Little Horrors

Rewatched all 4 Candyman’s back to back. 1 & 4 are great. 2 was bad, 3 was a whole new level of bad.

I love this franchise because the fluidity of urban legends—they morph and take on new roles as more and more people hear the story and slight details change. Such a cool premise which gets a little wobbly in the films but I still can appreciate.

I remember watching Candyman for the first time when I was a kid. My mom copied probably every blockbuster tape she ever rented. These films were our babysitters as she left us alone for long periods of time—sometimes all day, but it was the 80s so no one gave a rats.

She worked full-time as a nurse’s aide doing home health checks in the ‘boonies’ of the South, studying to be a nurse herself, for which she was going to school full-time. All that would eventually slow her down until the cancer could catch up, and stop her for good. But this summer—it was one of the good ones. One of the summers where she laughed more and we went to things like craft fairs in the Ozarks, camping, and bluegrass events. Little gatherings of 50-100 ppl or so. Gatherings I would never imagined I’d want to go to but ended up being memories that I still treasure. We’d sit up all night listening to people play banjo or homemade instruments on a makeshift stage or in a tiny, old church hung with garlands of moss. We’d run around barefoot with “hill” kids whose clothes looked like they were from another time period and eat popcorn right off a campfire Or have a fried bologna sandwich. By the end of the night, the morning chill would set in and I remember feeling cold in June as I leaned against my mom on a long, wood bench amongst many empty ones. Just sitting and watching as the last band played. It was a good summer.

My brother and I had come home to our tiny apartment in our tiny town. We’d been exploring. I remember we had fought. We weren’t talking. My brother grabbed a tape and put it on without asking if I was interested. Candyman. Probably a stupid kids movie. I likely complained and wanted to see Labyrinth, Flight of the Navigator, or Dark Crystal for the 80th time.

We watched, afixed in horror. I remember literally feeling the filth of the gore, the tension of the projects housing. All along, Tony Todd’s voice permeating our consciousnesses—keeping us. We were his victims.

“What’re you doing!”

It was rhetorical. Suddenly, mom was behind us and the combination of shock, and timing in the film had left us screaming what my mom used to refer to as “bloody murder”. We immediately threw ourselves into explanation mode on how we had come to be watching a film that we absolutely should not have been—the misconstruction of the name, for instance, then how it lured us in with plot; then, we blathered about the curse, the mirrors, the name being said 5 times, the deadly outcome.

She gave us her usual pitch on why we were in trouble, that we were grounded to our rooms until they were clean, and such. We kept trying to derail her from these piling consequences with appeals, stating that we were too scared to even shut the television off for fear that the Candyman was coming for us. She hollered just enough above our octaves to silence the room as she sought to prove there was no Candyman—and she walked straight to the mirror that hung just beside the hallway entrance to demonstrate.

“Candyman, Candyman, Candyman, Candyman…”

We screamed so loud, I’m certain the neighbors heard. We begged her to refrain from that last Candyman, explaining we would all die—talking over each other, crying.

“Then turn that goddamn TV off and clean your rooms!”

She yelled. I clicked the remote off and looked up just in time to see her smirk as she headed down the hall to her bedroom. Witch.

I’ve been an avid horror fan since that day.