How Can­dy­man reflect­ed the fears of urban society

Grad­u­ate stu­dent Helen (Vir­ginia Mad­sen) and her col­league Bernadette Walsh (Kasi Lem­mons) are record­ing younger under­grad­u­ates tell macabre, can’t‑really-be-true sto­ries that hap­pened to a friend of a friend, for a study on urban myths.

The first such myth that Helen (and we with her) hears in Can­dy­man is the sto­ry of a young babysit­ter Claire who, on the point of giv­ing her vir­gin­i­ty away (and not to her boyfriend Michael, but to ​‘bad boy’ Bil­ly), says the for­bid­den name ​‘Can­dy­man’ five times in the mir­ror, and is slaugh­tered, along with the baby, by the sum­moned fig­ure, with the hook that he has in place of his sev­ered hand.

Typ­i­cal of the pat­tern of urban myths, this Can­dy­man sto­ry traf­fics in social taboos, as well as deep-seat­ed ambi­gu­i­ties about its own veridi­cal­i­ty – and as the stu­dent nar­rates her tale to Helen, it is also realised visu­al­ly before our very eyes, so that it is made up of the same filmic mate­r­i­al as every­thing else in Bernard Rose’s feature.

Here, the bound­aries between myth and real­i­ty are flu­id – and just as one might eas­i­ly recon­strue the student’s trans­mit­ted sto­ry as crazy Billy’s self-jus­ti­fy­ing account of his own mur­der­ous crimes of pas­sion, the rest of Can­dy­man, and the sto­ry that it tells about Helen, is open to more than one inter­pre­ta­tion, some ratio­nal, some supernatural.

Helen is under a lot of pres­sure, both per­son­al and pro­fes­sion­al. Her old­er hus­band Trevor (Xan­der Berke­ley) is a pro­fes­sor of Eng­lish at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Illi­nois. And not only does he have a wan­der­ing eye, as Helen knows full well, for pret­ty young stu­dents, but he is also steal­ing the thun­der of Helen’s the­sis by him­self giv­ing a lec­ture series on urban myths (“the unself­con­scious reflec­tion”, as he puts it, ​“of the fears of urban society”).

So when Helen hears from uni­ver­si­ty clean­ers about a grotesque mur­der attrib­uted to Can­dy­man over in the projects of graf­fi­tied and gang-ruled Cabri­ni Green, she rush­es in, despite warn­ings about the dan­gers, to inves­ti­gate what might be the break­through that she so needs to prove her­self in the men’s club of acad­e­mia. ​“We’ve got a real shot here,” she tells Bernadette. ​“An entire com­mu­ni­ty starts attribut­ing the dai­ly hor­rors of their lives to a myth­i­cal figure.”

At Cabri­ni Green, moth­er Anne-Marie McCoy (Vanes­sa Williams) and young boy Jake (DeJuan Guy) both con­firm that a hook-wield­ing ​‘Can­dy­man’ is con­duct­ing a reign of ter­ror, and comes ​“through the walls”. There is, it turns out, a per­fect­ly ratio­nal expla­na­tion avail­able for all this. Mean­while Helen’s curios­i­ty and imag­i­na­tion are whet­ted when she hears from Trevor’s col­league Philip Pur­cell (Michael Culkin) that, accord­ing to leg­end, Can­dy­man was the por­trait-paint­ing son of a slave, hor­rif­i­cal­ly lynched (muti­lat­ed, bee-stung and incin­er­at­ed) in 19^th cen­tu­ry Cabri­ni Green for his love affair with the white daugh­ter of an employer.

As Helen, a white, mid­dle-class woman her­self, cross­es the thresh­old of her own city’s African-Amer­i­can under­class, she is con­front­ed with a his­to­ry of abject impov­er­ish­ment and mar­gin­al­i­sa­tion that she has (lit­er­al­ly, giv­en her ele­vat­ed con­do) over­looked. Helen fills the unbridge­able gulf between Cabri­ni Green and her own life with myth and mad­ness, call­ing upon Can­dy­man (Tony Todd) at the mir­ror and find­ing a place in his immor­tal leg­end for herself.

Can­dy­man is adapt­ed from the short sto­ry ​‘The For­bid­den’ by Clive Bark­er, but in relo­cat­ing its events from Liv­er­pool to the Chica­go projects, Rose is able to make his screen­play twist and turn along the neigh­bour­hood bound­aries of sex, class and race, in a sociopo­lit­i­cal sto­ry flex­i­ble enough – with a bit of imag­i­na­tion – to accom­mo­date anyone.

Per­me­at­ed with Philip Glass’ fune­re­al-min­i­mal­ist score, and punc­tu­at­ed by ​‘god’s‑eye’ aer­i­al shots that offer the only sem­blance of objec­tive per­spec­tive in an oth­er­wise sub­jec­tivised film, Can­dy­man offers a plot rid­dled with nar­ra­tive ambi­gu­i­ties that are nev­er ful­ly resolved, all as a spur to the hooked view­er to spread their own take on the Can­dy­man myth, and so to keep it alive.

Can­dy­man is released by Arrow Video on Blu-ray, in a brand new 2K restora­tion from a new 4k scan of the orig­i­nal neg­a­tive, super­vised and approved by writer-direc­tor Bernard Rose and direc­tor of pho­tog­ra­phy Antho­ny B Rich­mond), on 29 October.