A new trailer for Candyman, an upcoming film based in part on a Clive Barker horror story, was released on Thursday. Jordan Peele, who won an Oscar for his screenplay for 2017’s Get Out, is its co-writer and co-producer, and it's set for release on June 12.
The film acts as a sequel to the 1992 film of the same name, which told the story of a sociology student, played by Virginia Madsen, researching an urban legend about a murderous ghost. He’s said to haunt Chicago’s Cabrini-Green housing projects, and according to the myth, he can be summoned by saying his name—“Candyman”—five times while looking in a mirror. It turns out that the ghost, played by the wonderful Tony Todd, is very real; he’s the vengeful spirit of a black painter who was attacked by a racist mob in the 1890s for having a relationship with a white woman. They cut off one of his hands and set a swarm of bees upon him, resulting in his death—and now, whenever he appears, he has a hook for a hand and bees herald his presence.
The 1992 movie was based on Barker’s story “The Forbidden,” which appeared in the fifth volume of his 1980s Books of Blood collections, published in 1985. Barker’s tale was different in several ways; it’s set in a U.K. housing estate, for one, and its pale-skinned ghost doesn’t share key details of the film ghost’s backstory.
The new Candyman is set in the present day, nearly 30 years after the events of the previous movie, and it addresses new themes. It focuses on a painter, played by Watchmen’s Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, who investigates the legend of Candyman in Cabrini as it is today—“now gentrified beyond recognition and inhabited by upwardly mobile millennials,” as Universal Pictures describes it in a summary of the film.
Todd reprises his role in the new movie, which is directed and co-written by Nia DaCosta, who previous helmed the well-received 2018 film Little Woods.
David Rapp is the senior Indie editor.
