Week #1, 2020: Candyman
I was a very sensitive child. The list of things that would have me scuttling to sleep in parents’ bed is endless. I remember standing in my parents’ driveway throwing gravel at the kitchen window while everyone laughed at Eerie Indiana on our Trinitron. Or the incredibly mild teaser for The Outer Limits that featured only a black dot increasing in size on a white background, as an ominous note played over a voiceover. That was enough to haunt me for days. Or the time my dad – because I took efforts to hide how much this kind of thing unsettled me – bought me a Ghostbusters annual and I was so unnerved by a picture of a demon that I tore out the page and buried it in the back garden.
I had a very happy childhood, totally untouched by anything like the real horror that I realised other people lived through as we reconvened as adults. But I was still hemmed in by glancing exposures like this, or other mildly scary moments in totally age-appropriate content (that’s before we get to the truly mind-bending stuff my own imagination was pumping into my brain nightly).
All this to say, that at the time I was both the perfect target for the particular scares Candyman trades in and also the least likely to consider watching it. It was one of a number of VHS tapes that were ubiquitously available during my childhood. Despite the very careful parenting most of my middle-class peers grew up under, it was very easy to lay your hands on a VHS copy of Candyman, and for others to tell you its central concept (likewise Tim Curry padding around Derry as Pennywise in the TV version of It). Sleepover lore meant you knew that if you said ‘Candyman’ in the mirror five times, something unspeakable would happen. But I wasn’t fool enough to watch it when others dared. I found the legend of Candyman scary enough (it took as leftfield an illicit sleepover pick as The Lawnmower Man to con me into getting my wig thoroughly flipped and needing to be driven home to sleep in my own bed).
All of the horrors that these encounters created felt ineradicable and inescapable, rising up out of any innocuous or happy experience (I can’t remember which 1996 family film was preceded by a trailer for The Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace, but it took a fair few years for me not to feel like the cinema pre-roll was a minefield). Like a Sorcerer’s Apprentice of the mind (and when you think about it, that’s a very scary story), the more you chop it up and avoid it, the more it spawns. I never found movie monsters like Jaws’ Great White unnerving once the VHS was back in its box. After all, if the shark’s dead and you don’t go in the water, you’ll be fine. But what really sends me is an idea that can’t be so easily located and managed. Something as dangerous as thought itself. I’m convinced to this day that horror fans’ love of collectibles is the thrill of locating, perhaps even trapping, something that is otherwise impossible to catch and hold. It’s the genie put back into the lamp.
As the years passed, I became less scared. I watch a lot of horror films and yet very little terrifies me. Where horror films used to create fears I couldn’t control, I now watch them to parcel up grander, irresolvable fears and see them discretely vanquished. Having swung the compass the other way, my main worry now is that I have poked out my imagination’s third eye, the wellspring of my anxieties and creativity. What have I lost in gaining fewer sleepless nights?
It was only a couple of years ago that I caught up with childhood’s holy monster Candyman (on a beautiful print at the BFI, thanks Michael). In the film, Helen (Virginia Madsen) is investigating the urban legend of Candyman, who is said to appear if you say his name into the mirror five times, and then murder you. Word of Candyman is especially strong among the inhabitants of Chicago’s Cabrini Green, a ghettoised and dangerous estate. Helen – who is framed in the early going as an idealised, nearly madonna-like white woman – is a skeptic, partly because she exists outside of the system that necessitates scary stories. The violence of the ghetto after dark that Candyman is a metaphor for (and a literal embodiment of) does not touch her. But she transgresses, crossing a border (her hatchback driving across Chicago – set to Philip Glass’s ominous and brilliant score – makes this quick urban drive seem like passing through the gates of hell) and comes under his spell. Soon Candyman is driving her to the brink of sanity and implicating her in grisly murders of those closest to her.
Candyman is both about something legitimately scary (a hookhanded creature who can apparate anywhere, covers every surface with bees and is embodied by – scariest of all – a sexy as hell black man) but it’s also about the power of being scared. Why do we need scary stories? Candyman makes it clear: we need to find something to pin our worst imaginings, whether that’s murder, being declared insane, or having to share a neighbourhood with black folks. Candyman just takes the bad dream that bit further, and refuses to end the dream when we wake up or get back to our safe neighbourhood.
Beloved as the original is to me, I had zero qualms when I heard there was a remake of Candyman coming down the pike. Not just because a Jordan Peele produced, Nia DaCosta directed remake made perfect sense with Candyman’s rich treatment of America’s mangled racial subconscious. But because the film itself is about myths being adapted. During the Plantation, Candyman is a literal cuckolder, a virile black man out to seize white women. In racially segregated Chicago, he’s closer to a gangbanger, the reason white people don’t go into the ghetto. I’m excited to see what Candyman becomes in a culture that ‘would’ve voted for Obama a third time’. The hookhanded man lives again every time someone tells a story about him or dares to stand in front of the mirror. Horror films are just like that. We sit in front of the screen, chanting Candyman’s name. We’re hoping he won’t come, but we also know it’ll be a sad day when he doesn’t.
Three other things I've been enjoying...
Honeyland, an excellent documentary about a Macedonian woman who gathers wild honey and what happens when a family of more voracious bee keepers come to her village. The best kind of observational documentary that reminds you both of the strangeness and also the similarity of lives utterly unlike your own.
The video for Caroline Polachek's 'So Hot You're Hurting My Feelings' (directed by Polachek and Matt Copson) which is a bit John Martin meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer with great choreo.
'Final Form' by Sampa the Great.