One of the year’s most anticipated horror releases is finally arriving this Friday, August 27, in theaters. Nia DaCosta‘s Candyman, co-written by Jordan Peele, returns to Cabrini-Green and resurrects the urban legend in a wholly new way, acting as a spiritual sequel to Bernard Rose’s beloved 1992 film. The marketing curiously teases a Candyman “hive,” but what about the horror?
Ahead of the release, Bloody Disgusting participated in a press conference with director Nia DaCosta. She spoke of her approach to helming a spiritual sequel to honor the original film’s legacy while forging new ground in the present.
When asked if she was a fan and what she wanted to carry over from the original, DaCosta answered without hesitation, “Huge fan of the original film, but what I wanted to keep was the romantic nature of Candyman. I think there’s something really interesting about that, that they did the first film. I loved the way he was this darkly romantic, Gothic sort of antihero character. I wanted to keep those layers to him. But then also it was just important, again, to expand on who he was, what that meant.“
On whether Candyman is an antihero or a monster, DaCosta explained, “I think Candyman is a monster, for sure. I think, in some ways, he can also be an antihero. I think he’s multifaceted. For me, he represents how we change people from people into idols, or martyrs, or icons, or representations of a thing, as opposed to living, breathing human beings. He’s a monster. It’s a horror movie. He’s a villain of a sort, but we want it to deconstruct who decided he was a monster, who gave him that name, and how did he get there in the first place.”
Anthony McCoy (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, right) reaches toward a reflection of Candyman.
Storytelling will play an integral role in Candyman: “For me, the film is really about how storytelling is used around these horrific events, to either help process, to campaign, or to create a martyr out of people who ended up leaving us too soon through these terrible acts of racial violence. That sounds specific, but it also has so many facets to it. How does storytelling operate in our culture? How does storytelling operate to the point of getting us somewhere, like a character like Candyman.”
Opposite Candyman in Rose’s film was Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen), which prompted how much Helen would be involved in DaCosta’s film, if at all. DaCosta answered, “We were thinking about what places Helen plays in the film. At the end of the day, we thought, the first film is Helen’s movie. And I love what Virginia Madsen does, and I love Virginia Madsen, but this movie is really about Anthony McCoy, about Candyman. We wanted to make sure we gave the screen time to that.”
Rodney L. Jones III as Billy in Candyman.
More than balancing the mythos in her approach, DaCosta put a lot of thought into the horror and gore, too: “I love gore, but I think it has to have its place. I think body horror is really important. I knew that most of the gore and body horror would actually happen to characters we cared about, as opposed to throw-away, slasher stuff. But we also wanted you to feel those slasher moments. Sometimes it doesn’t mean that you see a closeup of someone being disemboweled; it can just also be sitting outside of an apartment and pulling away as the terror happens. Yeah, we thought about it a lot.”
With the horror and Candyman and Helen Lyle’s legacies answered, one lingering question remained. What about Philip Glass‘s iconic theme? Would this make its way into DaCosta’s Candyman? The director has that covered, too. “Robert A. Lowe, who did the score for the film, did a version of ‘Music box.’ I think it is so disturbing and creepy and an homage to the brilliant work that Philip Glass did. We also wanted to, in the way that Philip Glass made this very strange, unique score, make a very strange unique score for this film. And I think Robert did that so well.”