With Nia DaCosta‘s Candyman coming to theaters on August 27, 2021, Bloody Disgusting has been provided with a series of video interviews that shed some new light on the film.
Candyman comes from producer Jordan Peele, who co-wrote the film with Win Rosenfeld, and Peele talks all things Candyman in the first video we’d like to share with you this week.
“I think what Nia has really done is she’s explored race on all the levels from the uncomfortable to the downright devastating. And she’s kept a love story in there at the center. A tragic love story. Like the original,” Peele explains in the video featurette, found below.
“The original Candyman is one of my favorites. It’s a very influential movie for me,” Peele continues. “Mainly because… we didn’t have a Black Freddy… we didn’t have a Black Jason. When Candyman came along, it felt very daring. It felt very cathartic. And it was terrifying. This was one of the movies that told me that Black people can be in horror.”
Peele describes the new movie, in contrast to the original, as a “mirror image” flip of some of the themes that were explored by director Bernard Rose back in the early 1990s.
“In the original film, Helen, played expertly by Virginia Madsen, is a bit of a fish out of water, to say the least, in the Cabrini-Green area. A lot is focused on her fear of this Black space. Cabrini-Green has been torn down and is fairly gentrified now,” Peele explains. “And the story that resonated to me now is the story of my fear of the white space. And to be able to explore the mirror image of the first one, to me was a point that made the project worthy in itself. To see that full realization of that conversation that this movie is.”
Part of that conversation revolves around the concept of Candyman being “the whole damn hive” rather than a single character, as Peele goes on to explain in this new interview.
“Candyman is an eternal figure, and what we did with this version of it is we focused on the connection – we tried to bring out the connection with the fact that this is an epidemic of violence on Black bodies in this country. Candyman can’t just be singular, he’s a concept. He’s a story. He’s a bogeyman. And that means he applies across the boundaries of time.”
For more from Peele, you can watch the full video interview down below.
In this year’s Candyman…
“For as long as residents can remember, the housing projects of Chicago’s Cabrini Green neighborhood were terrorized by a word-of-mouth ghost story about a supernatural killer with a hook for a hand, easily summoned by those daring to repeat his name five times into a mirror. In present day, a decade after the last of the Cabrini towers were torn down, visual artist Anthony McCoy (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) and his girlfriend, gallery director Brianna Cartwright (Teyonah Parris), move into a luxury loft condo in Cabrini, now gentrified beyond recognition and inhabited by upwardly mobile millennials.”
“With Anthony’s painting career on the brink of stalling, a chance encounter with a Cabrini Green old-timer (Colman Domingo) exposes Anthony to the tragically horrific nature of the true story behind Candyman. Anxious to maintain his status in the Chicago art world, Anthony begins to explore these macabre details in his studio as fresh grist for paintings, unknowingly opening a door to a complex past that unravels his own sanity and unleashes a terrifyingly viral wave of violence that puts him on a collision course with destiny.”