like Slant have been hit hard in recent years, but we’re committed to keeping our content free and accessible—meaning no paywalls or fees.
If you like what we do, please consider subscribing to our Patreon or making a donation.
