Movie Review: Candyman

Originally written June 18th, 2014.

I’m not a big fan of Clive Barker as an author, but I was pleasantly surprised by Candyman. It does a great job of expanding a short story into a feature-length screenplay, and generally outdoes its source material. It’s eerie and chilling movie from beginning to end. In a decade largely devoid of good horror movies, Candyman stands head and shoulders above its peers as one of the creepiest flicks of the 90s.

One of the film’s strongest suits is its production value. The movie looks fantastic, with many scenes shot on location in the Cabrini-Green projects. Poor housing projects are dreary and unsettling enough to begin with, and putting a boogeyman in there just ramps up those feelings. Plus there’s a lot of eye-catching imagery in the colorful graffiti that forms most of the film’s backgrounds. That shot of the giant Candyman mural is both visually stunning and disturbing at the same time, and has stuck with me for quite some time.

The acting is some of the best I’ve seen in a horror movie. Horror movies are almost always chockfull of bad acting, and the memorable performances are usually from over-the-top character actors. Memorable and fun, certainly, but not high quality stuff. That’s not the case with Candyman. Virginia Madsen definitely deserved her Saturn award that year. (She plays the “is it all in her head” bit perfectly.) Tony Todd’s role as the titular Candyman is probably the creepiest horror performance of the 90s. He is just fantastic. From his deep gravelly voice, to his creepy placid demeanor, the guy just knocks it out of the park.

The score is excellent, too. Avant-garde composer Philip Glass penned the score for the film, and he did an amazing job. The music has a spooky music box feel to it. The score is mostly ethereal piano loops with choir vocals thrown in here and there, and it’s creepy as heck. The main piece played throughout, Helen’s Theme, is reminiscent of Promise (Reprise) from Silent Hill 2. If you like that song, it’s worth looking up the Candyman soundtrack, it’s a really cool track.

As a standalone movie, Candyman is excellent. But how does it stand up against the source material? The movie is based on the Clive Barker short story, The Forbidden. It follows roughly the same plot as the story; a woman named Helen discovers the urban legend of the Candyman and faces the deadly consequences of her continued investigation. Overall the movie does a better job of telling the story than the story, but there are a few key differences that bothered me.

For one, they give the Candyman a backstory that does everything except explain why he only shows up when you say his name five times in front of a mirror. It seems kind of arbitrary for him to use that as his main method of transportation when they clearly show he can appear wherever he darn well pleases. As a means of drawing out the runtime, the writers threw in a “was it all in her head” element. Virginia Madsen plays this device really well, but if you’ve read the story then you know it’s not in her head after all. Thirdly the filmmakers felt compelled to “kill off” the Candyman in this version. The ending for the movie is definitely better than the Wicker Man ripoff the story has, but they could have kept the Candyman alive without it affecting the ending at all. Plus it makes no sense how they even killed him in the first place. (A flaming piece of debris? Really?)

Overall, Candyman is a knockout piece of horror cinema. It takes its time, builds up its atmosphere, and then hits you with creepy bee-infested ghosts. It’s a fantastic horror movie and definitely worth watching. I highly recommend it.