Bernard Rose's 1992 film CANDYMAN was about Helen, a White graduate student who during her field studies caomes across the urban legend of the Candyman, a hookhanded spirit who kills anybody daring to say his name five times in front of a mirror. During her excursions Helen is also confronted with the life-realities of the Black inhabitants of the Chicago area Cabrini Green. While the film was progressive in terms of PoC visibility, its point-of-view was still a strictly White one. Nia DiCosta's 2020 sequel of the same name corrects this. Here a Black artist/curator couple moves into a Cabrini Green which has been wholly gentrified in the meantime. Looking for inspiration, artist Anthony hears the myth of the Candyman, with the story of the 1992 film having become one amongst several. Here, Candyman symbolizes something more universal, which Anthony is unable to get out of his head. The film uses Anthony's search to analyse and deconstruct the horror genre as well as social developments in the USA. However, as a horror film does not work entirely without questionable decisions, there are still enough instances of people who are otherwise popculturally savy unable to resist the mirror dare and soon regretting it. Here the film can score with some wonderfully inventive sequences using surreal dread rather than jump scares but never ignoring the sentence from the first film: "What is blood for, if not for shedding?". Including further visual as well as musical references to Bernard Rose's film, the new CANDYMAN is simultaneously a sequel and mirror-image of the first film, putting focus of details hidden in the background up to now. It is therefore advisably to watch both versions (but skip the two sequels from the 1990s.)

Christian Klose