SAY HIS NAME

IN RESURRECTING THE CANDYMAN FRANCHISE, DIRECTOR NIA DACOSTA AIMS TO GET A NEW GENERATION HOOKED ON A CLASSIC HORROR VILLAIN

- DAVID GROVE

THE URBAN LEGEND STATES THAT he can only be summoned by saying his name five times while looking into a mirror. After the fifth and final vocalisation, Candyman appears behind the foolish chanter, who’s then killed by a hook attached to the bloody stump of his right arm.

It’s not a real urban legend of course: Clive Barker created Candyman for his 1985 short story “The Forbidden”, and it was then brought to the screen in 1992’s Candyman. That starred Tony Todd as the title character, who haunts the residents of Chicago’s notorious Cabrini-Green housing project, shedding innocent blood for the purpose of perpetuating his gruesome legend. Nearly 30 years later, the once crime-infested area has become a model of gentrification, and the hook-handed killer has receded into the fog of myth. The world Candyman once terrorised no longer exists, so how does the supernatural killer regain his former bloody glory?

Central to figuring that out was Jordan Peele, the Oscar-winning writer/director of Get Out and Us, who co-wrote the script and acts as a producer. But he wasn’t calling the shots on set; that fell to up-and-comer Nia DaCosta, who Peele chose to direct after being impressed by her feature debut, the acclaimed 2018 crime thriller Little Woods.

“I loved the first Candyman, which I think is a terrifying horror film,” DaCosta tells SFX. “My agent got me a meeting with Jordan, and we discovered that we had the same vision for how this film should be made. One of the things that we both love about the first film is that it’s one of the few horror films that attempted to represent the black experience, and we wanted to bring that to this film.