1992’sCandymanis based on a short story,The Forbidden, by Clive Barker (director ofHellraiserandNightbreed) in his six-volume collection,Books of Blood.The Forbiddenappears in volume five, and the story is only 37 pages long. Typically, screenplays and prose break down to about a page per minute. Novellas of about 100 pages translate easiest to the popular movie length/structure of 90 minutes. The brevity ofThe Forbiddenmeans the screenwriter/director, Bernard Rose, was free to take liberties, but also had the challenge of doubling the length of the narrative. As a result,Candymanhas numerous changes from Barker’s urban fairy tale.
Some of the changes have deepened the subtext, some have softened the story for Hollywood, and others fall in a space between, where it is upon the reader/viewer to decide whether they improve or take away from the story. Sometimes, mystery is more important to horror than clarity or understanding. Barker’s story is elusive. It forces the reader to fill in the blanks. Hollywood has no appetite for blanks – it wants the audience to feel the story is finished and that they can close the lid on it and go home happy. Barker’s story stays with the reader – it haunts them.
What Happens in The Forbidden
The Forbiddenis a Halloween story. The film shows no sign of the holiday, but the story is set at the end of October, and the events occur on or around Halloween. The holiday is never mentioned, but its presence connects the story’s boogeyman with the tradition of giving candy.
The short story begins with Helen Buchanan visiting a public housing project to take photos of the graffiti for her thesis:Graffiti: the semiotics of urban despair. In the movie, Helen’s thesis is about urban legends, and she comes after being told stories of the Candyman. The monster is introduced from the beginning of the movie, whereas inThe Forbidden, he only appears in the final pages.
Helen meets Anne-Marie, a young mother who lives in one of the apartments at the complex. She tells Helen about the abandoned buildings and how there is more graffiti within them. Helen’s curiosity is aroused, and she asks Anne-Marie to show her these buildings. Within number 14, Helen finds a bedroom with a face painted on the wall, with the door serving as its mouth. This is the kind of art she is looking to photograph for her thesis, but the interior is too dark to photograph without a flash, so she determines she will come back another day to get photos of the portrait.
Anne-Marie invites Helen to tea, and while Helen visits her apartment, Anne-Marie tells her about a murder of an elderly man in the complex whose eyes were gouged out. Helen returns the next day to photograph the interior of number 14. After, she speaks to two women who live in the complex, and they tell her another story about a young man who was castrated during broad daylight in the public toilets across from the nearby grocery store.
Helen returns after the weekend for the third time, wanting to get more information on these murders, but when she visits Anne-Marie, the young woman will not speak to her or let her in, and she ushers her away, claiming she is busy. Helen returns to number 14, but finds the door locked. When she is about to leave, Helen hears sirens approaching. She comes around the corner to see a crowd gathering outside of Anne-Marie’s door. Her baby has been murdered.
Helen learns from the newspaper that the child had died between 6 and 6:30 AM and had been dead when she visited Anne-Marie. When the funeral is held, Helen visits the housing project again and watches as the hearse passes with the little coffin. Afterward, she again visits number 14 and finds the door is open again. It is on this fourth and final visit that Helen encounters the Candyman and learns of something dark that was cut from the movie.
Female Hysteria and Folk Horror
In the movie, Helen is accused of kidnapping the baby of Anne-Marie, but in the short story, the child is killed in Anne-Marie’s apartment, and Helen is not a suspect. Because Helen is never a suspect, and the scene where Bernadette is killed by Candyman does not happen, Helen is not placed in a mental hospital, and she never escapes said hospital in the third act. All of this was added to the movie to lengthen the narrative.
This change to the story affects the themes of the movie. The movie becomes a story of female hysteria – a theme that appears repeatedly in horror movies and fiction in which our point of view character is a woman whose sanity (or objectivity as a point of view character) is questioned by the other characters and the reader/viewer; thus allowing the horror story to continue (where we, the viewers, would immediately vacate the play). From the 1892 short storyThe Yellow Wallpaperby Charlotte Perkins Gilman to 1971’s drive-in vampire movieLet’s Scare Jessica to Death; the story of female hysteria has been a part of every era of horror.
InThe Forbidden, when Helen visits number 14 for the fourth time, she discovers the real darkness of the housing complex: the people who live there. The people living in the projects took the baby from the coffin and left it on the mattress of number 14 for the Candyman along with razor blades and candy. This was all too far for Hollywood, so the child is rescued from the Candyman and the inhabitants of the housing projects are portrayed as thankful tothe white savior.
After discovering the body of the baby, Helen is confronted by Candyman. He does not kill her, but demands a kiss. Helen faints, and when she wakes up, she hears the voices of women whispering in the building. Anne-Marie enters the room in the darkness and fetches the baby’s body. Helen follows her and watches her from the shadows as Anne-Marie crawls inside the pyramid of scraps and garbage that has been piled up for a bonfire in the quadrant, and when Anne-Marie exits, she is empty-handed.
Helen sneaks forward in the dark (all the streetlights have been busted by the residents) and enters the scrap pile to retrieve the child’s body as evidence of what she witnessed, but Candyman prevents her from leaving as the residents light the bonfire.
The people who live in the apartments murder Helen. It is not an accident. This marks the story as folk horror – with an emphasis on the folk. It is a story of a person of one world, another economic class, entering the world of common folk, normally in a rural setting, but here in a vandalized neighborhood, covered in graffiti and litter. On the first page ofThe Forbidden, Barker writes: “They (city-planners) would not have been shamed by the deteriorations of the estate… Their brainchild (they would doubtless argue) was as brilliant as ever: its geometries as precise, its ratios as calculated; it waspeoplewho had spoiled Spector Street. Nor would they have been wrong in such an accusation.”
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No Mirrors
One of the most iconic aspects ofCandymanis the incantation that summons him. If you say his name five times in front of a mirror, Candyman will appear and take you as his victim. The movie’s cold open is a retelling of a story about a woman who says his name and is killed. This does not exist in any form inThe Forbidden. It was added to link the story to the angle of urban legends, and to give this urban legend an element of familiarity, so the general audience understands what an urban legend is.
The mirror summoning is lifted from a real urban legend game that we all played on Halloween when we were kids: Bloody Mary. The game involved turning out the lights in the bathroom, and saying Bloody Mary three or five times while you spun around in place. When you turned on the lights, according to the rules, she would appear in the mirror.
Change of Setting and Race
The film moves the story to America from England, and in changing the setting to an American public housing project, it adopted a real location and shifted the race of the residents from white to black. Thisadds a layer of racial divisionto the class contrast between the upper middle class and the lower, impoverished class. Helen is a white graduate student with a husband who is a professor and a nice apartment in a safe area of Chicago. She has the income through her husband to afford the time to go chasing ghost stories in dangerous neighborhoods and take photos of the urban decayas if the housing projects were a zoo.
The complex in the film isthe real-life Cabrini-Green. The infamous housing project was constructed between 1942 and 1962, and it became a horror story of its own; plagued by gangs, drugs, and violent crimes. The complex was demolished between 2000 and 2011.
Like the lower class of England, the residents of Cabrini-Green were the descendants of people who were forced to farm the land. That connection to the land is severed, and the families of serfs/slaves are placed in public housing and forgotten. This history of the people ties the film’s story back to the folk horror themes ofThe Forbidden.
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Candyman was White
With the change of the race of the keepers of the Candyman’s story,the race of the phantom was changed. The title character of the movie is played by Tony Todd (Night of the Living Dead). Todd is 6’5’’, and he stands a foot taller than his co-star, Virginia Madsen, who plays Helen. The female lead remains white, and this moves the story into another subgenre of horror dealing withwhite women who are in danger of being sexually assaulted by Black men(King Kong). Here, the racial subtext of gorilla horror movies is brought to the surface. The Candyman, a black man, seduces Helen, an upper middle class woman, to be his victim and be immortal with him.
The Candyman in Barker’s story is white. His skin is described as jaundiced and buttermilk-colored. Barker writes: “He was bright to the point of gaudiness: his flesh a wary yellow, his thin lips pale blue, his wild eyes glittering as if their irises were set with rubies.”
Barker’s Candyman still has the hook, and his chest is still a beehive, but none of the origin story seen in the movies is present inThe Forbidden. The character is developed in the films as an artist who was lynched; his hand cut off, and was stung to death by bees. His backstory echoes the interracial relationship he has with Helen. He painted the portrait of a white woman and seduced her, and for this he was mutilated (the power of his skill taken from him with the amputation) and murdered by a mob. The amputation is subtext for castration, which was a common act in lynchings, and which exposed a sexual obsession/motive/fears with the mobs.
The Candyman is never explained inThe Forbidden. His arrival in the narrative five pages from the end, with no warning, with no tale to be told, is more frightening. He says that he is a rumor. He is immortal because the people continue to tell his story. For him to continue being, he must be believed, and to be believed, he must take victims. The reader is left to interpret what the Candyman represents – nature, some remnant of the past of the rural people, a ghoul whose body is consumed by bees; farmland that has been consumed by the concrete and geometry of expanding cities.
