Helen, aware of her place in the hierarchy, doesn’t want to be seen as exploitative. In Rose’s adaptation, Helen Lyle, an academic played by Virginia Madsen, grows infatuated with the horrific conditions besetting Black families in Cabrini–Green, who are under threat from a Black killer. The horror now is generated by fears of complicity in the violence and dispossession that created Candyman in the first place and recreates him anew. But the animating anxieties of DaCosta’s film belong to its upwardly mobile Black characters, whose relationship to Cabrini–Green is a bit more complicated.

Barker’s story and Rose’s movie-which shifted the setting to Chicago’s Cabrini–Green housing project-were told from the point of view of the bougie outsiders, the people for whom the slums are “indisputably foreign.” The horror played on their anxieties regarding the world of their social lessers. But something else emerged in the transition. Social hierarchy is still the backdrop, a story of class in general having become, on American soil, a story of race in particular. The basic elements of the thriller have stayed in place as it’s moved from Barker’s pen in 1985 to Bernard Rose’s camera in 1992 and eventually to DaCosta’s camera today. Like others before her, she eventually falls victim to the estate and, ultimately, to Candyman’s allure. She marvels at the stories residents tell themselves about the mysterious figure behind the slayings, the Candyman.

Helen is an inquisitive student from the upper orders, pestering her professor boyfriend at a restaurant in between stints at the estate, snapping photographs of the slum’s decrepit condition, and interrogating residents about the recent spate of deaths occurring on its grounds.

In Clive Barker’s short story “The Forbidden,” the precursor’s precursor to the Nia DaCosta–directed, Jordan Peele–produced Candyman, an academic named Helen becomes obsessed with capturing the grim conditions of the Spector Street Estate, a British slum marked by the malignant scent of urine, burnt plastic, and graffiti-an area “indisputably foreign, sealed off in its own misery.”Ĭlass is the specter, or the other specter, haunting Barker’s story, part of a collection he wrote known as the Books of Blood in 19. Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Candyman the forbidden