In 2015, Rose explained why he was so intrigued by this aspect of Chicago: “The fear of the urban housing project, it seemed to me, was actually totally irrational because you couldn’t really be in that much danger.
#PROJECT HALLOWEEN HELEN HOCKER MOVIE#
‘Black Christmas’ Was the First ‘Halloween’ Who Is the Best Horror Movie Monster or Villain? John Carpenter’s ‘They Live’ Was Supposed to Be a Warning. Aerial shots-using Skycam technology, a new device at the time allowing for elevated but smooth images à la The Shining, but without helicopter shadows-of the residence, combined with an operatic score from none other than Philip Glass, give Cabrini-Green an air of quiet death but also a majesty, like a mesmerising gothic church or an ancient sinister pyramid. The very first sentence of Clive Barker’s 1985 short story The Forbidden left its mark on Candyman: “Like a flawless tragedy, the elegance of which structure is lost upon those suffering in it, the perfect geometry of the Spector Street Estate was only visible from the air.” For his adaptation, Rose relocated the story from Barker’s native Liverpool to Chicago but kept his fellow British man’s point of view and poetry to make his setting gloomy and doomed. Get Out plays as a modern fable in Candyman, fables turn out to be factual. But of course, his fears will prove to be legitimate.
But how could Chris be sure that it isn’t his paranoid mind playing tricks on him? After all, it’s normal that he should be anxious to meet his girlfriend’s parents. How could a young black man like himself be afraid of being surrounded by white people in our woke day and age, when slavery no longer exists in America and his own girlfriend is white? And yet, the fear persists and finds itself justified in the increasingly strange behavior of the liberal-seeming Armitage family (in this scenario, “If I could, I would have voted for Obama for a third term” is as scary an utterance as “Candyman” five times in a mirror). In Get Out, the creepy story that Chris is afraid to believe in is racism. Urban or folklore legends get their power from their imperfect believability and our wild imagination. And they can be as gory and fantastical as one wishes them to be, which can make for some powerful images.
Scary campfire stories are perfect horror movie material: they’re meant to stretch credibility to keep us awake at night. But literal-minded Helen doesn’t believe in such myths, and even if it is with some hesitation, she does pronounce the murderer’s name five times in the mirror-and he doesn’t come, as people say he should.
The young woman is visiting the inhabited but derelict estate to study its urban legends, particularly the one about Candyman, the local bogeyman rumored to have actually recently killed some people in their homes. Virginia Madsen in ‘Candyman’ TriStar Pictures But where Chris is anxious about being exploited (more or less literally), Helen fears being perceived as exploitative. Chris, with his photography, and Helen, with her community-based research, are both aiming to document the reality of those milieus as outsiders. Where Daniel Kaluuya’s Chris Washington feels the need to get out of the wealthy mansion owned by his white girlfriend’s parents, Virginia Madsen’s Helen Lyle in Candyman is afraid of being intrusive as a white grad student entering the predominantly black and lower-class social estate of Cabrini-Green in Chicago. Like Get Out, Candyman sees a character enter a place that is typically not welcoming, but the dynamic is reversed. Candyman, in many complicated ways, was a precursor to Get Out’s embedded social critique and sophisticated use of genre cinema language.
(He wants Jordan Peele to be at the helm.) After this year’s direct sequel to John Carpenter’s Halloween by David Gordon Green, it would make sense to have Candyman return, updated for today’s particularly horror-savvy and -literate audience with its themes of race and class, some critics might even call Candyman “elevated horror.” It would also make a lot of sense, as Todd claims, to have Peele put his own spin on the material: his 2017 debut, Get Out, satirized and made explicit the hypocrisy and the danger still at the core of racism today. That’s Tony Todd, the actor best known for playing the suave, hook-handed killer in Bernard Rose’s cult 1992 horror film Candyman, talking last week about a potential remake of the most iconic film of his career. “I know I’d rather have him do it, someone with intelligence, who’s going to be thoughtful and dig into the whole racial makeup of who Candyman is and why he existed in the first place.”
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