In defence of Can­dy­man 2

Like a liv­ing body, Can­dy­man is com­posed of mirac­u­lous parts, each work­ing in per­fect har­mo­ny: orig­i­nal source mate­r­i­al by hor­ror mas­ter Clive Bark­er, pho­tog­ra­phy by Nico­las Roeg’s reg­u­lar DoP, a hyp­not­ic Phillip Glass score, Jacques Tourneur-lev­el direc­tion from Bernard Rose, and a lumi­nous lead per­for­mance from Vir­ginia Mad­sen. With the excep­tion of the music, all of this is miss­ing from the 1995 sequel, Can­dy­man 2: Farewell to the Flesh. And yet some­how, the film retains a lick of the orig­i­nal fire.

We’re in the direc­to­r­i­al hands of Bill Con­don, a skilled visu­al sto­ry­teller. Kel­ly Rowan is a pass­able Mad­sen sub­sti­tute, and hor­ror leg­end Veron­i­ca Cartwright plays an edgy South­ern matri­arch. Cru­cial­ly, Tony Todd returns as the tit­u­lar killer, and with a hook hand and a deli­cious coo, slices his vic­tims ​“from gul­let to groin”. But the film can’t be reduced to this check­list. Farewell to the Flesh elic­its a sim­i­lar state of woozy imbal­ance as the orig­i­nal because both pos­sess the same strange, irre­ducible qual­i­ties: a dream log­ic of mir­ror por­tals and bee-infest­ed tor­sos, his­to­ry wrench­ing itself into the present, gener­ic oscil­la­tions between ghost sto­ry and slash­er, and an insis­tence on ask­ing dif­fi­cult ques­tions about Amer­i­can racism.

The sto­ry cen­tres on Annie, an art teacher whose father was mur­dered while research­ing a series of bru­tal killings. When Annie sum­mons Can­dy­man to soothe the fears of her stu­dents, the skew­er­ing begins. As she learns about the killer’s life and inves­ti­gates her own fam­i­ly his­to­ry, Annie dis­cov­ers that the two inter­sect in shock­ing ways. The film leans into its ghost tropes over slash­er con­ven­tions, pri­ori­tis­ing the tan­gle of dark fam­i­ly secrets over imag­i­na­tive death set-pieces. Like the best super­nat­ur­al tales – The Changeling, for exam­ple – fam­i­ly lore reveals the trau­mas of nation­al his­to­ry; Annie’s ances­tral rela­tion­ship to Can­dy­man, a plan­ta­tion slave, points to the racism at America’s foundation.

Fam­i­ly bonds replace roman­tic cou­ples as the cen­tral rela­tion­ships. Annie’s hus­band is dis­patched ear­ly on, while the juici­est dynam­ics are between Annie, her gold­en-boy broth­er, and their brit­tle, con­trol­ling moth­er. An ear­ly close-up of the key to a draw­er con­tain­ing sepia pho­tos sig­nals the moth­er as the gate­keep­er of fam­i­ly mem­o­ry. These ele­ments place Farewell to the Flesh in a tra­di­tion of sprawl­ing South­ern fam­i­ly melo­dra­mas, stretch­ing from William Wyler and Dou­glas Sirk to Steel Mag­no­lias and Fried Green Tomatoes.

The wide streets and Span­ish moss-encrust­ed man­sions of New Orleans replace Chicago’s Cabri­ni Green estate. The script, anx­ious to empha­sise the Louisiana set­ting, ref­er­ences gum­bo three times in the first ten min­utes, and the film’s occa­sion­al nar­ra­tor is a local DJ and Mar­di Gras hype-man. As we progress towards a car­ni­val dénoue­ment, the fes­tiv­i­ties cre­ate some of the most mem­o­rable images: a gnarled snow­ball sales­man, packs of masked mil­lenar­i­ans, and a glo­ri­ous shot of Can­dy­man, among the crowds, tiki torch­es flash­ing across his face.

Of course, the film is guilty of choos­ing a gener­ic ​‘eth­nic’ milieu to com­pli­ment the themes of the nar­ra­tive, with­out any heed to the Cajun speci­fici­ties of car­ni­val cel­e­bra­tions. But Mar­di Gras is win­dow dress­ing; two South­ern man­sions are the spa­tial core of the film. In melo­dra­mat­ic style, the fam­i­ly home is the cru­cible of the real action. The final scene moves from the crum­bling plan­ta­tion house to the wood­en slave quar­ters, and, in a haunt­ing pre­fig­u­ra­tion of the dev­as­ta­tion wreaked by Hur­ri­cane Kat­ri­na a decade lat­er, Annie and Can­dy­man almost drown dur­ing a storm.

Farewell to the Flesh exhibits a savvy aware­ness of its own polit­i­cal lim­i­ta­tions. In two ear­ly scenes, the black­ness of young men is exploit­ed for cheap jump scares, but the sequences func­tion to indict the audi­ence, forc­ing them to con­sid­er their own uncon­scious pro­fil­ing. By unearthing Candyman’s slave past, the film also cri­tiques a cul­ture that, fol­low­ing the suc­cess of the first film, ele­vat­ed Todd’s char­ac­ter to a folk vil­lain but defanged him of his com­plex polit­i­cal meanings.

So go, bear wit­ness to the film’s strange plea­sures, fall vic­tim to its accu­sa­tions, but nev­er – nev­er – men­tion the third in the series.