Before we get too bogged down in half-baked theorising, let's talk about why it's just a damn good film first.
The plot follows Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen), a grad student writing a thesis on modern folklore and urban legend, who becomes fixated on 'the Candyman,' (Tony Todd) a hook-handed supernatural killer, the mutilated-and-murdered son of an ex-slave, who wreaks bloody revenge on anyone who says his name five times into a mirror. A very typical urban legend, of course, one that we're all familiar with, local variations included. As her investigations into a spree of killings attributed to the monster progress, she finds herself getting drawn further and further into the mythology of the Candyman. While initially it seems that Candyman is just an identity adopted by a local gangster, it swiftly becomes apparent that Candyman, hook-hand and all, is very real indeed. Candyman is seeking to extend and reinforce his myth, having no existence beyond the belief that people have in him (his 'congregation'). After attempting to drag Helen into his story, she escapes, but dies in the process, and becomes a myth in her own right, one just as blood-thirsty and vengeful as the one she unwittingly usurped.
Candyman is, in some ways, less a slasher movie than it is a movie about slasher movies. It begins with a knowing nod to the classic formula of the slasher movie: the babysitter, sexual immorality, the necessarily brutal murder. I was reminded of The Cabin in the Woods, which I will be writing about in the future, in that it dealt with and, to an extent, deconstructed the expectations of the audience (not to the same level of excellent abstraction as TCITW, but impressive nonetheless). I am, perhaps, getting a little distracted. Candyman is not a meta-film per se, but it is certainly meta-horror, perhaps even meta-mythic (which would be a great name for a band...). The film explores the evolution of stories and mythology, our fixation on the bloody and the nightmarish, though updating it for a modern, urban context.
The advent of modernity has not abolished mythology, it has simply created a new ones. Perhaps not quite so virulent as they once were, but still present all the same. Interestingly, it is those with the status of 'outsider' in Candyman who are most afflicted by his presence, namely, the black urban poor. There is a scene at the beginning of the film were Helen mentions that the apartment block she lives in was originally intended to be 'project housing,' but it was realised after construction that there were no local features (highways, bridges and so forth) around it to insulate it from the rest of the city. The urban poor, instead, are cut off from the rest of the city and largely left to fend for themselves. Initially, Helen assumes that the prevalence of Candyman mythology, ritual and graffiti ('Sweets to the sweet') is a coping mechanism for the disenfranchised to make sense of their environment, filled with casual violence and brutality; like I mentioned above, it is initially suggested (the audience, surely, does not believe this explanation) that the killings blamed on Candyman are just those of a local gangster creating an aura of fear around himself. Indeed, this is partially true, but this does not detract from the reality of Candyman.
It is not accidental that her own disenfranchisement, her committal to the status of outsider (insane, criminal, child-killer), when Candyman frames her for his own deeds, occurs at the same time that she is forced to absolutely accept that this supernatural force does exist. When she, an educated, middle-class, affluent white woman is robbed of her power of self-determination and her social status, she understands the truth of the situation. Candyman does exist, he is a genuine supernatural force, and those who believe in him are not deluded, they are, in fact, right. Their version of events, their belief that they are at the mercy of a force beyond reason, comprehension or resistance, is not a 'coping mechanism,' but an actuality. It is not a clever game for intellectuals, a puzzle to be figured out from the comfort of an armchair, but a destructive reality that is only disestablished when Helen accepts that it is true and sacrifices her own life to frustrate its plans (though the existence of two sequels suggest limited success...perhaps it's best to ignore them).
Ultimately, though Candyman is destroyed, Helen becomes a vengeful spirit in her own right, obeying the same rules (five times into a mirror), and slaying her unfaithful husband, in such a way that implicates the woman he left her for. The myth, the meme, perhaps, has not ceased to be, it has merely adapted and evolved itself. The cycle of revenge and murder continues as it always did, uninterrupted, just with a different face. Nothing, in the end, has really changed at all.
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