Only recently did Jordan Peele’s instant horror classic Get Out (2017) eclipse Candymanwith its savagely funny evisceration of white liberal angst about blackness.
Romero touched on the racial tensions of the late 1960s with his color-blind casting of Duane Jones in his seminal zombie classic Night of the Living Dead (1968), most black characters in horror cinema have tended to be campy caricatures, from William Marshall’s undead African prince in Blacula(1972) to Grace Jones as a bloodthirsty femme fatale in Vamp (1986) and Eddie Murphy’s misfiring star turn in Vampire in Brooklyn (1995). In 1992, it was still rare for a horror movie to feature a multiracial cast, and even rarer for such a film to draw its scary power from the real-life historical horrors of slavery and lynching. A century later, according to the film’s mythos, he will materialize and exact his revenge on anyone who simply gazes into the bathroom mirror and chants his name five times. After being smeared with honey and stung to death by bees, his body was burned on a pyre, then his ashes scattered across the Chicago neighborhood where the notorious Cabrini-Green housing projects were later erected. In Candyman, the hook-handed African-American antihero is the vengeful, unquiet spirit of Daniel Robatille, a slave’s son who became a successful businessman and artist in the late 19th century, only to be tortured and murdered by a racist lynch mob for fathering a child with a white woman. One vital reason the film felt so fresh in 1992, and remains so today, is its sharp racial subtext, needling away at the contemporary real-life fears of its target audience instead of relying on tired genre cliches about haunted mansions and undead Middle European monsters.
Rose’s inspired choices for Candymaninvolved expanding Barker’s slim blueprint to incorporate elements borrowed from other urban legends, transposing Liverpool to Chicago, and swapping evergreen British anxieties about class for the perennial American psychic wound of race. Barker first heard a version of the story in folklore form, passed down from his own grandmother. In the original story, a skeptical female academic looks into a fanciful urban myth about a monstrous killer who haunts a run-down city apartment block, only to become his next victim. The source material was also British, a short story by horror maestro Clive Barker called “The Forbidden,” set in Liverpool. feature debut of Brit director Bernard Rose. There are hints of Dracula and Beauty and the Beast in the mix, but also Shakespeare and Hitchcock and David Lynch too.Ĭandymanwas the U.S. A superior slasher movie on the surface, a subversive political parable beneath, it struck a smart balance between pulpy bloodshed and gothic romance, between primal horror tropes and self-aware commentary on the creepy urban legends that we share when we want to scare ourselves half to death.
In cinema this was the year of Basic Instinct, Malcolm X, The Bodyguard, Batman Returns, Bram Stoker’s Dracula - plus a little word-of-mouth hit by a young unknown director: Reservoir Dogs.īut the 1992 release that left a deeper impression on me than any of those listed above was Candyman. sent military forces into war-torn Somalia, Mike Tyson was jailed on rape charges, and Bill Clinton was elected to the White House.
In 1992, riots rocked Los Angeles in the aftermath of the Rodney King trial verdict, the U.S. It was a year of scandals, protests and explosive racial tensions.