Mary: Hello and welcome to HALLOWEEN SEASON, the most marvelous time of the year. Kelli I saw Candyman, the 2021 film directed by Nia DaCosta, and here we are to talk about it.
I’ll go ahead and say, as we have said on the podcast many times, we are just white women trying to be good allies, but please take our conversation with a healthy dose of salt. Obviously we should always listen to BIPOC communities on issues concerning race FIRST. With that out of the way, let’s talk Candyman.
Do you hate bees more or less after this film?
(Spoilers for Candyman to follow)
Kelli: I don’t hate bees at all! But they are definitely a great horror motif. This is a good way to jump into talking about the visuals in this film, because I think Nia DaCosta was doing some really inventive stuff here, and a lot of it comes back to the bees. For one thing, the body horror stuff with Anthony (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) was very freaky and cool. It all starts with a bee sting, and eventually he ends up with parts of his skin peeling away to reveal the hive underneath. There’s also a scene in one of the towers of Marina City in Chicago, which are apartment buildings that have a sort of honeycomb look to them in the way they’re stacked on top of each other. I think my favorite shot in the film is the slow zoom out from one of these apartments as one of the characters is brutally murdered by the invisible Candyman. I was just staring at the screen in awe. It’s one of the more memorable and innovative horror death scenes I’ve seen in the last couple of years.
Mary: Hahaha–I don’t hate bees either, but I definitely think the buzzing was ominous in a fun way throughout the film.
Oh boy, the body horror! A lot of horror doesn’t actually scare me, but body horror still does. We already can’t control a lot of things about our bodies, so seeing characters feel foreign to themselves really unsettles me. I agree that that particular death scene was very creative, Kelli. I actually think a ton of the visuals in Candyman were stunning. I love horror most when it’s beautiful and reflective, and I do think this film is doing that.
Kelli: Speaking of bees, they were also a huge part of the original film. Have you seen Bernard Rose’s 1992 film, or read the Clive Barker short story (The Forbidden, 1985) it was based on?
I haven’t read the story, but I did watch the film a while ago in anticipation of this continuation.
Mary: Yes! I watched the original film (though I haven’t seen any of the sequels). I also haven’t read the Clive Barker short story, but I can tell you one thing: Clive Barker writes some W I L D short fiction that you should definitely check out if you get the chance. The Hellbound Heart is such a joy to read. He’s one of my favorite horror icons.
I think that if you’ve seen the original film, the 2021 Candyman is more impactful, but that being said it’s not essential to watch it. The DaCosta version is a continuation, but it does give the viewer everything they need to understand the story, including a short, very artful paper puppet retelling of the original tale. I think DaCosta is trying to expand on the Candyman universe to make a bigger sociopolitical point, and that worked really well for me. All that being said, I don’t know how I would have felt if I hadn’t seen the original movie, because there’s definitely a thrill to seeing Tony Todd return as the Candyman that enhanced the experience for me.
Kelli: I would agree with this. I think this film establishes itself as something different and new and doesn’t lean too heavily on the source material. I also loved the shadow puppets, speaking of visual flourishes that we appreciated. The information conveyed in those scenes is crucial to the plot and I thought this was an effective and creative way to give us the backstory without it being too expository or unnatural.
Mary: I’d love to talk about the art criticism aspect of Candyman. Art and the art world are a huge part of the first act of the film, and I love that the movie interrogates both the whiteness of the art world and the gatekeeping that happens within it. In one scene, a gallery owner tells the protagonist, Anthony, to make art about life where he grew up. When Anthony responds that he’s from the Southside of Chicago, the owner says something like, “No, no, that’s all played out.”
The absolute audacity required to tell someone they need to be from a different place in order to create quality art, or that they’re experience isn’t valid because it’s “played out” is astonishing to me, but I imagine that these types of conversations happen more often than not.
There’s also the issue of a white art critic claiming that a Black artist’s work on race and the very real horrific murder of an innocent man is CLICHE. Like...what?
Kelli: This was definitely the most fascinating part of this film to me. The stuff with the art critic was wild, not just in her comments about the work being cliche but also when she was talking about gentrification and said something like “this is what your kind does,” and when Anthony was like “um what?” she was like “artists.” Her inability to even consider the way she phrased that comment was such a tell as to exactly what kind of white woman she is, the kind who thinks she knows everything about the intersection of racism and art and therefore cannot be racist, even when she does and says super fucking racist things. Not to mention the way she suddenly becomes very interested in the art she previously called ‘cliche’ as soon as a sensationalized murder occurs in front of it.
I think this movie is also interrogating the role of the artist in these situations. When does art become exploitation? What right does an artist have to intrude on a community and document it even if they may have some claim to that community? By the time we meet him, Anthony is living a life of luxury in the most gentrified area of the very neighborhood he is creating artwork about. We can see him questioning his own role in all of this, and I liked the complexity of that.
Mary: That’s true. Even outside of art, Anthony feels conflicted about his role in his own life. He definitely finds it hard to live with his art curator girlfriend, who has an awesome apartment, good income, and the ability to get Anthony hooked up with the art scene. In some ways, it felt like Anthony was struggling between wanting to be in a true partnership (where sometimes one partner has to support the other through something hard) and a more traditional relationship where the man has to be the breadwinner for the entire household. That was interesting, and it ultimately pushed him into madness.
Kelli: I agree with this. There was also some stuff going on with his partner, Brianna (Teyonah Parris), and how her relationship with Anthony ends up paralleling her relationship with her father. We learn in flashback scenes that Brianna’s father struggled with mental illness and ultimately took his own life in front of her, and as she watches Anthony succumb to what seems like something similar, she has to reckon with her feelings about that and decide how much she can actually handle while still taking care of herself. Ultimately, she does try to save Anthony, which leads to a devastating confrontation with the police at the end of the film — one in which Candyman becomes something like a hero. What did you think of the ending? Also, I guess this is a good place to discuss how this film ends up tying into the original and becoming a real sequel of sorts. I feel like we can just fully spoil it since it’s been out for like a month at this point.
Mary: I both liked and didn’t like the ending. In one sense, it didn’t feel like it had a real conclusion, and that Candyman is still out there (as Anthony, now), hurting people. On the other hand, I don’t know how the film could have had any different ending because the entire point of the 2021 Candyman was a sort of collective trauma put on Black Americans, and perhaps specifically Black men. Candyman wasn’t just one person who was wronged, he was many people who were wronged. There wasn’t necessarily a “bad guy” that could be easily defeated, because the bad guy was trauma, and that never really goes away. What did you think, Kelli?
Kelli: Yeah, I think we’re pretty much on the same page. Maybe I’m just terrible at predicting things, but I was totally surprised by the reveal that Anthony is actually the baby from the original film. I was like, OMG, IT ALL MAKES SENSE. Lol. But yeah, I wanted better for Anthony. It’s always kind of a bummer when the main character you’ve developed a relationship with throughout the film has an ending like this one. But I know it was in service of the story and the general theme that the violence of gentrification is cyclical, so I’m okay with it.
Mary: One last thing I’d love to discuss is the critical reception to Candyman. It seemed like many critics were lukewarm about it, and some outright hated it. I’m thinking specifically of Angelica Jade Bastien’s review for Vulture, which talked about how Candyman felt soulless and directed at a white audience. I’ll say that I always enjoy reading Bastien’s reviews, even when I disagree, and I do see where she’s coming from. The original Candyman IS a masterwork, and it does deserve way more praise than it gets, but I also enjoyed the 2021 Candyman, even if it’s not going to stick with me in the same way. I didn’t think it was bad, but it’s not perfect either. Robert Daniels at Polygon had a similar take on Candyman, and called it preachy, mentioned the script was kind of bad, etc.
I don’t know that I have anything smart to say about this, but sometimes it’s baffling to me how people hold up “classic” horror as being soooo good when really a lot of those films are poorly made and campy, then say that all new horror sucks. I don’t know why old and new horror can’t be good in different ways, regardless of how campy or poorly made it could be. Yes, there are obviously the highly praised art horror films from A24 and stuff, but other movies deserve a chance, IMO. I’m not necessarily defending Candyman against bad reviews, because I understand these criticisms and don’t think it lives up to the original, but I still enjoyed it.
Kelli: Yeah, the thing about Bastien is that I think she’s such a good writer and brings up so many interesting points, but I only agree with her about stuff like… half of the time, lol. For one thing, she dislikes almost everything Jordan Peele does, and I love his work, so perhaps for her, going in, that brought a bias against this film, where it brought a bias in favor of this film for me (Candyman is produced by Peele). I think many of her criticisms are valid, particularly in terms of some of the mixed messaging we get, but I also disagree with a lot of what she says. I had no problem with the performances here, nor did I find this film visually uninventive or flat — obviously, we had plenty good to say about its visual artistry earlier in this conversation. I also think that one of the inherent problems she brings up — why does Candyman kill Black people — is something the original film is to blame for, and she acknowledges that but then calls the original a masterwork within the same review.
I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong to hold the newer film to higher standards or increased scrutiny, as all reboots/remakes sort of need to justify their existence in a way the originals don’t, but I do think that this film has been unfairly maligned in its critical reception when, in my opinion, it is a perfectly enjoyable and interesting horror film!
some more bees for the road