"The moment is here, and I’m happy to have the art to accompany it."
Yahya Abdul-Mateen II explained some of the timely and relevant themes of the upcoming Candyman in an essay for the September cover of Men's Health.
"I knew that no matter when you’re making a movie about Black men being murdered by police, or the history of lynching, you can bet that conversation will be relevant in the zeitgeist," he wrote.
Candyman is scheduled for release on October 16, 2020.
Candyman was never a typical horror movie. The original 1992 film certainly came packed with slow-burning scares and supernaturally-charged violence, but the movie also held its own as a social thriller, exploring themes of gentrification, race, and social class. Twenty-eight years later, the star of the follow-up film of the same name, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, is explaining how the new movie will perhaps be even more socially relevant than the original—though this wasn't necessarily by design.
"I knew that no matter when you’re making a movie about Black men being murdered by police, or the history of lynching, you can bet that conversation will be relevant in the zeitgeist," Abdul-Mateen wrote in an essay for the September cover of Men's Health. "Especially if you’re making that movie in America."
The new Candyman, directed by Nia DaCosta—who was just contracted as the first Black woman to ever direct a Marvel film with the upcoming Captain Marvel 2—and produced by Jordan Peele, was originally planned for release in June, but was delayed due to the COVID-19 crisis. It's now slated for an October release, and we don't know too many details about the story, outside of the short trailer released several months ago.
The titular villain—a violent, hook-handed spiritual entity played with a sinister malaise by 6'5'' Tony Todd—has roots in the darkest parts of American history and culture. In the 1992 film, the story goes that Candyman is the son of an enslaved person and was raised in affluent, well-to-do community thanks to his talent in art (he painted portraits of women, and eventually fell in love and had a child with one of them). The father of the woman he had a child with set a lynch mob upon him; the mob cut his hand off with a rusty blade and covered him in honey, setting him up to be stung to death by bees. His ashes were scattered at the location of the Cabrini-Greene housing projects, where he ends up haunting and killing people for years.
The trailer for the new Candyman depicts the Cabrini-Greene location now as the location of luxury condominiums, suggesting the new film will explore the theme of gentrification in traditionally urban areas.
When he signed up for Candyman, Abdul-Mateen knew the movie would be relevant, but he had no idea it would come on the heels of the police killing of George Floyd and a wave of nationwide Black Lives Matter protests. "When we were making the movie last year, we had no idea the extent to which our message would resonate in the moment," he wrote. "But the moment is here, and I’m happy to have the art to accompany it."
Candyman is scheduled for release on October 16, 2020. You can stream the 1992 original right here on Netflix.