Vanilla Nightmares and Urban Legends: The Racial Politics of Candyman (1992)

Abstract

Candyman (dir. Bernard Rose, 1992) is considered one of the best horror-noire films of the 1990s. Certainly it’s one of the smartest. Adapted from Clive Barker’s short story “The Forbidden,” Candyman traces two intertwining plotlines. One has to do with miscegenation and a haunting, haunted love affair. A nineteenth-century white woman fell in love with the black artist hired to paint her portrait; when she became pregnant her family exacted a horrific revenge—against the artist, of course. His ghost haunts the present. The other story has to do with urban “renewal,” the creation of Cabrini-Green, urban drug violence, and the difficulties confronting contemporary black residents of Chicago. The way these two stories come together, intermingle, and ultimately re-segregate is part of what I want to explore in this essay. I am interested in the irreducible and unresolvable conflict between the film’s two diegetic strands and the different knowledges they represent. I’m also interested in what they have to tell us about the racist history that haunts this country, that will not be laid to rest until some kind of justice is exacted, and that continually calls into question everything we think we know.