I don’t know about you, but I find nature unsettling. My wife, who is Polish, theorizes that this is a particularly American quality, grown out of a land of settlers pushing out into a wilderness, surrounded by threat, and haunted by the destruction inherent in that expansion (The whole country has, of course, been built on Native burial grounds). I don’t feel that nature is my place – that I am welcome in it. Basically I feel it just wants to eat me. Red in tooth and claw and all that. And yet, it is beautiful, mysterious, powerful, and essentially unknowable.
So, it is no surprise that I find folk horror particularly effective; the mutual draw and fear of the natural world and of people who live more closely to it. There is a seductive and uncanny atmosphere that comes with such work.
With this in mind, I’d like to focus here on a film which I don’t believe is ever really discussed in the canon of Folk Horror, Bernard Rose’s Candyman. I would argue that while it may not make sense to call it precisely a Folk Horror, it is useful to examine it through that lens. So to do so, I’d like to look at it in comparison and contrast with Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man which is, along with Blood on Satan’s Claw and The Witchfinder General, one of the earliest and most influential progenitors of the sub-genre.
Both will be discussed in detail, so if you haven’t seen them and don’t want them spoiled, I recommend viewing them first. They are two of my all-time favorites and it is easily worth your time.
How they are the same
On at least a surface narrative level, the two films share many similarities. Both revolve around an outsider who comes from a place of privilege (the law, academia), who enters into an isolated community to conduct an investigation, certain of their superior world view. This outsider clashes with an element of local folk belief (Candyman, the old gods) and, on some level, seeks to disprove it. There is a missing child who is sought after, but who was ultimately never really in danger and only served as a kind of bait. The locals treat this outsider with justified suspicion. Finally, he or she is burned by the community in a kind of sacrificial bonfire, offering up a feeling of the miraculous.
Add in the utterly coincidental facts that both films feature performances by tall, seductive actors with silky, deep voices (Christopher Lee and Tony Todd), who get to pontificate poetically over the action, and that they both begin with opening credit sequences of helicopter shots of the given setting accompanied by droning music (the organ or the bagpipes, respectively), and it adds up to a surprising amount of overlap for two otherwise totally dissimilar films.
How they are different
For two films that I want to examine the similarities of, they are as different as night and day. Whereas The Wicker Man is warm, sunny, rural, and lovely, Candyman is cold, overcast, urban, and bleak. And in so far as Folk Horror is largely defined by its setting, only one of these films fits the typical pattern. Only one dwells in and celebrates the natural world.
What’s at the core
But, as I remember seeing in a recent David Attenborough documentary, cities are nature as well, with their own ecosystem, their own flora and fauna. Thus, Candyman is actually no further from nature and the natural world than the other film.
But the most important shared element is their focus on the event of human belief, the need of human beings for a kind of faith, for story, for the continuation of something older and more mysterious than ourselves. And in both cases, that faith which had been doubted or even mocked by the protagonist (obvious with Sergeant Howie, but even Helen laughs at her subjects as she collects their urban legends), wins out and persists in the end.
In the Wicker Man, Lord Summerisle explains how his grandfather had reinstated the old gods on the island out of not his own belief, but rather, expedience—to give the residents something joyous so that they would work harder in harvesting his produce, but that over time, those old beliefs took root. In performing the ceremonies, in singing the songs, the beliefs came to life. One senses that though they had been imposed from the outside only two generations ago, the current people of Summerisle, including the lord himself, are true believers. Lord Summerisle is not deterred from this religiosity, even knowing explicitly of the initial artifice.
In Candyman, so much has been imposed from without on the community, the residents of Chicago’s Cabrini-Green, a low income, public housing project. They have been essentially trapped and abandoned in this neighborhood by economics, by banking policies, and by the imagination of the city at large. The fact that this nightmare folk legend has grown up in this space is fitting. In a way, Cabrini-Green is two things, one real and one a myth. It is a real low income community with real problems when it comes to public services, poverty, crime, and policing. It is also a myth—the ur-ghetto nightmare of urban America. At the time of filming, it was considered one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in America and the people living there had to carry the weight of not only real, material problems, but also that of this monstrous image.
Thus, this repository of the city’s fear (and from the beginning of Chicago’s time as a city, that area had been a slum, though it was originally Italian—only recently has it been gentrified out of existence) grows a literal monster, a monster of belief, of story, of racial violence, of terror of isolation, and of invasion.
On the inconsistencies of the Candyman story
I have heard multiple times that while the film works on many levels, the central story doesn’t make sense. What does Candyman want? Why does he terrorize ‘his own people’ rather than exacting some kind of vengeance? Is he just a boogeyman, standing behind you in the mirror, or is he a symbol of racial injustice, or is he a figure of lost love that continues beyond death?
My answer is that all of these are true and that any inconsistency is, in a way, the point. First of all, I don’t think he is a ghost. When the pompous Purcell tells Helen the story of Candyman, he states that the “legend first appeared in 1860.” He then goes on to tell a story that is about “Candyman,” not a real person. There may have been a real artist, the son of a slave, who was murdered in Chicago for loving a white woman, but I don’t think Candyman is his ghost. I think Candyman is the story itself.
When Helen is attacked by and subsequently identifies to the police the gangster calling himself “Candyman,” who, in killing and terrorizing the denizens of Cabrini-Green, is keeping the fearful story alive, she disrupts the belief of the community and hence, the story must make itself flesh and reassert its power, must offer a new ‘miracle.’ He says as much to her in a monologue taken directly from the source material, Clive Barker’s short story, “The Forbidden”:
“Your disbelief destroyed the faith of my congregation. Without them, I am nothing. So I was obliged to come and now I must kill you. Your death will be a tale to frighten children. To make lovers cling closer together in their rapture. Come with me and be immortal.”
Later, he expounds on his state:
“I am rumor. It is a blessed condition. Believe me – to be whispered about on street corners, to live in other people’s dreams, but not to have to be.”
Honestly, it’s beautiful.
Beauty
And here we have another meeting place of the two films. Beauty. Generally, Candyman is ugly—grey, cold, sad, and heavy. But this element, this concept of immortality, is simply sublime. And it is real. Story does transcend base reality, the life of meat (and the film features plenty of very corporeal, bloody, dead flesh), “the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.” As long as the story is being told, remembered, felt, feared, it lives on. Thus, even a fearful, cruel story, of horrors untold, can, even if just for a moment, offer succor, can raise one up, regardless of life circumstances and make life more than-other than, can “procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.”
Oh that all horror content aspired to such heights, or perhaps depths.
On the other hand, the initial beauty of The Wicker Man is obvious. Summerisle, as long as the crops don’t fail and you aren’t sacrificed to appease a hungry agricultural goddess, is truly idyllic. Earthy, sexual, boisterous, its citizens seem so well served by their local mythology. Regardless of the veracity of its claims, they are happy people, living good lives. And in the end, Sergeant Howie’s sacrifice (at least for the moment) is one of hope and celebration. It is a chilling and gorgeous moment when he, burning, calling out to his god, in whose faith he has never wavered, sees through the wicker frame all of the citizens of the island swaying and dancing and singing with a very real joy in their own faith, nurtured and enlivened by his torturous end.
And how beautiful this internal tension between two fervent beliefs, at odds, neither with any concrete evidence to support their continuance? And such joy at a moment of such terror and pain. Again, we approach the sublime.
In both cases, the story persists. The faith continues. The community comes together in ceremony and while in Candyman, there is an actual miracle as, head ensconced in a halo of flames, Helen manages to save baby Anthony from the bonfire, delivering an act of rebirth and becoming herself, a new story, for the people of Summerisle, the final moments of the film feel no less miraculous—life is borne again here as well. (at least for now—who knows what will happen next year, if the apples will return)
And so, in the end, given these elements of community experience, of communion and ceremony, given its being situated so precisely in its environment, a kind of nature, and most significantly, its focus on questions of faith and belief and story, I think it is fair and useful to look at Candyman in terms of the ideas of Folk Horror. It may not exactly be a parallel to a film like The Wicker Man, but it is, perhaps, the other side of the same coin.