Candyman

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0:00:03.1 Natalie Dowzicky: Welcome to Pop & Locke. I’m Natalie Dowzicky.

0:00:05.3 Landry Ayres: And I’m Landry Ayres.

0:00:08.2 Natalie Dowzicky: Who can take a sunrise, sprinkle it with dew? Cover it with chocolate and a miracle or two? Oh, no, no, no, not that Candyman. Today, to discuss both the 1992 horror thriller and the Jordan Peele and Nia DaCosta 2021 remake is our favorite Reason duo, Features Editor Peter Suderman.

0:00:29.9 Peter Suderman: Hey folks, thanks for having me.

0:00:31.3 Natalie Dowzicky: And the book’s editor and author of The United States of Paranoia, Jesse Walker.

0:00:35.7 Jesse Walker: Howdy.

0:00:37.1 Landry Ayres: Now, I wouldn’t call Candyman meta-​horror necessarily. I don’t really think it fits that label super well, but it is reflective and self-​aware and in that nature of its treatment of things like folklore and specifically urban legend; they’re both a huge part of these films. What do the Candymen do to sort of reframe or invert horror tropes with urban legends in mind? And how do you think it differs or is similar between the original and the 2021 sequel?

0:01:20.4 Peter Suderman: So for my part, I actually did describe it as a meta-​genre piece in my review, and the reason for that was just that I think that this is sort of the newest film in this series, which is both a sequel and in some ways a reboot and expansion of the original design to take it into a new era I think is, in many ways, it’s not just a political horror film. It is a movie about how horror films have become political and the ways in which we understand them as political texts. And so it is in some sense about the genre and about the way the genre has been received both in the past and today with the sort of resurgence of social horror films, notably from one of these film’s co-​writers and producers, Jordan Peele. And it is a movie, the new film, is in many ways a movie about Black art and how Black art has either been appropriated or exploited or the place that has come to…

0:02:29.7 Peter Suderman: The way it has come to sit within a certain sort of White society, and so it’s maybe not a meta-​horror film in that it is mostly about the horror genre, about monster or about what do we really think about monsters? Although I could maybe make an argument, it is a little bit about that. What sorts of myths scare us and why do these and why… But it is, there’s a lot of self-​commentary as well as sort of meta-​genre commentary I think, working in the subtext and just barely under the surface of the new film, and that’s part of what makes it interesting.

0:03:12.7 Jesse Walker: Yeah, I think obviously horror movies from the beginning have engaged with folklore and legends. Vampires were not invented for the screen, they weren’t invented by Bram Stoker, either. So that’s always been part of it. And the slasher genre, and you can debate whether or not the original Candyman is properly a slasher film, but it’s certainly at least partly there, and it was taken by a lot of people as… When it first came out, has always had a bit of the urban legend to it, and now… And of course, after Candyman, you have a whole series of movies called urban legend, but even before then, that’s sort of part of how they were structured and so on. The Candyman was… I don’t wanna necessarily say it was the first to be the… There’s been meta-​horror movies going back to Abbott & Costello meet Frankenstein, but it really was about folklore… In a way that most previous horror movies that drew on folklore did not… It’s about urban legends. It’s about rumor.

0:04:20.6 Peter Suderman: You can almost think of that the use-​mention distinction here, right? Other horror films would use folklore, and this one is actually mentioning it, like to describe it in some ways.

0:04:31.9 Jesse Walker: Yeah, although it does both. It’s not one of those movies where when there’s old vaudevillian films where the big monster turns out to be our fear of a monster who is actually fictional… [chuckle] It’s one where there actually is a Candyman who appears, but it’s not just about urban legends, it’s about them in a pretty sophisticated way. Some movies, they might have this is the back story for this monster, Candyman, but they wouldn’t do the thing where at the beginning of the film, we see it described in this suburban context, from being told by this White person at the university with no connection to what we eventually find is the origins of the Candyman legend within the story.

0:05:21.7 Jesse Walker: And then by accident, the folklorist stumbles on the versions that have been told around Cabrini-​Green and finds out the ways that people enact the legends. There’s this whole process that’s called ostension in folklore studies and anthropology, which covers everything from just legend-​tripping, people going to this spot where they’ve heard there’s a ghost or something like that. Two people actually trying to re-​enact like, “Hey, I got… ”

0:05:50.9 Jesse Walker: [chuckle] Not that this really happens, but if someone said, “I got the idea, I’m going to actually put a razor blade into candy, because I read about that happening,” and in fact, there is the one case, the one proven case of someone putting poison in Halloween candy was someone trying to kill his own kid who… Wanted to use the urban legend as the cover story saying, “I don’t remember what was in the pixie sticks,” but it was obvious… Clearly. But it turned out there was, the only person who got it was just one kid, and…

0:06:28.3 Peter Suderman: Which is actually sort of interestingly relevant here in that Candyman is somebody who attacks, at least in the short story and then in the first… The 1990s films, he is someone who attacks within the community, he’s not trying to attack others, and… And there is a sense in which here is a story that is made up to hide the deeper horrors that are actually happening in the short story, in the big English housing block projects, and then… In the public housing in Chicago in the 1990s.

0:07:03.9 Jesse Walker: Yeah, and one other thing I wanna say, just while I’m praising the ways that this is more sophisticated and people seeing the ads for it on TV when it first came out might have suspected… I could tell you my memories of that [laughter] is the fact that there’s this real attention to these physical and social environments. You can tell that the Bernard Rose, who made the film, I was thinking about how would it be different in the suburbs from where the version is told in Cabrini-​Green. What are the forms of racial and class and state power that shaped this? There’s this whole discussion in the movie where the folklorist, Helen, learns that her apartment building was originally created as public housing, but it was then they decided this was too close to where the people in the better part of town live, so they re-​did it as condos, but it still had buried beneath it the remnants of the old structure, and all this is done in a really smart way, and again…

0:08:09.9 Jesse Walker: And I saw this movie pretty much, it came out in ’92, I saw it on video in ’93 after it came out.

0:08:17.2 Peter Suderman: You rented it from a Blockbuster?

[laughter]

0:08:19.3 Jesse Walker: No, I think I got it from a local Ann Arbor joint…

0:08:22.2 Peter Suderman: Oh, man. No problem.

0:08:24.8 Jesse Walker: But, it could’ve been a Blockbuster if we were… If we had a car instead of walking around… We were expecting something good, me and my friends, ’cause we had seen Bernard Rose’s earlier movie, Paperhouse, which is really good, if you’ve never seen it. It’s somewhere on the border between horror and dark fantasy, but everything about the advertisements just said this was gonna be another slasher movie, and if I looked up some of the old reviews, it got some pretty good reviews, but even the people who understood that it was trying to do something more than a Friday the 13th clone. One reviewer called it “Pretentious” because of this, and then turned around and complained that it still was gory. [chuckle] It was both, trying to be too highbrow and also too lowbrow at the same time. So it was a real pleasant surprise. And in marked to real contrast, not just with some of the other movies that were coming out around the time, but the first two Candyman sequels, which we should not dwell on; we should mention their existence.

0:09:29.4 Natalie Dowzicky: They do, in fact, exist. [laughter]

0:09:31.4 Peter Suderman: The second one was directed by Bill Condon, who was the same guy who directed Gods and Monsters and has now gone on to do the Disney quasi-​live action Beauty and the Beast film that came out within the last couple of years. And has had a real big Hollywood career and actually done some interesting films, and yet also he made, Kate… What was the name of this one? Like Candyman, the Darkness of the Flesh, or the… Sorry.

0:09:56.4 Jesse Walker: Farewell to the Flesh.

0:09:57.0 Peter Suderman: Candyman, Farewell to the Flesh. That’s the…

0:10:00.7 Jesse Walker: The only thing I remember about that movie is that it’s bad, [laughter] that I cannot remember a single scene. All I remember was me, after watching it, saying, “What’s this shit?”

0:10:08.8 Peter Suderman: It’s like how James Cameron got his… Everybody thinks his first movie was The Terminator, but his actual first directing project was one of the old Corman horror films, Piranha II: The Spawning, which was a waterfall… With a lot of water-​related production problems that would go on to… Sorry, this is a little off-​topic, but… [laughter]

0:10:30.2 Jesse Walker: Well, Oliver Stone’s first film, they’re the people who think he debuted with Platoon, and then there are the people who are a little bit more trivia-​happy and they know about an earlier, not so good horror movie called The Hand, but in the ’70s, he directed a horror movie called Seizure, which is just utterly crappy. I like horror movies. I was like, “Oh hey, here’s Oliver Stone. He’s not gonna be trying to make a big statement, I’ll have fun with it.” It is just garbage. So, I recommend it for people who like early garbage of Oliver Stone, but… I’m sorry. Now, I think that answers your question.

0:11:04.5 Natalie Dowzicky: No, we really love some garbage horror. [laughter]

0:11:07.6 Peter Suderman: That’s actually worth talking about just a little bit, just to situate this movie in the context in which the 1992 film came out and the way that it was positioned for audiences, not as this… Actually somewhat as Jesse said, sophisticated and almost intellectual, a deconstruction of racial divides in 1990s Chicago at the peak of the crime wave, but instead just a, “Yet another here’s Jason, here’s Freddy, and they’re gonna come after some people who probably have done some bad stuff and deserve it, or do they?” And it’s… Anyway, but it was like, it’s not that. It’s really not that even if the studio was trying to position it that way.

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0:11:53.7 Peter Suderman: Also, that was really interesting, Jesse, that you have already brought up the way that the first film and then the new one are both really interestingly architectural movies, and so… That’s literally built into the plot, just in the sense that they’re about buildings and about structures, but the first film in particular, it’s notable that it was literally a representation of structural racism before, decades before that term was in common usage. It was not something that you would see in newspapers or spoken on cable news at the time, even if was being passed around within academia, and that is what that movie is again, directly and literally about, are the physical structures and the way the layout of buildings and cities and places divide people by race and class.

0:12:47.6 Jesse Walker: I just actually wanted to build on that a little bit, so to speak, because if you go back to the original short story by Clive Barker, which is not… It’s set in England and everyone is, as far as we know, White, there’s no discussion of people’s race, so we don’t know for sure, but it’s like its racial divides are not part of the story, but the geometry and architecture still are… The very first sentence says that, “The perfect geometry of the Spectre Street estate was only visible for the era,” and then the next couple of paragraphs have, lay out this contrast between divisions of the city planners and architects who had designed this and the miserable actual practical lives of the people who live within it, which is a very classic political theme, at least in anti-​authoritarian politics about…

0:13:45.4 Jesse Walker: The difference between the planners and the people who have to live within the plans, and then they actually say in, I think the third paragraph, that the architects would not have been ashamed by the deterioration of the estate, their brain child, they would doubtless argue, was as brilliant as ever, its geometries as precise, it’s ratios as calculated, it was people who had spoiled Spectre Street. So that’s sort of implicit there at the beginning, and then the first film begins. Again, like the line in the story was that it was only… The perfect geometry is only visible from the air, it begins with these aerial shots of Chicago, really beautiful looking shots with Philip Glass on the soundtrack, very geometric pieces of music, as we’re sort of watching from above before we plunge down into the subterranean depths of it.

0:14:43.3 Jesse Walker: And one thing I liked about the 2021 Candyman is said it begins with a callback to that… Well, it begins begins with the mirror image of the Universal’s logo, like you’re looking at all of this to a mirror which fits the story of course, and you’re playing the distorted version of the Candyman theme, but then we find ourselves again, looking at the architecture of Chicago with Philip Glass again on the soundtrack, but instead of from the sky looking down, from aerial shots, it is from the ground looking up in this really sort of weirdly distorted, you might even have been using a fish eye lens or something, that’s sort of… It was very odd and distinctive visual impression that it leaves on you and…

0:15:30.2 Jesse Walker: That’s pretty interesting. On the one hand, it represents the fact that since the first film came out, Cabrini-​Green has been raised and buried, and that’s a plot point in the most recent movie. And so we’re now seeing something that’s about to come back up from the dead. It’s also another reference to mirrors because you’re seeing the mirror image of a…

0:15:54.0 Peter Suderman: Because Candyman appears when you say his name five times while looking into a mirror, and so it’s… Just for listeners here who have not seen this or do not know all of the particulars of this myth, that’s the way you summon him. [laughter] And part of the way you summon him…

0:16:11.0 Landry Ayres: And it’s true, it’s a 100% true. It happens…

0:16:14.7 Natalie Dowzicky: Do not try this at home. [laughter]

0:16:16.3 Landry Ayres: No.

0:16:16.3 Peter Suderman: So this is actually part of what’s interesting about this film series, and I think one of the reasons why it has stuck around with us is because the myth in a way, is structured a little bit as a dare to the viewer, it says… It says, “You know what, here’s a story, it’s probably not true, it’s just a movie, but you could try this at home and find out,” and that brings you in and mix and adds to… Adds to the kind of… It’s a very good psychological scare trick for our film to use, and it’s quite effective, I think, even if you remain completely skeptical about the myth, but it’s part of why this Candyman has stuck around in pop culture, not just as a movie series, but as something that has actually taken on a life of its own a little bit outside of the series is because people actually… Well, will watch these movies and then will like go look at a mirror and say, Candyman five times.

0:17:18.8 Jesse Walker: The Candyman legend in the films is itself built from earlier urban legends, including famously, where I grew up, it was saying Bloody Mary into the mirror. I know there are other versions with other names, but Candyman itself was created for the film, or originally for the short story, but then really… And it’s in the form that we know it now in the film. And it’s interesting to watch not only how it became an urban legend, but I poked around online and I found people assuming it was an older urban legend that was picked up by the film. And this is… This is sort of, like I mentioned earlier, the idea of ostension, this sort of like… You enact the urban legend. Well, this not only is, the film itself is an active ostension, it is about people doing ostension and then it encourages, or at least inspires people out in the audience to go up and do it themselves, and maybe eventually we’ll have someone killing folks with hooks and everything…

0:18:19.2 Peter Suderman: But it’s just fascinating to think that we are what, less than 40 years out from the first incarnation of Candyman, as we are discussing Candyman today. Yes, obviously, there was Bloody Mary and there were all sorts of other myths built in to Barker’s story, but I think that story came out in ’84, ’85, something like that, ’cause it was a part of his books of blood series. And already the origins are murky, already there are people who are sort of like, “Where did this actually come from?” And so it’s funny to think about 300 years from now, will people just sort of think of Candyman as like a collective myth that popped up and no one really knows where it started, and will they find this podcast and be like, “No, we know because there was a podcast that explained all of this and talked about it at the time,” but you can literally watch this happening in real time where this story is sort of bleeding out into the culture and just sort of becoming a thing that everybody shares and owns and retails amongst themselves, and nobody knows exactly where it came from or exactly how it got started, which of course is in some ways the subject of the new film, and the ways that there is a kind of collective ownership of this myth of a… What became in the first movie, not in the first short story, but this myth of a Black killer who stalks the Projects.

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0:19:54.4 Landry Ayres: What I noticed is, specifically, we were talking about symbols and Jesse brought up mirrors a lot. And that was the symbol that jumped out at me and fascinated me the most specifically in the second film ’cause the first one is, it’s a mishmash of a lot of these horror tropes because we’re talking about urban legends. You’ve got razor blades in candy, you’ve got the… His body’s covered with bees which is sort of a Wicker Man homage. You have all of these different symbols and tropes in a melding together and constituting this new myth in this manner. And then the second film, the one thing that they really lean into is the mirror.

0:20:39.7 Landry Ayres: And mirrors in horror, it’s a common trope, you are looking at yourself, you’re expecting to see yourself, you turn the light off or on and there’s suddenly someone behind you. It’s a well-​trod jump scare type of event that occurs there. But I think it’s worth interrogating what the symbol of the mirror specifically in horror can do. And I think there’s reading that says something like, “Oh, we’re looking at ourselves. Humanity is the real monster. It’s inside of us and everyone has this potential.” And yeah, you can make that and that’s certainly been done before, but I think there is something a little bit more to it.

0:21:26.8 Landry Ayres: There is, specifically, you talked about the structure and the architecture of both of these films and I think the second one, the 2021 version, takes that and almost uses mirrors as a fun house distorting technique, another horror trope that we can borrow the language from which is that you are constantly, even in spaces that do not have conventional mirrors, there are reflections that lead off into infinite and deceptive spaces all throughout the film. There is the elevator that he gets into at the library that has mirrors on some walls but then when the metallic doors close and he has the tape recording of Helen in that he’s listening to, that also becomes a mirror and he is in this, what becomes a reflective interstellar tesseract of reflections of himself.

0:22:25.1 Landry Ayres: The one that really stuck out with me is, though, when he’s visiting the art critic in her home and he’s standing in the hallway and she comes into the room and asks if he’s okay. And he turns around and you realize you’re seeing characters shot in their reflection tons of times without realizing it. He turns around and you’re seeing the real him but she’s in the reflection. And you’re seeing… If you position two mirrors on sides, it creates this infinity that begins to bend up. And so there is a notion that you are seeing a reflection of yourself, like a vision of the self, but there is also the constant telling and retelling over time begins to bend as folklore does, and truth itself and what the story is distorts. And I thought that was really fascinating. And you can take it one step further and understand that because it is a film, it is shot on a camera, that there is a lens inherent to that process that is capturing the light and reflecting it up into the prism to capture it and put it on a tape or even digitally, if you’re using digital cameras, like it were.

0:23:48.0 Landry Ayres: But I’m so fascinated by that symbol and what it can do. I think it lends itself to what they talk about at the end of both of those movies which is, whatever they say becomes the truth. It is not necessarily about creating a realistic representation of what you fear, it is really more about what that story and the connotations build up to that will live on through this narrative oral story-​telling that really interests me. And it also leads itself to a question I had which was about folklore and urban legend and the transition that you get when it goes from oral story-​telling, the general medium of urban legend usually, into stories that are mass produced and dispersed.

0:24:46.2 Peter Suderman: I think the mirror imagery is really interesting and the way it appears in the new film versus in the 1992 film is really notable because in the first film, Candyman is invoked in the mirror but then he appears in real life in a physical form. And in the new film, he only exists in the mirror which means that it requires an act of self-​reflection to even see what he’s doing, right? To watch the murders. And so, you have to look back at yourself in some sense in order to understand what he’s doing and also to understand what he has done. And of course, that idea then invokes the old cliche about art holding up a mirror to society. And this is a movie about art’s place in society. And you can only see its effects in refraction, bounced off of something else, right? And so you can never look directly at the thing. Now this is a little bit more complicated in the very final scene, but that’s basically the system that the movie uses.

0:25:54.5 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah. [chuckle] I was gonna say that. [chuckle]

0:25:55.2 Peter Suderman: And so it is taking that idea from the first film of, “Oh, you have to look into the mirror to call him,” and saying, “No. Actually, you have to keep looking in the mirror to see what the monster is doing.”

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0:26:09.2 Jesse Walker: Can we say a little bit about how the more recent movie talks about art? Because it was… It had a sophistication to that that the first one could surprise people with the way it talks about folklore and urban legends. Just little things like… A lot of… I’m not someone who hates contemporary art, I think a lot of it’s good. I think when you go to the contemporary art part of the museum if it’s more hit or miss, it’s because there hasn’t been the longer wing-​in wing-​out process, but one thing that you learn after a while is that the artist’s statement is always bullshit. There’s like a little thing next to it where they try to explain what they do and it’s like… They are inevitably more, more better at expressing themselves through their art than they are through explaining it to whatever grant maker… And a lot of times you can tell they’re just going through the motions.

0:27:03.1 Jesse Walker: And in this is there’s like a moment, there’s an about… For about 10 seconds on screen, they’re having an artist statement close up and I was like reading it really quickly, and they captured the bullshit perfectly. That’s exactly what it would sound like. And on a less negative note, things like in the silhouettes were pretty clearly meant to resemble the silhouette art of Kara Walker, who is a Black artist. Her work is very much like the way it’s done there, if you watch the film then you’ve… I actually went to look up whether she had done that for the film, and in fact it was more of a copy.

0:27:39.8 Landry Ayres: Special shout out. I just wanna say, if anyone has not ever heard about or seen any work of Manual Cinema who does the shadow puppetry in the second film, that really evokes stuff during the credits and sort of the myth making process, it’s an amazing art collective, I believe, based out of Chicago, and they have done lots of… Using very tactile analog overhead projectors and shadow puppetry, create these amazing live performances of movies. There’s a performance of Frankenstein that early in the pandemic they released or they performed live, and it’s just really, really incredible stuff. So I just wanted to… That’s my own personal plug of something people should check out if they really, really liked that aspect of the movie.

0:28:26.4 Natalie Dowzicky: I think also, on the art front too, that we haven’t… We’ve talked about how it’s a little bit meta, but in the new movie, since it just came out, we can do a little bit of explaining. So we have a Black artist who’s like, I guess in a funk, let’s say struggling to figure out what his next project is, and he is in a relationship with a Black woman that is… She owns a gallery, I think she owns the gallery, or she helps…

0:28:54.3 Peter Suderman: She’s an exhibitor, art world person, of some sort.

0:28:58.1 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah, yeah. And then there’s also other prominent characters. So there’s a White woman who is purchasing art, but the big thing too here, in terms of art, we’re all looking at it from a perspective of the writers of the movie are both Black artists. They’re probably looking at it as a self-​reflection as well. So it’s kind of like, again, back to that meta-​narrative of they’re putting Black artists on the screen and showing, through horror, showing different things that are happening to them, but also taking in this personal aspect that they’re also creating this Black art in the movie sense. So, didn’t wanna lose sight of that.

0:29:42.0 Peter Suderman: There’s a great bit early in the film when they’re at a gallery, and at a party at a gallery, and there is a middle-​aged White female art critic who comes up and looks at the piece that was created by the main character, or one of the main characters, Anthony McCoy, who is the struggling artist here, and she’s doing the art critic kind of thing, and says something like… The quote that I have here is, “It speaks in didactic media cliches about the ambient violence of the gentrification cycle, you’re kind of the real pioneers of that cycle,” and she’s sort of dismissing it and sort of just spouting the kind of art critic bullshit that Jessie was talking about.

[chuckle]

0:30:38.9 Peter Suderman: And yet, this movie is also inviting people to do exactly that. We’re here, the four of us, doing a little bit of what this movie is making fun of people doing, but also saying, “Look, we’re… I’m obviously, I’m putting an object up for display and people are gonna interpret it, and people are going to be interested by it.” And part of what is interesting is at first that critic dismisses his work, but then after there is a killing at the gallery, then she becomes interested and entranced. And so there’s a sense in which this movie is saying, “You know what, if we were to talk about the Black experience, we’ve gotta do it through the lens of horror, because otherwise you don’t pay attention to us unless I’ve got somebody’s guts being ripped out here and I make it up, right, and I do it through this… Nobody’s gonna pay attention. You’re just… Only through the sort of the gut spilling and the… Only when we make this an exploitation film and a B movie, are you going to pay attention.”

0:31:39.2 Peter Suderman: And then everybody is like, “Oh my goodness, this is such a visionary work.” And there is… I don’t know if I think that’s entirely true, but it certainly… It’s an interesting kind of, like I said, meta-​criticism of the genre and the way that the sophisticated social horror in the mold of Jordan Peele, the Get Out, Us, has become this object of fascination in part because it is using the genre and all of the fun, and grabby exploitation movie tricks to get people to talk about and to engage with these underlying issues, not just with the blood and the guts.

0:32:26.9 Jesse Walker: But the real key moment in that scene for me was when she says, “Your kind,” and he does a little start behind her because he thinks she’s making a racial reference, and then she explains she means artists, she’s talking about the pioneers of gentrification, and that’s a moment for, well, one thing that’s going on there is the distortion effect. Something goes quickly through a mirror and gets misunderstood, as Landry was talking about. Although, perhaps she had a little intent to twist a knife a little there at the same time, we don’t know.

0:33:01.3 Landry Ayres: I certainly took it that way.

0:33:02.8 Jesse Walker: Yeah.

0:33:03.4 Landry Ayres: I swear and it was like… She meant… She knew what she did.

0:33:05.5 Jesse Walker: It was really… Was that a clueless moment or was it a delivered insult? It’s ambiguous. But also, I think there’s a little bit of anxiety there to the black bourgeois as they say, artists in this gentrified area asking themselves, do we belong to “your kind” anymore, or What kind do we belong to? And that’s also one of the sort of themes of the movie which, again, is sort of something it can do because it’s not being made by a White English director adapting a White English horror writer’s story. It’s being made by a Black American director with a screen play she wrote with two other Americans, at least one of whom is Black. And that innately gives you a different perspective on both the issues and the kind of story it is.

0:34:04.9 Peter Suderman: It’s another form of reflection, the movie is looking back at itself and I think there is a kind of interesting, not full-​fledged, but at least sort of questioning self-​criticism built into the film. It is what… It seems to be actively wondering if it is playing into the hands of basically of critics like the woman being portrayed in the film, and it seems to be asking itself, am I just playing… Am I just doing the thing that I’m saying… That I’m critiquing? And that’s part of what makes it really interesting. And also that aspect of it also ties back to the Clive Barker short story from the 1980s, which again wasn’t racial, that was in focus, but was about class divisions. And it was a story about bubbled self-​satisfied elites, mostly academics, who hear all of these lurid tales about grotesque murders in public housing. And they don’t believe it.

0:35:05.2 Peter Suderman: They don’t believe it because they haven’t seen it and they haven’t heard about it, and if they had not… If they haven’t seen it and they haven’t heard about it, then how could it possibly true. It’s about people who cannot look outside of their own little tiny worlds and also can’t look inside themselves, can’t look in their own reflections. And it’s a story that really reads almost on the nose today, given our discussion… The constant discussions about elites and their separation from the lives of poor people.

0:35:40.7 Landry Ayres: One of the ways that it seemed on the nose to me at first, but the more and more we discuss it, the more and more I appreciate this creative choice sort of in the writing, that I think is acknowledging that struggle between the anxiety of feeling like… I don’t know if it’s abandoning your community, but feeling like you are stuck between these two groups. The sort of bourgeois black artists and wanting to push back against the gentrification and commodification of black art, is the name that Anthony chooses for his Candyman piece, which is, Say My Name, obviously a nod to the Candyman ritual, but I didn’t realize until towards the end is obviously a reference to “Say Her Name” or “Say His Name.”

0:36:28.0 Natalie Dowzicky: Black lives matter.

0:36:29.1 Landry Ayres: Exactly. The Black Lives Matter slogan, which is about confronting the reality and acknowledging the humanity of victims of police brutality. And by saying, Say My Name, you see Anthony react to that when they actually say the name of his piece after the first murder. And there’s this struggle within him as this Candyman persona, possession, however it’s functioning within the story, is beginning to sort of take hold for the first time, but he recognizes that he shouldn’t feel that way, but it’s still there. And the Say My Name, is a sort of almost… I think it reads more like an exasperated call to the people that are observing the film, as opposed… There is a challenge in the daring, but it’s almost like a dare like, yeah say my name, look into the horror, not because it’s a thrill, but because you need to confront the violence inherent in the structural racism that exists in media and art as well as politics and society at large.

0:37:50.0 Jesse Walker: It’s also an invocation. And the idea is not just you’re invoking Candyman but there’s a underlying idea that maybe… And saying the name, and the political sense of the last few years, that’s an invocation too. And without giving away how the film ends, let’s just say that it raises the possibility of Candyman becoming a weapon if not the sort of Golan-​style protector of the community, then at the very least, something that you can break glass incase of emergency’

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0:38:20.8 Jesse Walker: There is a long history of rumor intersecting with politics, and it’s a… In my book, I have a few pages discussion where I talk about the old rumors about the so-​called night doctors which this goes back to slave time. The idea that whites were kidnapping blacks and doing experiments on them. And there’s an interesting sort of… As is often the case with folklore, people try to figure out the origins. There is some possibility that there… We know that there were some experiments done. That there is some underlying truth here, and this kind of speaks to what Peter was talking about with people. If I didn’t read it in the newspaper, did it happen? Well, we do know that things like this happened. At the same time, do we know that the night doctor version of the story, some of which became very much more gothic than realistic, is what’s true? No, because actually, it’s another route that people have really speculated about was that this was a disinformation campaign, and I’m using disinformation in it’s old sense not as a sort of vague thing of people saying… Believing things you don’t like, that white planters were using to discourage newly freed slaves from going to the city. They’re saying, “Well, you know, when you get up there…

0:39:48.8 Jesse Walker: That you could be kidnapped and they might do all sorts of nasty things to your body. And one thing that’s interesting is the way the story that was used in that way, and may have originated in that way, then got a life of its own when it was adapted by the community itself, and is repurposed and so on. And just for more broadly with rumors, if you look at the riots of the 1960s, rumors played two very different and complementary roles, both in terms of helping to set off the riots, because with Watts, the actual incident that set it off, it was bad, but the story that spread around got a lot worse. And then there were broader stories that went around about alleged plots against the ghetto and so on.

0:40:40.6 Jesse Walker: But meanwhile, there were these rumors going on in White circles about who was behind the riots? Where were they coming? Were there masses of armed Panthers on motorcycles heading to your rural community? Stuff that sounds almost exactly like some of the anti-​fur rumors from last year that people were telling in rural communities. And so, you have this sort of mirroring process going back and forth. And it was even possible for someone to catch wind of the other group’s rumor, and have it then perceived through the mirror in a different way so that someone on the militant Black side of the barricades could hear something that’s being said among the Whites about what they’re up to, and construe that as deliberate disinformation that’s being used. And then, work that into your story about the authorities’ plots against the inner city. So, it’s very complicated and it’s an important part of what a rumor does. And it’s there, in subtext, in the first film, and is really, I think, becomes explicit in the more recent film. And that’s again, just one of the interesting things about it.

0:41:55.0 Peter Suderman: So I don’t know if the Candyman movies are libertarian films, probably not. But they come from a place of skepticism about state power, and that starts with Clive Barker’s short story about… And then Eve is even… Which is about public housing. And then that’s, I think, even more present in the 1990s film. And then in the new film, obviously, there’s a strong police violence angle. And so, the Candyman films are sort of built on a foundation of opposition to State power, including and especially State power that is nominally exercised to better people’s lives and to organize society in a way that is supposed to make it better for more people. That’s true, that’s true in the films, and it’s true. Like I said, I think in the original story, Barker was very much not a libertarian, he was a kind of a leftist. But he was a particular sort of British Left individualist who wrote a story. The underlying theme of his short story is that people who have a certain amount of power in society have failed to see the individualism of other people because they are judging them as groups. And so, again, these are not libertarian stories and like a Haechan philosophical sense at all, but they are stories about how State power fails to treat people as individuals and how society fails to treat people as individuals, and how that robs people of their humanity and leads them to worse lives and to suffering.

0:43:49.1 Jesse Walker: I’d like to believe that Haech would call Candyman a spontaneous order.

0:43:55.2 Peter Suderman: [chuckle] I’m kidding in some ways, but also not, it does kind of have some Haechan insights about how local knowledge in some ways is… About what’s going on is what you need to understand what is happening on the ground. Because if you’re just looking at it from the outside, and from a position of sort of studied hierarchical authority, you’re not going to understand what’s going on in a community.

0:44:17.1 Jesse Walker: And I will say that there are definite connections about why I got interested in libertarian politics, and why I got interested in folklore, and I see those connections in these films. That’s probably part of why I like them. Well, I should also say, by the way, since we’ve been intellectualizing this for an hour, and sounding like the critic, they’re also just really fine, effective horror movies. I don’t know… If you don’t like horror movies, you’re probably not gonna have a good time ’cause you’ll get scared and there’s blood and so on. But if you do like them, they’re really well made, and there’s something you can go to… You don’t have to sit there and interpret everything as you watch it, you can save that for the next day if you want to and just enjoy it.

0:45:07.7 Peter Suderman: I would even say these are horror films for people who don’t always like horror films, especially the flashier, trashier…

0:45:16.4 Landry Ayres: I think that’s why I enjoyed it, honestly. ‘Cause I’m not a big horror movie, and I came in to being like, “These will be okay, I’ll knock them out back-​to-​back.” Watching these two back-​to-​back, which I highly recommend if you have the time, luckily, they’re only an hour and a half each, so it only… It’s like three hours. If you could sit through Lord of the Rings, you can watch both Candyman movies. I really, really enjoyed it because while it is very gory and hard to watch at times, there is enough in there and enough interpreting of these symbols that… Even the score, while it has sort of jump scare moments, it… Normally with horror movies, you… Especially of this era, they fall into very well-​trod paths, you know when things are gonna happen, tension ratchets up, you’re expecting something to happen. But even the jump scare when Candyman plunges his hook through the mirror at Helen for the first time, that is a true jump scare, there is no score when that happens, there isn’t even a musical sting. There is a very slow fade-​in of some pad right after that, where it really does take you by surprise, and I…

0:46:26.5 Peter Suderman: The score in the ’90s film is so great. Philip Glass’…

0:46:29.9 Landry Ayres: Philly G, we love Philly G.

0:46:31.9 Peter Suderman: Work on this is just wonderful.

0:46:33.9 Jesse Walker: It’s one of the few Phillip Glass scores that actually feels like a Philip Glass piece also. You’re listening to it, this is either Philip Glass or someone trying to sound like him.

0:46:43.4 Landry Ayres: It has a kind of architectural quality to it, it seems to take up and capture physical space just in its choice of arrangement and the way it’s recorded.

0:47:00.5 Natalie Dowzicky: I’m gonna be completely honest, I had pretty low expectations for both these movies. Like Glen, I’m not a huge horror person. I like horror films, but I’m not like, “Oh yeah, new horror.” I had thought I saw the older version, but once I turned it on and like 10 minutes in, I was like, “This is not what I was thinking of.” I was thinking of Friday the 13th. [chuckle]

0:47:20.8 Peter Suderman: But again, that goes back to what we were talking about at the beginning, which is that the marketing of this film, and in some ways, you could say the legend of this film, throughout the 1990s, ’cause I didn’t watch these movies in the 1990s. I did not care for them because I thought that they were just going to be more, “Hot teen’s encounter with a machete.” That’s like, you could only watch “Hot teens encounter a guy with a machete” so many times. I guess, actually, you could watch it as many times as you can, but… And some people do, but I can only watch that so many times.

0:47:50.8 Jesse Walker: So horror sort of became disreputable again in the ’60s and ’70s, and ’80s, especially ’80s, there is… People had come to respect the sort of Classics like “Bride of Frankenstein” and “Freaks” and all these great old ’30s and ’40s horror movies, and then things got a lot gorier after… I have a hard time thinking of “Night of the Living Dead” and “Psycho” as gory movies, but they were considered really moving for… Like, bold new scare… I’ve seen an old Leonard Maltin Movie Guide where he gives “Psycho” only one or two stars ’cause he thinks it’s so disgusting. And then, “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” which is a really smart film, actually, and then the whole Slasher genre really… Then there were the Moral Panic in The Great Britain about what they called “Video Nasties” because they always come up with these stupid names in Britain.

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0:48:52.5 Jesse Walker: And I don’t know what it is about the British, “The Goodies and Baddies.” And people just really… But even people who are not doing the moral panic were just saying, “Oh, what’s happened to horror?” And of course, a lot of these movies were bad because genre movies, people crank out generic versions of things. But this came out, I think, the same year, within a year of one of the first really smart intellectual assessments of the Slasher sub-​genre, which is Carol Clover’s book, “Men, Women, and Chainsaws” which is a great book, which I recommend to people… [laughter] Whether or not… I mean, very…

0:49:32.6 Natalie Dowzicky: Sorry, the title. [laughter]

0:49:33.7 Jesse Walker: If you’re just interested in social psychology and cultural history and… Read the book, even if you don’t like this kind of movie. And you started to have academics taking it more seriously, critics taking it more seriously. And I think it is a coincidence that… I don’t think Candyman played a role in that re-​assessment, but it was convenient, if nothing else, to have it there.

0:49:58.3 Peter Suderman: When I start a horror movie review sub-​stack, it’s definitely gonna be called “Video Nasties.”

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0:50:05.2 Natalie Dowzicky: What we saw in both these movies and the short story is that there’s just so much you could talk about, which I think is also a sign of a good horror movie, in my opinion. ‘Cause most horror movies, there are huge plot holes or they’re just like Slasher films where the higher the body count, the better, And the fact that we’ve been able to talk for over an hour about a wide variety of things that happen in both these movies is just telling of, I think, how good the movies are. But the 2021 version, I think it came out in August, and it’s gotten kind of mixed reviews. So I don’t necessarily agree with this, but I kinda wanted to throw it out there and see what you guys think. So the movie was described as “At odds with itself, a clash between a solid horror spectacle with some social dilemma strings attached on the one hand, and a try-​hard grab for too much on the other.” Do you agree? Do you disagree? Is there too much going on? ‘Cause we have talked about a lot.

0:51:09.6 Peter Suderman: I have conversed about this film with other critics and read a number of reviews, and I think one of the issues that the folks who don’t like it quite as much have with this, is that the subtext of this film is not perfectly obvious. And so on the one hand, you can read it if you want to, just as a straight forward, like “This is a movie about Black Lives Matter, and we’ve made a horror film that is just like Black Lives Matter.” And as we’ve talked about, the movie also kind of seems to be questioning its own participation in like that, it seems to be basically saying, “You know what? I could have made a movie that is just a one-​note, like one step removed metaphor for Black Lives Matter, but I didn’t. I wanted to make something a little more complicated.”

0:52:00.5 Peter Suderman: And in complicating it, it becomes more ambiguous. And in its ambiguity, I think there are sort of questions left unanswered. I think there are themes that are not fully explored, and I’ve heard some people say, even make criticism that I think are not entirely wrong, that there… That in some ways, this movie is actually a little too short and probably should have been 15 or 20 minutes longer, and there are some ideas that it sort of gestures at, but doesn’t quite dig into. At the same time, I like the fact that this movie seems to be doing not just one thing, and the one thing that it is maybe doing most, it is on the other hand, saying, “Am I really doing that?”

0:52:44.1 Peter Suderman: Is that the thing that you want? I’m gonna do it because that seems like the thing you want me to do. And I’m also gonna say, “Man, is that really what I wanted to do? Is that what we have to do in order to get your attention?” And so it is engaged in reflection on itself and on its own place in the social horror discourse, in a way that I think is fascinating, but I think is frustrating to some other critics who see it as kind of unfinished and not as fully thought out as it could have been. I disagree with that assessment, but I will say I don’t think it’s completely illegitimate.

0:53:18.5 Jesse Walker: Three quick points. First, it’s weird to hear that people would have that reaction ’cause I thought if anything, it was a little bit too overt about its subtext. I think maybe people are getting too used to TV shows that spell everything out, but that isn’t me. I still like the movie. The second thing is, I remember thinking at the Say His Name, right? Is the name of that? I remember thinking this would be too obvious if only… Except they put it in the hands of this artist who was always kind of ambiguous in the movie how good an artist he is. You can join in with the people, say, maybe it is because his wife or girlfriend, I don’t remember which it is, has this place in the community, that he’s getting a little bit above his talents. And he seemed… He definitely… There’s a leap in the quality of his work, I think, once he gets possessed by the Candyman.

0:54:16.2 Landry Ayres: Spoilers.

0:54:17.5 Jesse Walker: If that’s not exactly what happened. Yeah, ’cause that’s this… I’m saying this, and it’s not literally a possession. What you said about wishing it was a little bit longer, and things that they’re more explored, in general, I think it was just the right length. I appreciate a movie that knows how to end when it’s time to end. But one thing that I found, I don’t know if it should have been more explored or if I like it better as an enticing hint, but the character’s father who was the artist who killed himself, I wanted to see his art, I wanted to know more about him. It’s like I don’t feel that leaves it incomplete necessarily, because it’s good to let me wonder about that and think about it. It didn’t feel like a loose end that had to be wrapped up, but if they were going to add another 15, 20 minutes, that would be what to cover. But there’s something to be said, and this is the old Umberto Eco argument, and I guess we got into this when we talked about they live on… Previously on Pop & Locke, that one thing that helps make a really good cult movie is that feeling of incompleteness, that there’s something more that you as the audience can bring to it, and imagined, and perfection does not lend itself to a cult following so much as something incomplete but compelling, does.

0:55:37.7 Landry Ayres: Maybe there will be Candyman Five coming after this, made by Bill Condon Jr. [laughter]

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0:55:46.7 Landry Ayres: Thanks for listening. As always, the best way to get more Pop & Locke content is to follow us on Twitter. You can find us at the handle @PopnLockePod. That’s Pop, the letter N, Locke with an E, like the philosopher, pod. Make sure to follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen as well. We look forward to unraveling your favorite show or movie next time. Pop & Locke is produced by me, Landry Ayres, and is co-​hosted by Natalie Dowzicky. We are a project of Lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org. To learn more, visit us on the web at www​.lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org.

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