Say Candyman 5 Times In The Mirror I DARE YOU.
It is a pet peeve of mine when people announce that a movie is more socially relevant now than when it was first released. This declaration assumes that the issues brought up in the film somehow magically corrected themselves and that it's only in recent years that the issue has reared its problematic little head again. Social structures of oppression are sustained over decades, over centuries. This is the sentiment that has followed the cult classic Candyman (Bernard Rose, 1992) like a pseudo-progressive moth to a flame.
The tough issues of racial inequality are the main crux of the story. yet at no point in the last three decades has this issue faded, it's maintained the same level of relevancy since inequality has, unfortunately, persevered like Katie Hopkins career or The Sun's hatred for immigration. For example, the brutal police beating of Rodney King in 1991 is not dissimilar to the case of George Floyd last year. Same problem. 29 years apart.
The legend states that a white lynch mob attacked, mutilated and murdered a black artist after he fell in love with and impregnated a rich white man’s daughter
They covered him in bees, cut off his arm, and replaced it with the iconic bloody hook. If you say his name five times in the mirror, he will pop out and murder you by slicing you from groyne to throat with his trusty, rusty hook.
An easy way to survive this horror movie is to not say those words or look in the mirror. But our heroine, Helen, is too caught up in her investigation to even fathom this.
*Spoiler Warning for a 30 year old movie*
She invokes his name and, in doing so, creates a series of events where she indirectly (or directly, if you prefer that interpretation) causes the kidnapping of an innocent rottweiler, her best friend Bernadette (Kasi Lemmons), her psychiatrist, herself, and is responsible for the kidnapping of a little baby named Anthony.
All this unnecessary bloodshed was all because a white woman needed to finish her dissertation. She paid for her degree with her sanity and her life. That's a level of dedication that I will never be able to match and that's undoubtedly a good thing.
Let's hope sociology students don't take It upon themselves to delve deeper into the tale of the Swansea Devil because it could mean any one of us could be the newest victim of its unlucky curse.
Candyman's main goal throughout the 1992 film is to shape this naive grad student into his own image, thus making it so no one will want to help her, just as nobody helped him. Turning Candyman into a legend ensured that as long as his moniker lived on, so would he.
The classic phrase of “the wound may heal, but the scars will remain" has its own Candyman version. Tony Todd so delicately and creepily whispers as the titular Candyman, “I am a rumour. It is a blessed condition, believe me. To be whispered about at street comers. To live in other people's dreams but not to have to be."
To put even more simply, the person may perish, but the violence, pain and injustice live on in those who remember. And those who remember can never forget.
Now, as a little lass from the countryside whose complexion is akin to a vampire or 'Casper: The Friendly Ghost', I can't and shouldn't weigh in on black issues as I come from a completely different background and am, frankly, uneducated on the black experience. So, something that I, and everyone else who also has the same colouring as a sheet of paper, can do is to listen and adjust behaviour accordingly,
That is the bare minimum.
If you take anything away from this horror classic, and I hope you do, it is that in a climate where fear and stereotypes are branding people into rigid groups of children starving Tories and snowflake Liberals, Candyman portrays how willing we can be to vilify each other.
As cool as villains are, they only lead to more suffering, which isn't cool.
And, most importantly, that it would suck to be stung to death by bees
