The character:	Candyman
The actor:	Tony Todd
The movie:	Candyman (1992)

“Hurt people hurt people” suffers from its brevity. I don’t think the phrase, if used honestly, is meant to excuse the abuse that the abused do to others. It’s axiomatic, in my home, to say that just because we feel bad doesn’t mean we are allowed to make others feel bad. All the same, people use the phrase as an excuse for cruelty. And because the phrase is so concise, it implies a destiny that I can’t abide by. Just because someone was abused does not mean that they must go forward and abuse others. To say otherwise is to deny that person’s agency. If the phrase does something well, though, it puzzles and troubles. Even a considered, patient reaction to the sentence is one that had to start with a kneejerk emotion. Simple as it is, it has no easy answer.

Candyman, for all of its subtleties and advantages, does make the subtext text in that “I know writers who use subtext and they’re all cowards” way. Think about Creature from the Black Lagoon, a barely postcolonial fable about a native South American invaded by bullying gringos who doesn’t appreciate being treated like a, well, creature when the rest of them get to be people. It’s not enough to say “Other” because we have the word “racism” that works just about as well. Clive Barker’s Nightbreed is an even more explicit version of this idea in horror, perhaps the most explicit that has ever been put on film, ending as it does with an attempt at unambiguous ethnic cleansing. Racism in the historical sense, not merely the hypothetical, arrives in Candyman. Unsurprisingly, the original short story that inspired Candyman comes from Barker, and so the myth and the truth combine in the person of Candyman himself.

A Black man has sex with a white woman. He’s found out. The white community tortures him and murders him. It is impossible to know how many times this sequence played out (or, in a variant, the Black man is merely suspected of having wanted the white woman sexually without having done or said anything) in American history, but whatever the number you have in your head is, it’s probably higher. This happens to Candyman in his life, and in death, all he has left to him is the myth of his power which turns out to be entirely truth. Call on him five times and the man with the hook hand, the one every teenager fears in a lover’s lane since the invention of the automobile, will strike you down.

One of the things I really like about this movie, a story about a spectral figure, is that his carved-out lair feels so tangible. There are high ceilings and dark walls, and a mural of his own devastation, and within it the face of his final beloved, a face so similar to Virginia Madsen’s. He’s not Beetlejuice, you know? I feel like you can say “Beetlejuice” three times almost by accident. “Candyman” five times is purposeful. It’s a warning to the person speaking just as an animal’s growl is a warning; come no closer. To say his name five times is to yank him from his reverie of a lost life and a stolen love. It takes him from brooding about a briefly wonderful past to the present, where he is, if his name is spoken five times, just a punchline. No wonder he’s hurt.