Another Candyman Movie

Mostly they were grossed out at some parts. Yeah, yeah, Danielle just said that's gross and Stephanie said that's fucked up at the same time. And I had this moment of like looking back on ourselves on our various couches, watching in our respective places, and kind of reminded me of that scene at the top of Thriller. You've got Michael Jackson sitting there in the audience having popcorn. Yeah, yeah, beautiful array and then the scene when you know, she

screams and popcorn goes everywhere. Uh, That's that's how I imagine this moment with our wives watching this film. It was fun. I'm Khalil Dbrad Muhammed and I'm Ben Austin. We're two best friends, one black, one white. I'm a historian and I'm a journalist. And this is some of my best friends are as in I'm not a racist. Some of my best friends are dot dot dot fill in the blank. In this show, we wrestle with the challenges and the absurdities of a deeply divided, an unequal country.

And just so you know, we will be talking about the new Candy Man, So if you haven't seen it yet, there will be spoilers. But you should listen to this show no matter what, even if you haven't seen it yet. You know what a huge fan I am of the nineteen ninety two original Candy Man. Yeah, man, you've written about it. I wrote about it extensively in High Risers, my book about Chicago's most iconic housing project, Cabrini Green. The nineteen ninety two Candy Man and Nia Da Costas

are both set there. And these movies, you know, they tell us so much about the so called inner city, both in the early nineteen nineties and today. That's right. We talked about movies in an earlier episode. That's right. Inter ratio Buddy Movies. Yeah, it was a great episode. Everyone should listen. But we don't want to give the wrong impression about our podcast. I mean, you know, we're not Ciskel and Ebert, although you know, maybe we could be.

But our show isn't going to focus on movies every week. Yep, that's right. But the two Candy Man movies were too juicy, too haunted to pass up. They're the perfect way for us to explore not just portrayals of the inner city in the early nineteen nineties and in the early twenty twenties, but actually what cities in America were like back then

and how and why they've changed to today. Yeah. I mean, these movies are our social commentary as well as cultural touchstones of then and now, and I think I think that's what we should talk about today. I think so too, because when I think about the first Candy Man as a groundbreaking, trail blazing horror film, I think about that moment when, as we were coming of age in the nineteen eighties, there was Freddie Krueger who was terrorizing high

school suburbanite white kids. There was Michael Myers doing the same thing in the Halloween series. Yep, Jason, that's right, Jason for Summer Camp. And then what are all those horror film monsters have in common that you're getting at? They're white dudes, and so so Candy Man. The thing that's that's so groundbreaking about Candy Man. It's a weird form of representation. But it's a black horror film monster, that's right, and an end of a kind that is

meant to be mainstream white audience. It's not, you know, an independent film. It's not black you la, And you know, a black monster in America is loaded with all kinds of meaning, right, I mean, like that is that's a that's just a loaded thing like that, So I like it. Can you say that again? Say what did you say? A black monster in America is loaded with all kinds of meaning? Yeah, and that's kind of what we're going to talk about today. Yeah, well, let's get into it, Khalil.

Let's focus first on the nineteen ninety two film The Original. Here's the premise of the movie. All right, so it's said in Chicago and there's a white graduate student named Helen played by Virginia Madsen, and she's doing her research on urban legends an entire community starts attributing the daily

horrors of their lives to a mythical figure. And one of the urban legends she's been hearing about is of the candy Man, a monster that everyone is talking about called candy Man, and candy Man is sort of like this Bloody Merry ghost story legend where if you say his name five times, he appears and you know, he's a hook candid apparition and then he kills you. You know. So Helen is hearing these stories and it's it's interesting that the story of the candy Man, it sort of

works in two different ways. He is said to live at Cabrini Green, which is this large public housing complex in Chicago on the near north side, Cabrini Green Candyman Country, and early in the movie, Virginia Madsen is doing research and interviewing people about this legend, and a cleaning woman at the university or black woman overhears her and says, are you are you talking about the candy Man? Huh? Yes, have you heard of him? You doing a study on yes, an,

what have you heard? Everybody scared him wants to get dark. Well, one of the things that I really like about the first film, and I remember being sort of surprised by when I saw it for the first time is how much it borrows from in comments on the real world. I mean, you know, they use a murder that actually happened in Chicago in nineteen eighty seven as the inspiration

for the whole film. A woman is in her apartment in another public housing development in Chicago and she calls the police because somebody is trying to push through the mirror in her bathroom. Someone is trying to come in from the apartment next door into her bathroom, and somehow the construction is so shoddy that you could just push right through and come in and be in there. It's like a home invasion. And she calls the police, the

police don't come, and she's eventually murdered. There's actually a great Chicago Reader story about this by Steve bagheera they came in through the bathroom mirror that captures the both both how terrifying this is and also really like the state of public housing at that time. Yeah, but that's crazy as shit, right, I mean, not only crazy, was super scary because then you're thinking, like anybody could come literally through the walls and kill me at any moment. Yeah,

that's the stuff of horror. I mean so, and the stuff of horror is you know that didn't happen a hundred times, but if it happens once, and it's a story that gets told around And what you just said of how terrifying that is that that someone could just come into your space inside your own home. You know that if you're in a dark room, that there's an

entrance that someone else could come in. And so this film picks up on that real killing and plays with it in a way that it is sort of fueled by these fears that outsiders have of Cabrini Green anyway, Like that's like the real truth that then fuels these nightmares that people imagine, like there's just death and destruction and murder and mayhem around every corner. So the Candy Man works in two ways as a legend, as an

urban legend and an urban myth. It's something that people within the Cabrini Green community tell themselves, and it's also a way that outsider see the community. Yeah, but then like you said, like yeah, there's also a way that public housing and actually Cabrini Green at this time is almost the personification of the scary image of the inner city, and so setting it there is really captures this idea

of how outsider see the black ghetto. And so in the movie that means like Helen goes from the library and she's like, well, I gotta go to Cabrini Green.

But but even going back to the director, he's British and he has this Clive Barker short story set in Liverpool, and the idea to put it in Chicago and in Cabrini Green in sort of this idea the scary image of the inner city is both like problematic but also super interesting because like in the history of horror, if you think about how horror had always worked up to this point, it always happened in outsider places. It's places

that are beyond society. So The Woods is like the most you know, traditional historical one, or like the Haunted House on the Hill, or like you know, for much of our youth, they've like set it at there were these horror movies set in the suburbs, which is a funny dynamic and even if you think about it, you know that's what Jordan Peel exploits and get out, like you know, it's it's the suburbs, the place where you

wouldn't expect it. But then you think, like, so in nineteen ninety two, where are what are people most afraid of? And you know, for this director to think, like, okay, the thing that people are most afraid of are actually in a crowded inner city and like the most the center center of the inner city, in these sort of isolated spots of public housing which you are built in a certain way of like many many towers surrounded by

by huge plots of land with no through streets. Yeah, you know, so they're like islands of poverty, of black poverty, and and that's that's really interesting. He actually goes to Cabrini Green when he gets to Chicago to sort of scout the locations. Didn't you interview the director? I'm a journalist. Yes, I reached out to him, Bernard Rose, who wrote and

directed the first film. And the thing that he sees there, this is what he told me, is that he actually just sees real people, Like it's scary as fuck when you go in there. He said, like, you know, you go into the hallways and the lights are out and the stairwells smell of piss and you know, the elevators

don't work in his graffiti. But also just like a lot of real people like having you know, you know, living their lives, and to him that actually was made it more powerful to set the story there, because that's that's a difference when myth and reality like have this this distance, you know, when people are terrified of a place that isn't necessarily even always terrifying. Yeah, that's where

you got people. Yeah, So what you're really saying is a lot of this movie helps to tell the bigger story that you tell in your book High Risers, Right, definitely, Yes, High Risers is really a history of Cabrini Green, But because Cabrini Green as an as both a place and an idea is so important in Chicago history and an inner city history and an American history, it's really a much larger story of America and about how we imagine poverty and ray and how it plays out over time. Yeah. Yeah.

In fact, when I used to teach history of urban America, I used to point out that when public housing was first conceived in the early days of the Great Depression, it was really truly conceived for white people. And in fact, if I have this correct, the urban historian Tom Segrew estimated that for every one public housing built with black people in mind, twelve public housing units were built for whites.

So it's a far cry from say, the late thirties and forties to the seventies and eighties and nineties with a conception of public housing itself. Let's go back to the film's version of Cabrini Green in nineteen ninety two. I want to talk about one scene in particular, Like the movie focuses on public housing. Like Helen and her graduate student partner they go into public housing. They go

to Cabrini Green. They're scared. Uh. They get there and they're they're guys out front, the lobby boys who were taught you know, maybe selling drugs or hanging out um, and they pretend that they're police in a way to to sort of, you know, protect themselves. They walk up the stairwells. It's scary, um, you know. But what they find there, you know, they they find graffiti and then

they find some evidence of sort of this myth. But like really what they're looking into is just like it's just like how how this place plays in the civic imagination, in the public imagination, and you know, I want to talk about one scene in particular. All right, So, so after Helen goes there, she meets a little boy and he says, you know, uh, do you want to see Candy Man, and like that's all she wants to see. So she says, take me there, and he takes her

outside the high rises. There really aren't a lot of people there. There's just you just see buildings, and there's a public bathroom that he says to go enter, and he says, you know, candy Man killed someone in there. I got killed in Who was he? He sure trying to tell me where this is? Like this really is like the haunted house of this place that like only

the most ridiculously naive person would walk into. Yeah, like yeah, and you know, like like my wife would never use a public bathroom anywhere, and you can imagine about like this public bathroom in public housing that's abandoned but also completely on view. So Helen is outside his bathroom and the boy is like, you know, I'm not going in there,

and of course Helen goes in. I mean, this is the story of every horror movie, and of course she goes in all alone, right, right, and and she goes in there and it's it is disgusting, Like she finally goes into the last stall, and you know, it's like building, building, building, and there's this whole weird motif of bees, which we you know, maybe more than we get into here, but she sees lendly all these bees and then she turns around.

There are men standing there, and there's a guy in a long leather trench croat and he's holding a hook in his hand. The guy isn't candy Man, but he is dressed exactly like candy Man, and he says, I hear you looking for candy Man, bitch, Well you found it, and then he hits her in the head with the hook, and it's The story is really powerful. It's amazing, actually, because it pushes against the idea of monsters. Crime is terrible, people get hurting and people commit crime. People die, and

people die. And yet that's different than saying something is a monster and that divide these are just there's something very mundane in how this is depicted. It completely cuts against the monster image of criminals, of somebody who commits a crime they you see them sauntering off at the end, slowly, with just sort of like the grayness of Chicago in

the background. There's not nothing amazing or or you know, supernatural has happened the exact opposite, right, And and maybe that's a moment where the film crosses over into a kind of social realism, which is to speak to a kind of um senselessness of the mundane, everyday violence that happens there. Um yeah, that that you know, anybody at any moment could show up and do you harm. And that's that's that's the part of the film that is the social commentary of the of the period in which

this film is me. Yeah, I mean, I totally see your point, and you're right that you know, here we are a black man attacks a white woman. It triggers all these responses. And yet the movie does something when it makes it so much less sensational, and it pushes

back against it in all these ways. And I know this is kind of a leap, but like when you think about the moment of that time when we're in a sort of hysteria about black males committing violence, and this movie doesn't engage in that in the same way you mean, the movie wants us to see their humanity and wants to position the response as something about Cabrini Green as a public housing project that's been failed, rather than a place where monsters are around every corner. Yeah. Yeah,

I think that's exactly right. Yeah, And in that sense, what comes in the actual real world with these kinds

of racis stereotypes is actually about eliminating monsters. So this is a moment when the image of the black quote unquote criminal as monster is sort of taking off all over the place, Like Rodney King is beaten so badly because the police imagined him as a brute, a monster with superhuman power who could, with superhuman power destroy eight armed cops with guns and billy clubs with one fell swoop,

and and and the same thing. You know, if we think back to nineteen eighty nine and the Central Park jogger case, the sensational case, these five youths are you know, talked about as wilding teams, and you know, they're they're like packs of wild animals, wild dogs. Like a super predator is not that different than a monster, you know, it's like supernatural power of these of these black kids,

and and these things. You know, these lead to to actual real policies, right right, These policies, these stories, these these fuel both in the popular imagination, journalistic coverage, actual crime statistics, and the political ratcheting up between first Republicans and then Democrats and Bill Clinton and Joe Biden, who at the time was the Senate and had long by that time been leading various crime bill efforts from nineteen eighties,

are going to write the biggest, baddest, most punitive crime bill and in US history in nineteen ninety four and pass it. Yeah. So I asked at the beginning, you

know what role do monsters play in American society? And so here we have this monster is Place Cabrini Green, And you know the thing that happens is you said, you get things like the crime Bill, and you get truth in sentencing, and you get mandatory minimums, and you get super aggressive policing, but you also get the erasure of this neighborhood, of this community, because if it's a monstrous place and it doesn't really have humanity, then the

only thing to do, and even only the only responsible thing to do, is to get rid of it. And so across the country, starting in the nineteen nineties, two hundred and fifty thousand units of public housing end up being demolished. And at Cabrini Green, this neighborhood on the near north side of Chicago, it's completely All the high rises, all twenty three of them are torn down. At its peak, Cabrini Green had twenty five thousand residents are pushed elsewhere

in the city. Yeah, and so that community doesn't exist in the same way today as it did back then. Yeah, that's that's really Uh, it's really fascinating for this reason because the second film picks up exactly where that leaves off the remake. Uh. And so this theme about erasure, this theme about gentrification, this theme about um, what do you do when you disappear a community and what are

the lingering effects of that? Let's talk about let's let's talk about Candy Man jumping forward in time twenty twenty one. That's right, and even the idea that you know, if if public housing can evolve, maybe monsters can't evolve too. So in Nia Dacosta's remake of Candy Man has just

come out recently. One of the most striking things that we see early on is not even something to be seen, it's to be heard, and it is the remake of the Candy Man, the original song from the Willy Wonka film about the chocolate factory, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, which of course for generations has been particularly for our childhood, has been this delightful movie about a fun house of candy. And the parable is, you know, be careful that you get too much of what you wish for, and it

is a kind of house of horrors. And so this song is playing and like you know, lyrics like who can take a sunrise sprinkle it with do covered with chocolate in a miracle? Or two the Candy Man, Oh yes, the candy Yeah, like Sammy Davis Thing's version, which is what I love. That's right. So there, So in this moment of this film coming on, before we see anything, we hear this song, um, and he goes from being kind of in a in a major chord uh with

happy notes to being distorted. So that opening totally plays with that idea of inside or outside or horror stories, right yep, Because there's a guy that residents are talking about being the candy Man and and the and it's basically a lesson don't take candy from strangers, right he You know, there's a story going around that he put razor blades in candy, that's right, which which I was.

I was so happy to hit for you to bring that up because I wanted to tell you I have the distinct memory of the first Halloween when I was a little kid in Chatham on the South side of Chicago. Is at my grandmom's house. I was probably six years old and about to head out with one of my aunts to go trick or treating, and guess what they

all said, there might be razorblades in the candy. When I was reporting for High Risers, real life Cabrini Green residents who grew up there in the nineteen sixties and the nineteen seventies, they said adults used to tell them to watch out for the witch underneath the Ogden Avenue bridge, and it was a way to scare children, so they

stayed away from trouble and came home before dark. You know, imagine how how radically different that is from the nineteen nineties, when their homes in public housing are imagined as the actual scary place to stay away from. I mean, look, we're really talking about fear, and that fear leads to the demolition of twenty three towers, all the towers at Cabrini Green, I believe the last one comes down in

twenty eleven. And these luxury apartment buildings pop up everywhere, and there's all kinds of fine dining and stores and and everything that you would expect in a place that has now erased an entire community, where gentrification is what comes next. And in that sense, that's where this new film opens up with two of our main characters, Anthony McCoy and Brianna Cartwright, a couple who live together in one of these luxury apartments. It's not just the inside

the counts. It's close to the gallery. It's very practical. Okay, what is wrong with it? Well? Nothing, As they told me, sister many times, the neighborhood is haunted. The bougie they're they're living. They're living on the other the luxury apartment. The trauma of the nineteen nineties, the trauma of the dangerous black community that no one cared about. This is, you know, some version of a kind of post racial good life. And it is accented by her brother who

is gay. And happy and loving, and he has a white partner, and they make a lot of jokes about being this fun, loving couple and so, you know, we are in a space that is no longer about the horrors and pathologies of a black community. No, and their conversations are specifically about real estate, yeah, about the neighborhood and about pricing, and you know about their apartments. Um, you know, they're they're, they're they're they've sort of adopted

the ethos of this new world. So in this in this opening dinner party scene where we learned that Yaya is trying to find his muse and that he's lost his way as a kind of metaphor for black man that doesn't realize his own history, he learns for the first time about the urban legend of candy Man. So there's a wonderful interplay between how the character of Anthony McCoy learns about candy Man. This this what is now being repositioned as an urban legend um that now he's like, hmm,

I need to study this for myself. And so, just like Helen Virginia Madsen's character in the first story, he's going to figure out what is this story of candy Man for himself. Some of the things that have happened to Cabrenia over the years. Violence is just so extreme, so bizarre. It's almost as if violence became the ritual. The worst part the residents are afraid to call the police,

a code of honor perhaps. So what's so fascinating hearing Anthony do this research and hearing Helen tell this story for the first time, is he's finding his muse because he's an artist, and this film actually uses the art world and the way that art is a vehicle for expression and for history telling. And so he's going to have a conversation also in another scene with this obnoxious and condescending art critic where she's basically going to challenge

him on how he's telling his story. Oh it speaks, all right, speak and didactic nesia cliches about the ambient violence of the gentrification cycle. But you're kind or the real pioneers of that cycle, you know, excuse me. Artists. Artists descend upon disenfranchised neighborhoods, defining cheap rents that they can dick around in their studios without the crushing burden

of a day job. That that process itself as one of the characters says in a scene that the city cuts off the community and waits for it to die, and then invites mostly white artists and promises the whole foods if they stick it out for a couple of years. I mean, if that isn't a devastating line for this moment and a powerful critique of kind of the art world itself as a kind of soft underbelly of the

violence of gentrification, It's just powerful. Yeah. In the end, this scene is much about the erasure of Cabrini Green as an act of gentrification and violence, but also about whether we get to remember that story in the way that it happened in a place like Chicago that gets destroyed not from the enemy within, but from the enemy without, from the violence literally of white supremacy. That is the

premise of this remake. The interactions that occur in this film between Brianna, who is Anthony's girlfriend and her position as the person who's introducing Anthony to the art world becomes a interplay between whether or not Anthony can make art that speaks to the conditions that black people live under, or whether his art is an abstraction. And there's this wonderful line where where she basically says to him that

your work is too literal. And this discussion about whether black people get to tell their stories about what they've experienced becomes a metaphor for forgetting the history of the violence that black people actually endured. So that this powerful notion of defining what counts for what version of art or what version of black people's stories get told is what is being positioned as another form of violence through the art world itself. And so then the art world

itself is a kind of monster in the story. It is the vehicle for whitewashing. It is using its power and prestige to limit the voice of black people in such a way that they can't actually tell their stories through their art. Yeah. So the movie starts with this idea that there's a candy man roaming in Cabre Green, ye you know, and the idea that he passes out candy and their razor blades in it. And so we have this character, a boy who is it goes into

the laundry room and you know, that's scary. He's all alone in the laund room and Cabrini green. And then this guy emerges from a hole in the wall, which is sort of also HARKing back to the first already, right, this is the restroom scene. But then we see that this guy comes out and he doesn't have a hook for a hand. He has a prosthetic and he has this candy, and he seems to be sort of simple minded in some way. And the boy is no longer scared.

He can see that this is sort of an innocent and that there's been a mythology that's come around him. But he's already shouted and the police run in and instead of sort of accepting his view, they they they beat this man to death. Yeah yeah, and it literally instead of them coming in to see what's wrong with the kid and asking questions, they come in and kill

an innocent man. The film and policing not as saviors who are often, as my mama would say, a day late in a dollar short, but actually are the vehicle of violence in this film. This is a film about police violence as a kind of monstrous crime committed against the black community. This is a Black Lives Matter film.

This is a film that wants to reposition the narrative of the pathologies of superpetitors and public housing in the black community, to a story about the pathologies of structural racism. And so in these three ways, from public housing to art and a kind of erasure of black stories, to police violence and the killing of unarmed people. There are powerful scenes in this film that tell a new backstory to Candyman, which spoiler alert, really become a play on

this notion of say his name or her name. Although in this rendition, I think all the victims of racial terror, whether they are killed by white mobs in Chicago or lynch mobs somewhere else, the story of Candy Man becomes attached to victims of white mob violence and police violence.

And so the roster of name calling that is told in this backstory in the film is a way of saying that the real monsters that the black community have been fighting against, our monsters that have been literally killing us all this time. Yeah, we have an actual monster in the film, Candy Man, who is this killing people. And he becomes in some ways, as you're saying, almost created by centuries of trauma, that the trauma almost manifests

in this murderer, this monstrous murderer, this supernatural phantasm. Right, And so when you think about what a monsters tell us. Like you said, it's over a century of extra judicial killings, sometimes not even extrajudicial. There's one where we just see a little boy being executed, right, um, you know who

has been tried and sentenced. And and then there's a strange way where like the say his name, which is you know, you say Candy Man's name five times and then suddenly it's tied to uh, you know, like saying Rikia Boyd's name or or Sandra Bland or Brianda Ta carries the name of the one of the lead characters. Yeah, and so the you know, candy Man becomes a kind

of form of vengeance. This is almost a you know, a tool that's being wielded to get to get h to equal the playing field that we see the victims of Candy Man in the movie, right, they're all white, every one of them. Right. So we started out talking about, you know, what does a black monster in America mean? Like here we have a black horror film monster, and that it's loaded with meaning, and part of the meaning is to push back against even the monster narrative itself.

It's interesting. I don't think I don't think the second film is a rejection exactly of the first one, because it's sort of like it is playing with so much of it and even like importing so much of it. But these ideas of the urban legends, which are part of how of the comprehension of the state of the city and the state of violence, and particularly the state of violence and black communities. Um, candy Man is an

urban legend. Yeah, well I do. And yeah, well, just say say one thing about importing because I think, um, I think that you're right, but I think it's importing for the purpose of correcting. You know, if there is such a thing as revision history, this film wants to rewrite the history of the original film. This film is saying racism never stopped, and racism is more than a lynch mob. Racism is more than the clan. Racism is built into the built environment of our neighborhoods, and it

is an ongoing project. It is built into the way that our institutions either do or don't acknowledge Black humanity, and it is in the ongoing realities of state sanctioned violence in law enforcement. And so there's no origin story that is separate and apart from the daily lives and realities of black people in this version of the film, and that's why, that's why I think the film is so powerful as a commentary on where we are today. Yes, candy Man, candy Man, candy Man, come on, mat, look,

if you say it, that's on you. I have nothing to do with it. Or I'm not the outcome. I'm not that kind of person. I'm stopping right there. All right, Well, that was a great discussion. I mean, I've been thinking about, as I said, candy Man for my book and for for those thirty years. So uh, I'm glad we had

this opportunity to talk. Yeah, yeah, we we should give Nia Dacassa and Jordan Pill and other filmmakers a shout out for making this film, because what what great they should give us a shout now, well what great material you know to learn more about about your work and uh and and a little bit about mine. So all right, yeah, love you man, I love you too. So no, no. Some of My Best Friends Are is a production of Pushkin Industries. The show is written and hosted by me

Khalil Dubron Muhammad and my best friend Ben Austin. It's produced by Sheriff Vincent Ken Wood and edited by Karen Shakerji. Our engineer is Martin Gonzalez, Our associate editor is Keishell Williams, and our showrunner is Sasha Matthias. Our executive producers are Lee Taal Molad and Mia Lobell. At Pushkin thanks to Heather Fane, Carl Migliori, John Schnars, and Jacob Weisberg. Our theme song, Little Lily, is by fellow chicagoan Avery R.

Young from his amazing album Tubman. You will definitely want to check out more of his music at his website, Avery Ryung dot com. You can find Pushkin on all social platforms at Pushkin pods, and you can sign up for our newsletter at pushkin dot fm. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. If you love this show and we hope you do and others from Pushkin Industries,

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