Critics reviews

It would make a lot of sense, as Tony Todd claims, to have Peele put his own spin on the material: his 2017 debut, Get Out, satirized and made explicit the hypocrisy and the danger still at the core of racism today. Candyman, in many complicated ways, was a precursor to Get Out’s embedded social critique and sophisticated use of genre cinema language.

Beyond the racial critique, Candyman is also a very bloody and gory film that serves both as a psychological thriller (the female protagonist is deemed insane, rendering all the killings doubtful) and as one of the first revolutionary self-aware slashers.

This mixture of lust and terror casts the action in a nicely purplish hue; Rose has the right unabashedly lurid sensibility for Clive Barker, and he doesn't skimp on the pungent details (urinal stalls caked with feces; Helen's face hideously swollen in the aftermath of her assault). He's also a great entertainer in an old-school tradition.

The resulting film oscillates widely and sometimes uncomfortably between clever meta-horror and quotidian actual-horror, but remains an underrated snapshot of the city's pre-"Plan For Transformation" unconscious, in the shadows of the towers which (as of May 2011) no longer exist.