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Candyman
It is a silly story—the type of shocker that seems suitable for campfire scares or one of those cheesy “true” ghostly encounters books you can buy for cheap at your local used bookstore: If you look into the mirror and say “Candyman” five times, a bloodthirsty ghost will appear behind you and slash you to death with his hook hand. In the opening moments of Candyman, we witness a scene that borrows from the traditions of low-rent slasher films and reenacts such a scenario—a “true story” we are informed by the narrator, passed down by a friend of a friend who knew a guy whose cousin this actually happened to. So it goes. This first scene is a clever one, because it belongs to the old traditional “horny teenagers” subgenre of horror, in which a babysitter and her punkrock boyfriend, moments away from coitus, are interrupted by a supernatural killer who literally cuts in on the fun. We know the scene is a cliché, but so does the narrator who quickly laughs the story off even as she tells it. We jump instantly to “the real world” and meet the speaker, a graduate student investigating urban legends for her thesis. She is played by Virginia Madsen as a woman who does not believe a word of these stories; at one point in the film, she notably insists to a terrified young boy who thinks he has seen the dreadful hooked phantom, “Candyman isn’t real. He’s just like Dracula and Frankenstein. Completely make-believe.” Fair enough, but wait a second: Dracula and Frankenstein are based on historical figures, and their ghosts have successfully haunted western culture for the last 200 years, even if it has only been in the guise of their fictitious counterparts. Clive Barker, who contributed to the screenplay and also wrote the short story on which this film is based, is clever and subversive enough to know this, and so Madsen’s specific wording is inadvertently ominous. As it happens, the film provides a back story of an ex-slave killed by an angry mob who is the historical basis for the Candyman (whether or not it’s true, I’m not sure); it is a fable as plausible as anything we know about the historical Dracula and Frankenstein. And as the legendary Count and Doctor know, just because something is fiction doesn’t also mean that the reality of its fiction hasn’t taken on lifelike qualities. Candyman, Madsen will come to learn in her investigations, has a life of his own: He is a violent, menacing phantom who doesn’t like having his existence questioned in a way that diminishes his power over people, even if he was only ever a myth to begin with. And because this is a horror film, he is happy to oblige Madsen by challenging her bold assertion of his non-existence by inviting her to play along with the silly stories she has been told about him. In case you’ve never seen this cult-classic, I’ll leave the storyline at that and let you experience its twists and turns for yourself. Essentially, Madsen is both right and wrong in her skepticism—right because there is no such thing as teenage-slashing ghosts, wrong because she has miscalculated the power of a legend to become so engrained into our subconscious that it attains a strange sort of existence. Candyman thus establishes itself as an allegorical film, and it begins as a very good one that slyly comments on myths in popular culture. It’s curious, for example, how much urban myths have crept into our collective psyche so that they are retranslated to play on more common fears and stereotypes. Because Candyman is African American, the film informs us, he has become a popular folk hero in the ghettos of Chicago. When Madsen, a pretty white woman, is forced to enter into this predominantly black, lower-class side of town in order to investigate his legend, a peer cautions her, “Are you sure you want to go over there? Haven’t you heard that those people rape rich white women?” Director Bernard Rose shrewdly generates tension based on this fear by simply surrounding this white woman around poor, rough looking black men. Now: is there any real danger here, or are racist assumptions simply fueling our (and certainly Madsen’s) paranoia? It’s a curious approach to discussing racial stereotyping; even more so because Candyman himself is played by Tony Todd, a charismatic black actor who seems to represent everything Madsen is warned about. Urban legends, then, are not restricted to supernatural tales; they are generated from our harmful prejudices just as much as they are on “innocent” fears of the dark. This is a fantastic setup for a socially-conscious horror film that the likes of George Romero or Larry Fessenden would feel right at home tackling. Bernard Rose himself has dealt with similar material quite nicely in his surreal Paperhouse (1988), about a young girl’s psychic connection with a disabled boy. But after carefully setting up the premise and conjuring legitimate scares based on familiar paranoia, it is disappointing to see the film deflate with the appearance of Candyman himself. This is not a discredit to Todd, who effectively interprets Candyman as sexual force of nature literally fighting for survival against a woman whose investigative debunking has diminished his power among his “children.” But the farther the relationship between Candyman and Madsen’s reporter develops, the more the film loses its narrative footing and descends into a series of increasingly gory slaughters that weaken the creepiness of the film’s first act. I am not against the use of extreme violence in any film, but a picture that starts as a psychological thriller should certainly feel inclined to pursue its ideas instead of undermining them with gory deaths that seem more apt in a Jason Voorhees vehicle—especially when they have no context outside of their mere presence. As the massacre escalates, we wish that Rose would slow the blood flow down and get back on the movie’s previous, more thoughtful track. The gripping denouement almost redeems the film, but it is sabotaged again by a finale that pointlessly contradicts Candyman’s position as a phantom born of myth, and instead frustratingly suggests that the myths were born from the phantom. It’s a lazy, angering rejection of the intriguing themes initially introduced. Perhaps Rose is suggesting with the gory finale that Candyman thrives on fulfilling the slasher clichés that are credited to him. Certainly the aforementioned opening scene supports this reading. But the prologue also got that point across by itself, and there was really no need to repeat the same idea over and over. I suspect that the real reason for the film’s rise in superficial gore is that the filmmakers, and particularly the studio, realized that they had a making of a bankable horror antihero on their hands and decided to take it in a more marketable direction, a la the Freddy Krueger and Michael Myers series. I have not seen the two (and counting) sequels to Candyman, but I would guess that they play up Candyman’s literal background story as an ex-slave instead of dealing with this film’s suggestion that his origin is irrelevant, except as the vague beginning of a fictional myth that has taken on a life of its own. If I am correct, it would only reveal that the follow-ups miss the point that Rose and Barker begin to make here before they give in to the typical horror machine. It is unfortunate to watch a well-acted horror picture with such a compelling setup stop thinking about its ideas and instead start thinking about its potential Krugeresque franchise. Unfortunate, but not surprising. Cast: A TriStar Pictures release. Directed by Bernard Rose. Written by Rose and Clive Baker. Based on the short story “The Forbidden,” by Barker. Rated R, for extreme gore, language, and brief nudity. Running time: 99 minutes. Original United States theatrical release date: October 16, 1992. Questions? Comments? E-mail me: danel_the_tinman@hotmail.com |
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