Tag: Candyman

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Watch a Scary Story Come to Life in ‘Candyman’

‘Candyman’ | Anatomy of a Scene

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“Want to hear a scary story?”

That enticing question (or horrifying one, depending on your point of view) begins this scene from the new “Candyman” (now in theaters), which is both a continuation and a reimagining of Bernard Rose’s 1992 horror film.

The update is directed by Nia DaCosta and co-written by Jordan Peele (with DaCosta and Win Rosenfield). It still involves the menacing figure who comes after you if you say his name five times in front of a mirror, but this scene reaches back to the story of the original film.

Brianna (Teyonah Parris) and her brother, Troy (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett), are both hanging out one evening with their boyfriends when Troy turns down the lights and turns up the dread to tell a story. It concerns Helen Lyle, one of the main characters (played by Virginia Madsen) from the earlier film, and how one day she just “snaps.” Killings and snow angels in blood ensue.

Troy’s story retraces the steps of the earlier film’s narrative, with some embellishments. Rather than flashing back to footage from the 1992 movie, moments are depicted with shadow puppetry. Narrating the sequence, DaCosta said that she wanted each shadow puppet segment to “be specific to the teller” because she saw it as “someone’s way of thinking about the story. It’s not necessarily the truth.” In this scene, hands move the puppets to convey a sense of how the storyteller, Troy, is also manipulating his tale.

Read the 2021 “Candyman” review.

Read the review of the 1992 film.

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How ‘Candyman’ Star Yahya Abdul-Mateen II Turned the Subsequent Huge Identify

How ‘Candyman’ Star Yahya Abdul-Mateen II Became the Next Big Name

“One of the first things that I did when I went to Chicago was to go to Cabrini-Green and put on that community planner hat,” he said. “And for a place that has a history of being as Black as that neighborhood was, that was not what I found. One has to wonder what happened to all of those families, all of those spirits? For every household, there’s a story, but when there’s no one there anymore to tell those stories, then that’s a tragedy.”

With the clout he’s beginning to accrue, Abdul-Mateen wants to make sure those stories are told right. He also knows that if he can bring even more of himself to bear on these movies, he can start steering the wave instead of surfing it.

Maybe it will help, too, once he feels he has a world to return to. Abdul-Mateen has spent the last few hectic years without a home of his own; even when he secured the keys to a New York apartment in January, he left the next day to film a new movie in Los Angeles. “This has been a very isolating experience,” he said. “I don’t want to do that anymore. I don’t have to do that anymore.”

In the future, he plans to take more cues from his “Aquaman” co-star Jason Momoa, who keeps his family and close friends around him on set: “It helps him to stay true to who he is, because he’s not always the one having to speak up and support his own values all the time.” Abdul-Mateen hopes that will help the movies he makes feel more like himself, more like the homes he grew up in, more like the community that raised him in New Orleans.

In the meantime, he’ll bring that feeling with him. When I asked Abdul-Mateen if he could name the most New Orleans thing about him, he grinned and spread his legs wide.

“The way I take up space,” he said. “Somebody from New Orleans, they sit with their legs from east to west, they’re going to gesture big.” He waved his hands, then looked into the camera and fixed me with those high beams. “I don’t necessarily do that in my everyday life. But when I decide to take up space, nobody can take it from me.”

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‘Candyman’ | Anatomy of a Scene

‘Candyman’ | Anatomy of a Scene

Hello, my name is Nia DaCosta and I am the director of “Candyman”. “You want to hear a scary story?” “No.” “Pity.” So this scene is Troy and Brianna – they are siblings – and Brianna’s friend Anthony – who is the artist – and Troy’s friend. And they are all trying to have a nice dinner together, but Troy insists on telling a ghost story about the neighborhood Brianna and Anthony just moved into. You see Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Anthony, Teyonah Parris as Brianna, Nathan Stewart-Jarrett as Troy and Kyle Kaminsky as Grady. [LAUGHTER] “This is a story about a woman named Helen Lyle. She was a graduate – a white graduate – and was writing her PhD on the urban legends of Cabrini Green. She came to Cabrini a few times to do research. You know, ask questions, shoot graffiti, people. And then one day they just snap. ”So the shadow puppets came about when Jordan Peele, the co-writer and producer of the film, came up to me and said I think we should do shadow puppets instead of doing real flashbacks. And I was in a great mood because I didn’t want to shoot any flashback scenes or cut clips from the first film. So we’ve made a decision, OK, the flashbacks are going to be shadow puppet shows. But then when I was working with the shadow puppets and trying to figure out where they fit, it turned out that they were actually much more useful. So they ended up in this scene. We wanted it to be very specific to the cashier. So every shadow puppet scene has a very specific style and point of view because it’s the way you think about the story. It’s not necessarily the truth. “Helen comes with an offering.” [BABY CRYING] And that’s why we wanted to create this separation between fact and fiction, real and fake. And that’s why you see the hands moving, because it’s about these people creating a story – puppetry, how we think about these people. And for Troy, he’s very hyperbolic because he’s trying to tell a scary story. He also says things that didn’t happen. We made the style very jagged and scary and not the personable character of Helen that we know and love from the original film. “Is my rosé still in the freezer?” “You don’t want the Moscato? Moscato is a dessert wine. ” [CHUCKLES]

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‘Candyman’ Evaluation: Who Can Take a Dawn, Sprinkle It With Blood?

‘Candyman’ Review: Who Can Take a Sunrise, Sprinkle It With Blood?

The first time Candyman the hook-wielding ghoul appeared on the big screen was in 1992, and he was making mince out of the people in Cabrini-Green, the troubled housing estate in Chicago. Since then, residents have moved (or moved out) and more than a dozen buildings have been razed to the ground. Forgotten sequels have come and gone, but Candyman remains, because cult film characters are a more durable and certainly more valuable commodity than affordable housing.

The original “Candyman”, written and directed by Bernard Rose, is more gross than scary, but it has a real bite to it. The focus is on the son of a formerly enslaved man – Tony Todd plays the title demon – who was once punished by racists for loving a white woman. Now he wanders around cutting and rolling those who call him. Just look in a mirror and say his name five times (oh, go ahead) and wait for the blood to splatter. Among those who did it back then was a white graduate student who becomes an ardent victim. The pain wasn’t exquisite as Candyman had promised, but it had its moments.

Candyman seems to pause in the sharp, trembling repeat directed by Nia DaCosta. The time is the present and the place is the bougie community that arose around Cabrini-Green. There, in slim towers with designer kitchens and window walls, the rising avant-garde sips wine and enjoys the view. Beyond that, the city sparkles pretty and its evils are a safe distance (if not for long). The troubled camera oversees the scene, and Sammy Davis Jr. – a black civil rights touchstone who became a supporter of Richard M. Nixon – belts out his sticky ’70s hit “The Candy Man” dive”). ) It is a smart reminder and warning that the past always troubles the present.

Sometimes the past bites the present exactly where it hurts, and soon the initial calm is violently reversed. As the blood begins to gush and the number of corpses increases, the story takes shape, as does the somewhat tense domestic life of a painter, Anthony (a very good Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) and a curator, the pointed Brianna (Teyonah Paris ). You soon learn that Candyman never left (well, he’s a valuable franchise item). Enter the horrors and screams and frightened laughs and the dependably indispensable Colman Domingo who shows up with a grin of a Cheshire Cat. There are also flashing police lights that are not as inviting as elsewhere.