Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Candyman’ on VOD, a Flawed-but-Excellent ‘Spiritual Sequel’ to a Cult Horror Classic

Now on VOD, the 2021 version of Candyman is a “spiritual sequel” to the 1992 cult horror classic, an- wait wait wait, don’t run off! It’s worth disregarding the annoying buzzwords in quotation marks and sticking with it, because there’s an enormous amount of talent involved: Producer/co-writer Jordan Peele, director/co-writer Nia DaCosta (soon to be famous for helming Marvel’s The Marvels) and stars Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Teyonah Parris. The original film was reasonably well-received upon its release, but has grown in its cultural cache since then, the current context drawing out its latent and incisive racial commentary. So it makes sense for Get Out and Us guy Peele, the most invigorating name in modern horror, to revisit it.

CANDYMAN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Chicago’s Cabrini-Green projects, 1977: A kid lugs a basket of dirty clothes across the courtyard to the laundry room. We notice things, especially if we’ve seen the 1992 Candyman — things like an exterminator sign with a cartoon bee on it, a big ugly hole in the wall, reflections in glass and/or mirrors, anything that looks like a hook. From outside the building, we hear the kid yell, and two nearby cops dash inside. CUT TO: Cabrini-Green, 2019. We notice things like “luxury lofts,” fancy restaurants and bodegas that probably stock organic essence-of-kumquat lip balm and $12 bottles of quadruple-inside-out-reverse-osmosis drinking water. The old projects are fenced off, a ghost town left to be devoured by weeds.

In one of those luxury lofts lives a couple. Brianna (Parris) owns a successful art gallery, and Anthony (Abdul-Mateen) is a painter in the midst of a creative dry spell. One night, after a glass of wine or two, her visiting brother Troy (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) tells a “scary story,” and it’s rather familiar — it’s about Helen Lyle, the original film’s protagonist, played by Virginia Madsen; we see it reenacted via creepy shadow puppetry. Par for the course, facts are distorted and the timeline is jumbled, as if it’s been funneled through the telephone game for nearly three decades. It captivates Anthony to the point that it seems as if he’d rather read old news stories about Helen Lyle on his phone instead of have sex with Brianna — a harbinger of horrors to come? Sure seems that way.

The next day, Anthony’s pressured by an art dealer to come up with something to paint, so he pulls a bit of blahblahblah about the socio-political history of Cabrini-Green out of his butt. And he follows through on it, looking a lot like Helen Lyle as he wanders through the projects, illuminating creepy dark dilapidated rooms with the light of his camera flash. A bee stings him on his brushwielding hand, which might be significant as the plot develops further! Who knows! He meets a laundromat owner, William (Colman Domingo), who fills him in on the Candyman legend — you know, say his name five times in a mirror and the killer sticks his hook-hand in soft places until you no longer have enough blood in your body to keep you alive. Anthony gets to work, and puts together an installation featuring a mirrored medicine cabinet and written instructions on how to get your ass murdered. A snotty high-school girl with a ’90s scrunchie in her hair and a snooty art critic visit the installation, but surely that’ll amount to nothing. Meanwhile, Anthony’s bee sting is looking really infected — some delightful scabs oozing with gobs of pus — but he’s in the zone, painting his head off. This’ll all end well, I bet.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: This is as good a place as any to mention how DaCosta’s film disregards the two mid-’90s Candyman sequels, which opted for rubber-stamped slasherisms over atmosphere and ideas. DaCosta’s Candyman clearly wouldn’t exist without Get Out; her style and vision brought to mind Let the Right One In and It Follows.

Performance Worth Watching: I’d ding the screenplay for not quite bringing its characters into tight focus, or allowing its cast to fulfill its potential. Abdul-Mateen and Parris are very good here, but are surely capable of doing more.

Memorable Dialogue: “You need a hand?” — Anthony delivers a line that sure would be innocuous in a different movie franchise

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: One of the most striking components of the original Candyman is its use of deep-bruise plum-purple color during its graphically violent moments — the type of scenes that make your eyes widen a little, that make you feel more aghast than maybe you expected. DaCosta’s Candyman accomplishes similar textural ooginess via today’s scary-movie trope du jour, body horror, as Anthony’s bee sting is like, hey, welcome to Scab and Fingernail, Wes Craven’s trendy new restaurant in the newly revitalized hipster district. And Anthony sure does pick at the Cabrini-Green/Candyman lore until all its spiritual ugliness is exposed and glistening, stopping a few shades shy of Cronenberg’s The Fly, but still satisfying the gore faithful, while inspiring a significant puckering of the bum from we sensitive types in the audience.

Thematically, the original Candyman stands strong and tall on its own two feet, which means DaCosta and co. had to get clever to concoct a story that’s both fresh and familiar, and can be retrofitted into the existing lore. They’ve devised a surprisingly sturdy reiteration and expansion of the original plot, and it doesn’t come off as excessive or unnecessary. The new film makes a few callbacks to the first: classical slasher freakouts, a scary scene in a restroom (DaCosta inverts it by keeping the perspective mostly from inside the stall this time), a Madsen vocal cameo and an updated dinner scene populated with insufferable intellectual blowhards. And like the first film, it sustains its drama nicely in its many moments where characters look in the mirror, willingly or unwittingly tempting fate.

The screenplay tends to scatter transparently provocative characters and situations about like cheez balls tossed to the squirrels, and the plot stumbles over its own twists once or twice. But DaCosta powers through, directing with intent, purpose and visual panache. She eventually aligns some of the scattered pieces, even if she doesn’t quite catch all the provocative red herrings in her net at the end. The story tackles white supremacy in a few different forms — violent cops, gentrification and it’s surely intentional that people who snicker at Candyman lore are white, the urban legend functioning as a metaphor for Black perspectives.

There are times when DaCosta and co. tend to hammer nails smack on their heads, opting for open and literal explanation instead of suggestion. But it’d be disingenuous to say the film isn’t powerful — what it lacks in focus and subtlety, it makes up for with style, intensity and a strong climax that’s a nightmare turned righteous.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The new Candyman is far from perfect, but it feels vibrant and immediate, and holds true to the original movie’s intent.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Where to stream Candyman