Bernard Rose's 1992 Cult Classic Candyman is as Powerful and Incisive as Ever

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Candyman takes place in a Chicago I know all too well as a former third generation resident of the Windy City. It’s a city that’s chilly and cold, violent and sad, where horrible things happen all the time but people are too beaten down by the inexorable horrors of everyday life to be able to do anything about it.

I went to University of Illinois at Chicago my freshman year and was struck by the strange beauty of its architecture, by the otherworldly oddness of its buildings. Candyman makes exquisite use of its Chicago settings to create an ominous world at once gorgeous and horrifying, cerebral and visceral, scary and ultimately deeply sad. 

Candyman is unabashedly a horror film of ideas. It’s a cult classic that has aged like a fine wine and will sadly always be relevant because it is fundamentally concerned with the eternally timely horrors of racism, sexism, grotesque social iniquities, violence and poverty. 

English Writer-director Bernard Rose transformed British fright master Clive Barker’s Liverpool-set tale of supernatural horror into an atmospheric art film/mood piece about everything that makes Chicago, and by extension the United States, such a fascinating horror show. 

In a performance that rightly won her the most prestigious honor in the arts, the Fangoria Chainsaw Award for Best Actress, Virginia Madsen is absolutely fantastic as heroine Helen Lyle. 

In a role that makes brilliant use of Madsen’s trademark combination of steely strength and aching vulnerability, the future Oscar nominee plays a Semiotics graduate student at the University of Illinois at Chicago studying urban legends. 

In the course of her research, the ambitious academic stumbles upon the legend of Daniel Robitaille (Tony Todd, in the role that made him a horror movie god), the cultured, artistically gifted son of a wealthy former slave.

The talented painter became an in-demand portrait artist for the white upper class until his taboo-shattering romance with a white woman led to him having his hand cut off with a saw by an angry mob that then covered his body in honey so that he could be killed by bees. 

they have fun!

The way that Candyman handles this information speaks to its artistry, elegance and restraint. We learn all of this from a single monologue from an asshole contemporary of our heroine’s jackass professor husband. 

A lesser film would seize upon this grisly scene as an excuse for blood, gore and violence. It would depict this grotesque, tragic spectacle in all of its lurid horror. 

That’s not how Candyman treats its unforgettable villain’s backstory. We don’t see ANY of the horrors described. There are no flashbacks. Our minds travel back to that long-ago tragedy but we never leave the expensive restaurant where the scene takes place. 

We don’t even see the professor’s face as he tells the story. Instead Rose makes the bold choice to keep the camera on Madsen the entire time. He knew that merely watching Madsen silently react to someone else’s words for two minutes could be as scary and unnerving as actually seeing the events described. 

That choice epitomizes the film’s approach to its material. The Candyman doesn’t even appear until the movie is half over. Rose isn’t averse to gore and bloodshed and shocking violence but he prefers mood, atmosphere and insinuation. 

Helen and her colleague Bernadette "Bernie" Walsh (Kasi Lemmons) visit the notorious housing project Cabrini-Green, the eternal home of Candyman and a harsh realm where all of the failings of capitalism and the American experiment are on full display. 

Candyman walks a fine line in being honest about the harsh realities of Cabrini-Green, racism and misogyny without resorting to lurid, racist stereotypes.

That extends to Candyman himself. In a career-making and defining performance, the towering, deep-voiced character actor plays Daniel Robitaille as an imposing, verbose, hypnotic figure. He’s the hate that hate made, a monster created and molded by racism in both its individual and institutional form. 

He’s also unmistakably romantic and sexual. He died for love and now seems willing to kill for it as well. There is an unmistakable strain of romantic obsession in his fixation on Helen. 

The outsized villain makes dying at the end of his hook seem like the ultimate masochistic display of devotion. For Candyman, death and sex and love and legend are all inextricably intertwined. In his estimation, it is better to die and become instant folklore than to live and have to put up with all the bullshit that Chicago has to offer. 

Todd’s performance is rightly revered as one of the greatest and most iconic in horror history. He is the only slasher icon I can think of whose defining characteristics, beyond, you know, an unfortunate propensity for mass murder, are dignity and a truly impressive vocabulary. 

Candyman is scary but he’s also seductive. Todd created a monster for the ages here but he wouldn’t be anywhere near as effective if he didn’t have such explosive chemistry  with Madsen. 

That chemistry is inherently sexual. Candyman wants to murder Helen in the most romantic, dramatic possible way and she seems disconcertingly kinda into it. It’s a daring performance that retains an air of verisimilitude no matter how gothic and grotesque things get.

Any realism Candyman possesses comes from Madsen’s ferociously committed but deeply nuanced performance. We believe in Candyman because she believes. 

In its second half Candyman steers away from the grit and social commentary of its beginning and becomes a sort of grim fairy tale about a strong-willed innocent facing down evil.

Candyman lives in a world of myth and metaphor, allegory and legend. It’s rooted irrevocably in the brutal realities of Chicago in 1992 and 1892 and 2022 but it aspires to something bigger and more mythic. 

bee my baby!

Candyman is a remarkable meditation race and sex and death blessed with a Phillip Glass score that plays a big role in raising this unusually ambitious fright flick to the level of art.  It’s not elevated horror but rather horror that elevates the seedy slasher genre with ideas, style and substance. 

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