THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – MUST SEE
In cinema, the horrific and fantastic genres have rightly been considered as symbolic representations of what is called the return of the repressed, in the psychological sense of course, but also, more broadly, in a historical sense. Terror is often aroused by the appearance, in a monstrous form, of what society, sometimes for its own survival, has tried to deny or do away with.
Vengeful reminders of old or still contemporary guilt, the mythologies of horror cinema question a present with a radicality and brutality that other filmic rhetorics are content to touch upon, even attempt to avoid.
In 1992, screenwriter and filmmaker Bernard Rose adapted a short story by Clive Barker, The Forbidden (published in French under the title Flesh prison, in 1991, at Albin Michel), and thus enriched the gallery of monsters of the cinema of terror with a very singular figure. His Candyman described the career of a student in anthropology, played by Virginia Madsen, devoting herself to research on an urban legend born in Cabrini-Green, one of the black ghettos of Chicago.
A particular incantation (pronouncing the word “Candyman” five times in front of his mirror) made an infernal creature reappear, a man with a face disfigured by multiple bee stings, a hook instead of the right hand, who committed a series of horrific murders.
Political significance
Bernard Rose’s film articulated two elements, the monstrous appearance of which was nourished: one psychological, that of female jealousy leading to psychosis; the other, historical, the reminder of the martyrdom of a young black man tortured and put to death for having seduced, in 1890, a white woman.
Thirty years later, producer and director Jordan Peele, famous for his films where terror takes on political significance (Get out, in 2017, and Us, in 2019), tackles, not a new version of the 1992 film, but a sequel, which he entrusts to Nia DaCosta, a young filmmaker discovered in 2018, with the dramatic thriller Little woods.
Candyman cru 2021, a successful avatar of the horror film “à propos”, skilfully re-examines the original myth in the light of the evolution, particularly urban and social, of American society. Thus, rather than repeating the original work, the film complicates and updates the issues by extending them.
The white scientist is succeeded by a young black painter, Anthony McCoy (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), installed in the renovated district of Cabrini-Green, which has become a place of bourgeois residence, and surrounded by a group of individuals (his small friend, Brianna, played by art gallery manager Teyonah Parris, her brother, a reviewer). Short of inspiration, McCoy meets, one evening, the manager of a laundromat in his neighborhood, who exposes him to the legend of Candyman.
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