In the fall of 1992, I was deep into a phase of Clive Barker fandom. I’d read all of the author’s books available to that point and watched both Hellraiser and Nightbreed often enough to put serious wear on my VHS copies. When a new movie based on a short story from one of Barker’s Books of Blood collections started building hype, including positive reviews from some prominent critics, I excitedly ran out to see it in the theater opening weekend. Sadly, I came away unimpressed.

I didn’t think very highly of Candyman at that time, and frankly, didn’t give it a whole lot more thought in the years that followed. I filed it away in my head as a frustrating disappointment that (a producer credit for the author notwithstanding) had very little to do with Clive Barker. Yet the movie was a modest box office success during its release, spawned a few sequels, and over time has grown into more than just a cult hit, but actually something of a respected horror classic. I picked up a copy when it was released on Blu-ray with plans to revisit the film and see if my opinion had changed, but set it aside and let it linger in my growing stack of unwatched discs.

Now, more than three decades having passed since that first theatrical screening, the time has finally come to once again stare into the mirror and repeat the name five times: Candyman, Candyman, Candyman, Candy… On second thought, maybe I’ll just stop there.

Title:	Candyman
Year of Release:	1992
Director:	Bernard Rose
Watched On:	Blu-ray
Also Available On:	4K Ultra HD Blu-ray AMC+ Peacock Roku Channel Shudder Various VOD rental and purchase platforms

First published in 1985 as part of Clive Barker’s Books of Blood Vol. 5, the short story The Forbidden followed a university student named Helen whose thesis research into graffiti art led her to a Liverpool slum rife with tales of a supernatural killer with a hook for a hand. Fascinated with what she assumed was a myth, Helen would of course eventually experience the terror of the Candyman for herself.

Depending on the publishing format, the original story runs somewhere between 37 to 53 pages and ends rather abruptly with the reveal of the killer. It has very little elaboration as to whom or what the Candyman is, what he wants, or why he kills. He’s a boogeyman; he shows up, he kills people, the end. Naturally, any attempt to turn this into a movie would require significant expansion and padding to justify a feature length.

The man to do that was Bernard Rose, a British filmmaker whose arty fantasy thriller Paperhouse had received some critical acclaim a few years earlier. For his adaptation funded by American studio Propaganda Films, Rose transplanted the story from England to Chicago in order to exploit the reputation of the notorious Cabrini-Green housing project, a low-income apartment complex known nationally for its vandalism, disrepair, and high crime rate, including several murders over the years.

The movie follows the basic outline of the short story in at least crude terms. Virginia Madsen stars as Helen Lyle, a grad student working on a vaguely-defined thesis about urban legends and popular folklore. For as much as she arrogantly believes she’s breaking new ground treating such a subject as worthy of academic study, Helen hasn’t seemed to actually research much about it, or she might’ve realized that others in her department – not least of whom her own dickwad husband (Xander Berkeley) – have already dug much deeper into some of these myths than she has.

After hearing repeated stories blaming a recent unsolved murder on a ghostly specter called Candyman, Helen drags her partner Bernadette (Kasi Lemmons) out of their comfortable middle-class environs to go deep into the heart of the projects to investigate for themselves. This isn’t a good idea. Soon enough, Helen finds her life falling apart when the mythical Candyman proves all too real and takes as much interest in her as she did in him.

As a film, Candyman has pretensions of being an elevated slasher movie. Rose attempts to direct the picture with better production values and more artistry than your typical Friday the 13th or Slumber Party Massacre sequel. A big part of that is the outstanding musical score by Philip Glass that tremendously outclasses the material it’s supporting. Even if nothing else in the movie works, that score will stick with you.

For me, unfortunately, even after a distance of thirty years between viewings, nothing much else in Candyman does work. I still don’t like the movie any more than I did the first time. The plotting is nonsensical and not scary in the slightest. Most of the characters (including Helen) are jerks. Now given an expanded backstory, the Candyman himself (Tony Todd) is a confusing mishmash of too many ideas that don’t fit together. He was a former slave who was attacked by a mob for deflowering a white girl. His hand was cut off and replaced by a hook (why would his attackers want to give him a weapon like that?), yet he was also stung to death by bees. As a ghost, he dresses like a 1970s pimp and leaves a bag of candy filled with razor blades behind for reasons never explained, and he comes calling to kill you if you say his name into a mirror five times. What any of these things have to do with one another is confounding to me.

While Virginia Madsen was perhaps at her peak beauty in 1992 (which is really saying something), her character’s incessant smoking in every scene is off-putting and dates the movie terribly. Tony Todd is imposing as the villain, but has very little screen time and does almost nothing in any of it beyond stand around and look menacing.

Most troubling of all, by sending a pretty white woman into the ghetto to be terrorized by a scary Black man, the movie’s racial politics are deeply uncomfortable and feel less than half thought-out. If Rose were trying to make some sort of point about stereotypes and racial bias with that, it doesn’t come across the way he thought it would. All the scenes of Helen snooping around the project building, taking photos of the decrepit conditions and the graffiti for a paper she hopes to publish, also reek of poverty tourism.

All that being my perspective, I will acknowledge that Candyman is a popular film among horror fans, including many Black viewers, who’ve claimed the Candyman himself as an antihero icon. The most recent sequel/reboot in 2021 (also just called Candyman) was directed by a Black woman who co-wrote it with two Black men to decent success and acclaim. I haven’t seen that entry. Does it correct some of the flaws in the first movie? Even if it does, this one’s too much of a mess for me and I still don’t particularly enjoy it.

The Blu-ray

Shout! Factory released Candyman as a Collector’s Edition Blu-ray through its Scream Factory label back in 2018. Rather than use seamless branching, the two-disc set contained the Theatrical Cut and the Unrated Cut of the movie on separate discs. Given that both versions of the film run the same 99-minute length and differ only by slightly gorier alternate takes of a few shots, that feels like a rather inefficient waste of resources.

More recently, Shout! Factory released a 4K Ultra HD edition in 2022. (Arrow Video also released a comparable set in the UK around the same time.) Even if the new 4K remaster might offer some genuine improvement, I don’t personally care for Candyman enough to feel a desire to upgrade.

The 2018 Collector’s Edition Blu-ray credits a “2K restoration from a new 4K scan of the Original Camera Negative, supervised and approved by writer/director Bernard Rose and Director of Photography Anthony B. Richmond.” The same master formed the basis for both versions of the movie, with “HD inserts from a rare print” added to the Unrated Cut. For all that, the transfer looks just okay. The 1.85:1 image is variable in quality throughout the movie. Some scenes are reasonably sharp and clear, but others are very soft and grainy. While watching the Unrated Cut, I believed that the worst-looking footage must have come from those “rare print” inserts, only to check the Theatrical Cut afterwards and discover that those scenes in fact had no changes between the two.

In general, contrast for the transfer looks a little too bright, which leaves the movie looking overlit and kind of cheap. The Virginia Madsen character’s apartment and college offices, and even the slum housing project interiors, feel more like soundstage sets than real locations. I think that mostly comes down to the video transfer exposing too much of the artifice. Whether the 4K remaster handles this any differently, I cannot say, and at this time am not interested enough to invest any of my own money to find out. Despite my complaining here, the Blu-ray remains adequate enough for my purposes. I doubt I’ll ever watch this movie enough to need a better copy of it.

Audio options on the Blu-ray are provided in DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 or 2.0 formats. (The 4K version has a new Atmos remix.) The Philip Glass score sounds huge and enveloping in the 5.1 track, with a very resonant low end. The sound of Candyman’s voice also growls with a lot of exaggerated bass. Dialogue otherwise sounds a little flat, however. Sound effects, especially during the stinger scare scenes, are often too bright and harsh, which makes the movie’s audio experience fatiguing.

The Collector’s Edition is loaded with bonus features, starting with no less than four audio commentaries over the Theatrical Cut. Other extras on Disc 1 include a handful of old DVD-era interviews and featurettes, some storyboards, trailers and TV spots, a still gallery, and a copy of the movie’s script available on BD-Rom. Disc 2 then houses a bunch more new (as of this Blu-ray’s release) interviews and featurettes, some of which wind up covering the same ground.

Related

• Clive Barker movies
  • Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988)
  • Hellraiser (1987)
  • Hellraiser (2022)
  • Lord of Illusions (1995)
  • Nightbreed (1990) Director’s Cut
• Clive Barker comics
  • Clive Barker’s Hellraiser (1989-1994) comic book
  • Clive Barker’s The Harrowers (1993-1994) comic book
  • Hellraiser Nightbreed: Jihad (1991) comic book
• Virginia Madsen
  • Dune (1984)
  • A Prairie Home Companion (2006)