Candyman: Critiquing the Horrifying History of Monsters
Earlier this year I turned on the Bernard Rose’s 1992 film, Candyman, which I had never seen before and knew next to nothing about it. I emerged from that experience, head aflutter — full of thoughts and feelings — and within seven days, I had seen the movie two more times. Now I consider it to be perhaps my favorite movie ever, in large part because of the questions it prompted and the spark those questions evoked in me. I felt it fitting to take this opportunity to analyze the film, breaking down its ideas and themes and the impact they had on me, and perhaps by the end of the essay, I shall have inspired you to give it a chance.
To properly establish Candyman, I think it is best to provide some context to the ideologies and the tropes of the horror genre and more urgently to briefly discuss the film that Candyman most directly refutes. That film, of course, is The Birth of a Nation. The Birth of a Nation — or as it was originally called, The Clansman — is a 1915 film that revolutionized the technological capabilities of film at the time. It also was directly responsible for 20th century resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan. It is in this latter half of The Birth of a Nation’s legacy that Rose and Candyman assert their grievance. Video essayist Lindsay Ellis makes the argument The Birth of a Nation is in many ways the first monster movie. Her video is linked above for further viewing on the topic, but I shall summarize the crux of that thesis here. The Birth of a Nation frames its black antagonists as primitive monsters, incapable of reason and wanting only one thing: white women. This is patently disgusting, but it should not sound unfamiliar. Every King Kong adaptation operates on a more traditional and metaphorical version of this same premise, particularly the 1933 original. As does The Creature From the Black Lagoon. These comparisons are not coincidence. The Birth of a Nation presents a singularly compelling, albeit racist, idea. The notion of a monster who cannot be reasoned with is a fascinating topic in science fiction, fantasy and horror. The issue is that whereas King Kong and Creature From the Black Lagoon are simple personifications of colonialist guilt, racist presumptions, and critically, fear of comeuppance for the terrible burden the imperialists had placed on nature and their fellow man, the monsters in The Birth of a Nation are actually black people. While I think King Kong and Creature From the Black Lagoon have unsolved racial issues of their own that we as a society should likely contend with, they are not nearly as overt nor as directly historically impactful as their predecessor. Between the three of them however, they did set the standard for what a monster movie should be, and fundamentally, a genre built off of the suppositions of those three films is going to have its fair share of racial and cultural insensitivities.
Fast forward to the early ’80s, and the monster movie genre had taken on a wholly different approach. America was neither afraid of the unexplored regions of the world anymore, nor the comeuppance for their colonialism. A more pressing 20th century fear had begun to run rampant through the horror genre, well truthfully two, paranoia and sex. The tail end of the Cold War was still going strong, and Americans were still worried that their next door neighbor could turn out to be a dirty commie. Meanwhile, the needle had dipped back into conservatism, with a new cowboy movie star at the helm. As the sex happy ’60s and ’70s came to a close, there was a heightened pushback against the sort of “immorality” that was present throughout the those decades. 1981 also marked the beginning of the Aids Crisis, a catastrophe America still has yet to fully come to terms with. And thus monster movies became about demons with knife fingers entering your dreams and killing your friends to scare you into chastity, or hockey mask wearing psychos stalking you for even considering sex as an option. Slasher villains emerged almost as a method of social control over the younger generation, a bloody bastion of a newfound sexual morality. They sent a pretty clear message. Friday the 13th, both the original and later installments, spells out that message rather explicitly. There were other monster movies at the time, some of which even appear on the surface to be about the traditional man vs nature themes of old monster movies. Fundamentally though, Jaws is not about Quinn vs the Shark. Jaws is about the mayor who wouldn’t do what was best for his people in favor of a bit more money. Alien isn’t about Ripley vs the Xenomorph, it’s about Ripley vs a Patriarchal system (I mean, the Xenomorph has a smaller head that extends out of its mouth and looks like a penis. It isn’t subtle). These newer horror movies were about man vs man, or woman vs man. In cases like the slasher genre, more often than not the seemingly supernatural killer is just… a guy. He may be a supernaturally powered man, but in appearance he is just a man. This shift away from giant monsters such as Kong or the Creature, to the everyday paranoia and fear of living in an America battling both the commies and AIDS, is a monumental one and alongside the original monster movie, it is the cornerstone of what Candyman’s cultural critique is about.
Having established what Candyman wants to be a critique of, let me now establish what Candyman is. For those unfamiliar, Candyman follows protagonist and student Helen Lyle as she researches an urban legend about a murderer with a hook for a hand who would appear if you said his name five times in a mirror. This leads her down the rabbit hole of horror as she finds that the Candyman is all too real. The story goes that the spirit, now known as Candyman, was once a slave named Daniel Robitaille. He was freed after the Civil War, and he began a path to higher learning, he learned to read and write. Eventually, he fell in love with a woman. The only issue with his inspiring tale was that the woman was white. Her father sent a lynch mob after Daniel. They cut off his hand and shoved a hook into the bloody stump. They covered him in honey, and then they covered him in bees. He was stung thousands of times and died a death most gruesome. Fast forward to modern day (in this case, 1992) and the image of Candyman can be found painted across walls and streets in Cabrini-Green housing project, a real life place where the fictional Robitaille died. Older structures within Cabrini-Green, rooms that are no longer in use, still contain murals dedicated to the Candyman, Daniel may be dead but Candyman lives on.
Candyman, the character, represents negative stereotyping. In death, he becomes what the white folks who killed him believed him to be. They were fueled by an identical racist sentiment to the Klan in The Birth of a Nation. They believed themselves to be heroes destroying a dangerous predator, an animal too stupid for its own good. In reality, they were murdering a man whose only crime was his race. But in death, Candyman indeed becomes the monster they made him. He has his heart set on being reunited with the woman he once loved, and he terrorizes Cabrini-Green to get to her. Candyman isn’t really Daniel Robataille any longer, he even says it himself. “I am rumor. I am the writing on the wall. I am the whisper in the back of the classroom.” When Robataille died, Candyman is born again as myth. Specifically, he is the myth of the dangerous black man hunting white women. He is a myth that ravages black communities to this day. Cabrini-Green is a predominantly black community of Chicago, and it is no mistake that Candyman — a physical manifestation of negative stereotyping — disproportionately affects this housing project.
That is what Candyman represents, a racist and terribly destructive myth. It is a direct opposition to monster flicks of old, which portrayed this myth in a rather straightforward way. Plainly, the creators of The Birth of a Nation and King Kong did not believe it to be a fiction, but a real cause for concern. Candyman shows the same conflict in order to prompt its audience to challenge that preconceived notion, to ask themselves if the belief has any basis in reality; and further, it asks them to examine the ramifications of such a racially charged myth being baked into pop culture, especially when left unchallenged. The film, to its credit, does not exactly provide a direct answer to the audience as to how they should feel upon making this realization. It is openly critical of the culture that allowed this myth to become a common belief set, understanding reckoning with years of racist conditioning isn’t an easy thing for most people, let alone in the space of just 100 minutes. It bridges this gap with something rarely seen — or at least, rarely understood — in monster movies, the importance of empathy.
In King Kong, the human characters have clear empathy for Kong. It’s evident in the timbre of the infamous line, “It was beauty killed the beast.” It is a mournful line reading, as if he has witnessed a tragedy. It was inevitable maybe, but tragic nonetheless. However, for the vast majority of that film, Kong is still treated as a lesser, more primitive being. And even in his sorrow, the message is still that he was felled not by man’s hate, but Kong’s ambition. In Creature From the Black Lagoon and Frankenstein, there is empathy towards the monsters, but it is of a limited quantity. There is absolutely still an attitude of superiority towards the creatures, threaded into the very fabric of those films.
The presence of this in Frankenstein is most notable because it is the closest comparison in nature to Candyman. Candyman isn’t an ape or a gill-man. He’s human, or he was. That is something Candyman and Adam(Frankenstein’s monster) have in common. Another similarity between the two characters is that they are judged, and thought to be monstrous simply through one aspect of their identity. Daniel Robataille was killed for being a black man in the 19th century, and for daring to fall in love with a white woman. Adam is brought to life using the “brain of a criminal.” This criminal brain element is brought up repeatedly, to suggest a belief that Adam is predisposed towards evil. The weird biological essentialism is not necessarily comparable to the racism that killed Daniel, but I think it merits mention because it represents a bit of stereotyping imposed on the character as well as represents the filmmakers reconciling with harmful and incorrect real life paradigms.
Frankenstein (the 1931 film, at least) does not go all in on this empathy. We see Adam howling in pain, trying to escape the fire towards the end of the film. This is clearly tragic, and while watching it, I was filled with a desire to try to help him escape. But the film does not present this as tragic as I perceive it. The film, if anything, skims past that moment to get to the epilogue. It bizarrely juxtaposes something deeply heart wrenching and business as usual, and it undercuts any real sense of compassion. In the end the characters, the writers and the director of Frankenstein (1931) saw his death as tragic, but not that tragic. This ethos would persist through monster movie stories until the aforementioned ’70s and ’80s which is important to note because those decades saw monster movies get even less sympathetic rather than more. Whereas King Kong, Dracula, Creature From the Black Lagoon and Frankenstein had some level of empathy attached to them, the new monster movie focused on creatures that felt nothing. The Xenomorph, Bruce the Shark, Zombies, Demons, Deadites, Pumpkinhead, Jason Voorhees. The monsters were more dangerous than ever and felt nothing. They lived to kill. There were exceptions such as An American Werewolf in London, which features the monster as the protagonist. The film takes a deeply empathetic tone in exploring his transformation into a werewolf. But films such as this were the exception not the rule in the monster genre. This was the atmosphere leading into the ’90s. And then, almost immediately, things shifted.
In 1991, Disney Animation released Beauty and the Beast. It was the first animated film to be nominated for a best picture Oscar, it was a sweeping Box Office success, and it proved that the success of The Little Mermaid was not a fluke, and that Disney was in fact, back. Featuring a nuanced and empathetic portrayal of a monster which allows that monster to grow and change to suit the woman he loved, it redefined what monsters could be in movies. What this also did was indirectly set the stage for Candyman. I do not contend Candyman was necessarily inspired by Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, though they most certainly took inspiration from the folktale, as well as the Cocteau film. Candyman was in the editing phase by its release, but Beauty and the Beast’s existence did prove that there was a market for an empathetic monster again and showed audiences and critics alike were inclined to accept the monster as the hero and deserving of love.
Taking that love into consideration, Candyman has as much to say about gender as it does race, and gender is just as loaded and complicated a subject in horror. But Candyman as a story would be nothing without the presence of Helen Lyle, and the Beast was nothing without Beauty. In many of those films cited in this essay, the monster chases after a white woman, and those same white women are portrayed as helpless. They are pure and innocent, and they cannot protect themselves, which makes it doubly offensive to her white male friends that the evil monster would want her. If that sounds racist, that’s because it is. If that sounds sexist, that’s because it is.
Harkening to, “It was beauty killed the beast,” we see women’s true value presented as their beauty and their innocence. This particular view of women runs the length of horror history. The covers of classic monster movies seemingly always feature a monster with a woman draped helplessly in his arms. This changes in the late ’50s and early ’60s with the rise of films like Psycho, Eyes Without a Face, Rosemary’s Baby and The Haunting. Very suddenly, women were the stars of horror. These films may have differing levels of merit in terms of their portrayal of women, but nuanced female characters are suddenly in the forefront and a lot of horror from then on will focus on female trauma. But as the century progressed, the pendulum swings back, and horror again focuses on sex, with women bearing the brunt of those thematics. Slasher movies developed a trope known as the “final girl,” which describes a woman in a horror movie who is the only survivor of her friend group, most typically because she is a virgin and her friends are not.
Candyman is not just a film about Race. It is a film about gender. It is a horror film. It is a monster movie. It is a slasher film. Its all of these things, so establishing a nuanced context for the cultural and artistic era that it was born in is vital. Helen Lyle, the protagonist of Candyman, is working on her thesis doing a research paper on urban legend. Right from the start we see that her relationship with her husband is a tad distrustful, and it seems like he might be cheating on her. The men in her field look down on her, and they assume she will need their help. She rejects their offers and goes looking for Candyman herself, or at least for stories of Candyman. She gets more than she bargained for however, after she runs into a local gangster using the Candyman myth to keep Cabrini-Green under his thumb. He knocks her out, but doesn't kill her, and she later gets him arrested. She remarks on this briefly, seemingly aware of her white privilege saying, “You know what bothers me about this whole thing, two people get brutally murdered and the cops do nothing. A white woman gets attacked, and they lock the place down. Kinda shows where their priorities are.”
The story takes a sudden turn when Candyman himself actually appears to her, angry that she doubted him. From there on out, the two are engaged in a game of cat and mouse. He kills people, and puts her at the scene, framing her for the crimes. He does this again and again, causing her to doubt her own sanity, and causing her to be locked up in an asylum. A month later, He offers her a place alongside him, tells her that he will let the baby he kidnapped go if she becomes his victim in the baby’s place. He tells her she has to choose to be his victim, so he breaks her out of the asylum instead of kidnapping her. She returns to her home to find her husband has already moved in with the student that was flirting with him at the beginning. She realizes she has nothing in her life except Candyman. She surrenders to him. He preps her for the ritual he seems to be about to perform, and knocks her out. When she comes to, she sees a mural on the wall that reads, “It was always you, Helen”. She quickly realizes that Candyman has broken the deal. She hears the baby’s screams coming from the massive bonfire pile. She dives in to save the baby, and only then is Candyman’s plan made clear. He is in the bonfire pile already, he wants the three of them, Candyman, Helen and the baby to die as a family. His death was so lonely the first time, and he wants to share it with them. Helen fights back and in a tussle, seemingly kills him, or whatever was left of him. She manages to get the baby out, but she burns to death in the process.
There was a lot of content there, and I appreciate you sticking with me through it. I want to analyze the meaning of all that on its own and relate that to the meaning that has in relation to all the earlier films this film builds off of. Firstly, Helen has autonomy. This is important because it allows her to actively react to her issues, and it makes the patriarchal sexism that she has to sit through, more agonizing for her and for the audience. Helen is the antithesis of a traditional final girl. Final Girls tend to be teenaged. They’re usually virgins, usually they fight back against the monster only at the very end, and they always live. Helen is an adult woman. She’s married, and she has had sex. She not only fights back against Candyman, she seeks him out in the first place. And…she dies. The fact that she is antithetical to the traditional final girl in most respects suggests to me that that is an intentional comparison the creators are drawing. Candyman postulates that women in horror can be women. Adults. This is an important element because typically the final girl trope is easily used to convey the “sex bad” theme. Simply have the girl who is a virgin survive and you’ve conveyed your ideas nicely. Candyman actively leans away from this so the central themes present in her character are a bit less readily apparent. There are a few ways to read her character from a thematic point of view, but the one I like most stems from the line “It was always you Helen”. Candyman writing this on the wall reveals to us that Helen is a reincarnation of the woman Candyman loved, or at least he thinks she is. Though the film leaves it ambiguous, I personally believe that she is less a literal embodiment of his first love, and more a general stand-in for white women, and especially white women in horror. It is implied that when Daniel was lynched and turned into Candyman, his love did nothing to stop this. This echoes back to all of the white women who stood by and allowed lynchings to happen via passivity, as well as to those who instigated such killings. Helen serves kind of as an apology for the sins of white women generally, and specifically for the woman Candyman loved. In the end Helen does what Candyman's lover couldn’t, and frees him from the hatred and pain. She kills him, but in doing so she is allowing him to be Daniel again, rather than the monster known as Candyman. And she dies too. This time, she will not let him face the pain alone. However you choose to read the reincarnation bit, literal or metaphorical, this certainly paints a compelling picture of change and compassion. Whether this is an accurate picture I cannot say, but it is a nuanced and heartfelt moment nonetheless.
As much as this film wants to explore white women's relation to the topic of race and specifically to hate crimes, it also wants to explore gender inequality in America. While it is certainly less in depth with its gender commentary than its race commentary there is still something of value to glean out. Most notably Candyman’s gaslighting of her. Candyman begins trying to convince her that she is mad, or at least make her appear mad to the outside world. He tears her entire world to the ground, isolating her, so that she can turn only to him. It is in this respect that the third act of Candyman truly shines. Her aforementioned sacrifice in which she frees Candyman and saves the baby, is a shining example of this. Candyman is a monster. He tortured her. He killed her friends. He gaslit her. He got her thrown in an asylum. But in the end she chose to see Daniel. The man that he was before the lynching. Whether this is true reincarnation or not remains unimportant as in either case her actions speak for white women generally. She disposes of the abusive, monstrous Candyman, hoping that even in death, some spark of Daniel may return.
The complicated racial issues that white women have contributed to over the years, and the continuing role of patriarchy and misogyny in our culture intersect in Helen Lyle, and in the end she chooses to free herself, and Candyman from the confining cultural context in which they live. In this moment she is rejecting The Birth of a Nation. She is spitting in the face of Halloween. She is lashing out in her final moments against the social structures that brought she and Daniel to such ruin, and against the cultural structures that grounded so much of horror in outdated racism and sexism.
