Candyman

Candyman (1992) is set in Chicago. A graduate student writing a thesis on urban legends comes across a story told in the Cabrini-Green housing project: say his name five times into a mirror and he comes. She tries it without believing it. The source is Clive Barker's story The Forbidden from Books of Blood. That story is set in Liverpool and is about British class division. Bernard Rose moved it to Chicago and turned the subject to American racial inequality. Tony Todd's scenes with bees are real. He negotiated a bonus of a thousand dollars for every sting he took, and was stung 23 times during filming. For the scene in which 500 bees enter his mouth, newly hatched bees that could not yet sting were used, to protect Virginia Madsen, who has a severe allergy. Philip Glass wrote the score. He said years later that the film had become a classic and that he still receives cheques for that music every year. Its racial politics were contested. Rose has described meeting the NAACP, who asked why Black actors should not play villains in horror films. It runs 100 minutes. Good for: urban legend horror, genre cinema with a social argument, and Philip Glass's score. Less good for: the violence is graphic and the bee sequences are physically unpleasant. The depiction of Cabrini-Green carries the outsider's gaze of its period, and that criticism still stands.