New Featurette for CANDYMAN Takes a Look Inside the Urban Legend Horror Thriller Reboot
We’ve got a featurette to share with you today for the Jordan Peele-produced and Nia DaCosta-directed reboot of the urban legend horror-thriller Candyman. The featurette offers an inside look at the film and explains what we can expect from it.
The featurette includes interviews with Peele and DaCosta, and Peele explains, “I’ve always been fascinated with urban legends. Candyman is the patron saint of the urban legend.” DaCosta went on to say, “Candyman was a real sort of urban legend when I was growing up, it wasn’t just attached to the movie. For us, Candyman was some kind of demon ghost man killing people in the Projects.”
Peele went on to say, “We didn’t have a Black Freddy. We didn’t have a Black Jason. It was important that this Candyman be told from the Black perspective.” When talking about the political themes of the story DaCoasta said, “Candyman is so perennial. We’re talking about the cycles of violence and how history repeats itself and how we collectively process trauma through stories. It’s always a time to tell a story like Candyman, which is the big tragedy of the tale in the first place. ”
The movie will offer us “a fresh take on the blood-chilling urban legend that your friend’s older sibling probably told you about at a sleepover: Candyman.” Here’s the synopsis:
For as long as residents can remember, the housing projects of Chicago’s Cabrini Green neighborhood were terrorized by a word-of-mouth ghost story about a supernatural killer with a hook for a hand, easily summoned by those daring to repeat his name five times into a mirror. In present day, a decade after the last of the Cabrini towers were torn down, visual artist Anthony McCoy (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II; HBO’s Watchmen, Us) and his girlfriend, gallery director Brianna Cartwright (Teyonah Parris; If Beale Street Could Talk, The Photograph), move into a luxury loft condo in Cabrini, now gentrified beyond recognition and inhabited by upwardly mobile millennials.
With Anthony’s painting career on the brink of stalling, a chance encounter with a Cabrini Green old-timer (Colman Domingo; HBO’s Euphoria, Assassination Nation) exposes Anthony to the tragically horrific nature of the true story behind Candyman. Anxious to maintain his status in the Chicago art world, Anthony begins to explore these macabre details in his studio as fresh grist for paintings, unknowingly opening a door to a complex past that unravels his own sanity and unleashes a terrifyingly viral wave of violence that puts him on a collision course with destiny.
Candyman is set to hit theaters on August 27, 2021.