They Will Say: Ritual Naming and Living beyond the Pale with Candyman

Abstract

Bernard Rose’s 1992 film, Candyman, and Nia DaCosta’s 2021 remake of it use memorial rituals of naming and summoning that give life to Black memory and trauma. Through the use of Achille Mbembe’s work in Necropolitics, Christina Sharpe’s description of wake work in her book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, and Émile Durkheim’s sacred-profane dichotomy, this article illustrates how, when both films are read together, they enact a ritual of mourning and proclamation with the utterance of Candyman that is adjacent to the #SayTheirNames hashtags of the Black Lives Matter movement. By reading these films as one ritualistic endeavor, this article looks at the uses of mirrors, naming, and summoning as sacred rites that implicate those within and outside the film to say the name of Candyman and revive not only the fictional dead but also the real memory of Black victims of brutality. Overall, the article aims to demonstrate how the 1992 and 2021 films encourage a ritual that insists on Black memory, breaks through the world of the living, and resuscitates the dead into the single configuration of Candyman.

I can remember standing in front of the bathroom mirror at school with my friends, giggling as we turned the lights off and stared at our dark reflections. I remember all of us chanting, “Bloody Mary.” I wanted to see a ghost, but a white woman covered in blood never appeared behind four middle-school Black girls from South Carolina. So, we tried “Candyman.” By the time we got to the third incantation, we ran out of the bathroom, fully believing we could hear something coming from the walls.

In retrospect, it does not make sense for jumpy schoolchildren to want to summon a murderous fictional character. Nevertheless, there was something (is still something) provocative and sacred about uttering a forbidden name and feeling that you are able to draw forth a being from the imaginary into reality, from the dead into the land of the living. Candyman is one of the few slasher villains in the American horror film canon whose existence relies only on ritual and invocation. Only when he is named does he live, and only when he is named does he kill, and because of the nature of this ritual, Candyman toys with the possibility of living off the screen.

Considering this, the 1992 film directed by Bernard Rose and the rebooted Candyman directed by Nia DaCosta demonstrate the sustained vitality of Black existence and memory through the utterance of a name. This article is concerned with the advent of Black life after death and the active memory invoked by protest movements like Black Lives Matter and the declarations of #SayHerName, #SayHisName, and #SayTheirName. Naming Candyman aligns with these proclamations, since Candyman is the amalgamation of Black victimhood due to racial violence. These rallying cries for recognition are also dares, invocations, and provocations. I dare you to say the name of a victim murdered by the state. I dare you to say the name of a victim of mob violence. I dare you to remember them and recognize their humanity. As such, by using Émile Durkheim’s myth-ritual theory of the sacred and profane and Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics, this article seeks to demonstrate how the figure of Candyman, how the ritual utterance of “Candyman,” illustrates a life beyond death by implicating not only the characters in the film but also the spectators watching it inside its ritual. In employing Christina Sharpe’s definition of wake work from her book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, I look at both Candyman films as a ritual of mourning/summoning that illustrates what it means for Candyman to exist beyond the pale, “outside or beyond the bounds (of),” a fictional space of death.¹

Reading the two films together as a memorial ritual, I look at the first film as the initiation of the ritual, the first layer of summoning that brings forth the murdered and mutilated Daniel Robitaille. The first film, directed by Rose, demonstrates the spectacle of the ritual when wielded by Helen Lyle, a white woman, that engulfs the viewer in the world that made Candyman. The second film, directed by DaCosta, however, is the subsequent layer of the ritual summoning. It extends beyond Cabrini-Green, beyond the film itself, and showcases the radical use of the summoning to include many figures of state and mob violence. For example, the film highlights figures such as George Stinney Jr., who, at fourteen years of age, was one of the youngest people in the United States to be executed in South Carolina for the alleged murder of two white girls.² If Rose’s film asks how we get those outside the Black community to remember our fallen—a question asked clumsily and in a racially charged manner—DaCosta’s film answers it, wholly and completely; we say their name, we summon their memory, and give these victims a life beyond that shows itself as an insistent defense of Black life and a testimony to Black memory. Mbembe writes:

Candyman, the name and figure, is ceaselessly projected. The rituals within the films, starting with the use of mirrors, the naming, and the final summoning, loosen the ties between the past and present, reviving the dead. In essence, when I attempted to conjure Candyman at the age of twelve in my middle-school bathroom, I wasn’t just invoking a fictional character or playing with the idea of an urban legend. I was involved with a ritual summoning, a memorial rite. I tried to summon the figure of Candyman, but when I said the name, I wasn’t just summoning a character. I was using language and naming to conjure the memory of George Stinney Jr., Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Breonna Taylor, Philando Castile, Sandra Bland, George Floyd, Sonya Massey, among the many others. Saying the name is an act of resuscitation for the victims of brutality across America. In this sense, because of the very real threat to Black lives, Candyman, in his/their manifestation of visceral mourning, becomes real.

Candyman: Initiation of Sacred Spaces and the Use of Mirrors

Catoptromancy, the summoning of or divination with spirits, needs to start with a mirror or a reflection.⁴ In Western traditions, these divination and summoning rituals have been applied to urban legends, specifically and most popularly, Bloody Mary and Candyman, which begin by staring into a mirror. While many scholars, such as Laura Wyrick, have applied Jacques Lacan to close-read the use of mirrors within Rose’s Candyman, this essay will focus on reflections as a marker of a sacred space used to rupture the world of the living through Durkheim’s sacred-profane dichotomy. Durkheim speaks to a separation between the everyday mundane world and the sacred world. Once practitioners begin a ritual, they are no longer a part of the mundane world (considered profane) but are participating in an extraordinary dimension (the sacred world) that will produce extraordinary results.

In “What Is a Rite? Émile Durkheim, a Hundred Years Later,” Lorenzo D’Orsi and Fabio Dei state: “The transition from the sacred to the profane . . . entails a radical metamorphosis. In a Durkheimian perspective, the task of religious rites is that of reinforcing this separation, thus averting the collapse of the sacred into the profane.”⁵ Considering this, mirrors and reflections transform the space the speaker is in from a mundane and therefore profane space to a sacred space primed for the arrival of Candyman. More important, the use of mirrors breaches the profane world, keeping the doorway open between the living and the dead.

About the 1992 film, Wyrick writes: “Mirror reflections and breakthroughs in Candyman demonstrate the inverse links between persons and places . . . between temporal being and temporal becoming that connect narrative to narrative in order to form personal and collective history. . . . The mirror as an/Other space, hides a ‘real’ beyond but paradoxically displays its real in its surface.”⁶ Wyrick’s work demonstrates how the mirror reflections represent the blurred boundaries between personal and collective memory within the 1992 film. For my purposes, however, I am furthering these claims by illustrating how the act of blurring the lines between personal and collective memory through the mirror reflections begins the memorial ritual of Candyman and ruptures the profane world.

At the beginning of the film, Helen listens to a variation of the Candyman legend told to her by a white student that retells his terrorizing a white teenage couple. However, two Black janitors at the university tell her that they also know of the Candyman story, not as a legend but as a real murder that happened to a woman named Ruthie Jean in the housing projects of Cabrini-Green. Although Helen initially dismisses the murder as another instance of gun violence, her interest is piqued when she realizes that the murder weapon was a hook. Helen’s position as a well-off white woman in academia cuts her off from the experience of Black Americans who live in death-worlds. In Necropolitics Mbembe writes, “Death-worlds [are] . . . forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead” (N, 92). The residents of Cabrini-Green are among the living dead, and Helen, as a white woman, as a truly living person, does not have to think about them unless she wants to.

Her interest in Candyman, however, puts her parallel to this death-world. Her apartment was created to be a part of the projects, but when officials realized that there was no way to cut it off from the rest of the city, they made it into a luxury condo instead. Helen’s apartment is a mirror of the housing complexes in Cabrini-Green, but her summoning of Candyman does not work because it does not occur within the sacred space of the Cabrini-Green death-world, the other side of the white mirror. Instead, it happens within the profane and mundane living space of Helen’s apartment.

Only in the sacred Black death-world, a location overlaid with repeating trauma and Black death, can the ritual be initiated. This happens when Helen first visits Cabrini-Green and crawls through the apartment mirror of the murdered Ruthie Jean. When she comes out of the other side, we learn that she crawled through the mouth of Candyman, who is spray-painted on the wall. This sequence illustrates that, as a white woman, Helen can participate in the ritual only when she has physically pulled herself through the mirrored death-world. Only after she has transgressed the boundary between the living and the dead will Candyman appear. This is demonstrated when she finally sees Candyman after being attacked in the public bathroom of Cabrini-Green. Throughout the film, Helen is slowly dragged into this mirrored death space. Reflections and mirrors accompany her whenever she hears, sees, or is in the presence of Candyman. For example, after Helen sees Candyman, she loses consciousness and ends up in Ann Marie’s apartment in Cabrini-Green. She is covered in blood, and Ann Marie’s baby is missing. When she is subsequently arrested and institutionalized, she sits in front of a doctor near four sets of TV screens that reflect her face as she is shown thrashing about in her room. These scenes showcase that the more Helen enmeshes herself in the lore of Candyman, the more she becomes a part of the mirrored death-world and the more she becomes a tool in this ritual.

The instances in the film when Helen’s face or body is reflected in screens or mirrors indicate that her power as a white woman has been subsumed by Candyman. This contrasts with the time when Cabrini-Green is shut down after she is attacked. Instead of being considered a victim when she is found covered in blood in Ann Marie’s apartment, she is now suspected as a perpetrator. The police are not interested in her story or what she has to say. In this case, her power as a white woman holds no sway because of her continued presence in the mirrored death-world of Cabrini-Green and her proximity to Candyman. The longer she stays within his sphere, the more dead she becomes. This is reinforced in the scene with the psychologist. Her continued incarceration within the psychiatric hospital displays her lack of power in the living white world. Mbembe writes: “Modern democracies have always evinced their tolerance for a certain political violence. . . . They have integrated forms of brutality into their culture, forms borne by a range of private institutions acting on top of the state” (N, 16–17). As Helen becomes fully entrenched in the Black death-world of Cabrini-Green, she is subject to the systematic violence usually reserved for Black Americans.

Even when Helen does escape and returns to her apartment, it is not the same. Her fiancé has repainted it and moved in with one of his students. At this point in the film, Helen no longer belongs to the white profane world of the living and so returns to Cabrini-Green. These occurrences and interactions represent how, through the mirror, the act of opening up a sacred death-world colonizes Helen. In Necropolitics Mbembe states,

The use of the mirror in the 1992 film not only triggers the separation between the profane and sacred worlds but also pushes the two worlds together to colonize the living. However, the use of the reflections does not efface the traces of violence used on the Black world, such as systemic institutionalization. Instead, it fastens Helen’s living silhouette to these spaces of oppression and subjugation and apprehends her image as a specular device for Candyman’s use. Candyman, with his hook for a hand, severs Helen’s connection to the living white world. He kills her socially when she is institutionalized. This is why at the end of the movie when her ex-lover stares into the mirror, she appears ready to haunt and colonize her previous world. She becomes a part of the mirrored death existence Black people face and is used as a tool to continue this imposition on the white profane world.

In a similar vein, although with different applications, the 2021 film directed by DaCosta also uses mirrors and reflections to signify not only the beginning of this ritualistic summoning but also the entry point into the sacred world. When the 2021 film starts and the production credits roll, the Universal, Paramount, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and Monkeypaw Production logos are inverted as if the audiences were seeing them through a mirror. Even before the actual film narrative starts, the movie signals that we are entering the sacred arena of a ritual. The 2021 film forces the audience to view the film through a mirrored lens, implicating the audience in this ritualistic space. This use of reflections declares to spectators that they are leaving the profane (mundane) experience of typical movie watchers and entering into a different experience altogether.

Like Rose’s film, the 2021 version also employs moments of mirrored reflections in integral scenes as it showcases Anthony, a Black man from Cabrini-Green (though his origin is initially hidden from him) who is drawn into the ritualistic endeavors of Candyman. For example, one of the first instances of the importance of mirrors and reflections is when the film begins in Cabrini-Green in the seventies. Police stand guard outside the housing complexes, looking for Sherman Fields, a Black man suspected of putting razor blades in candy and killing a white girl. A young Black kid named Billy walks into the laundromat where there is a large hole in the wall, and as he completes his chore, he stares into a mirror that showcases the hole in the wall, where Fields walks out and gives him candy. Following Billy’s startled scream, the police rush in and kill Fields.

This sequence, which begins with the police stationed outside the occupied death-world of Cabrini-Green, shows that the police are there not to protect the residents but to implicate them in any form of crime. It also showcases how the spectacle of Black death resides close to Black daily existence. Fields is killed in a laundry room of a housing complex where children and families live, and they have to continue living within that space long after he is murdered. The dead live close to death. The mirror shows not only the hole where Fields was hiding but also how daily life in this mirrored death-world of Cabrini-Green operates, an operation that is out of the norm for the profane white world divided by the highway, a world where state-sanctioned death is embedded in daily existence.

This mirrored existence of Black death and tragedy is also illustrated within Anthony’s art exhibit. When Anthony hears Fields’s story, he decides to paint him for his next exhibition and positions a mirror that viewers have to open as they say “Candyman” to reveal the painting. He explains to a critic that this is to “calibrate tragedy into a focused lineage that culminates in the now.” Specifically, his exhibit displays various instances of Black tragedies that have occurred in the same space by forcing people to look through a mirror.

In this scene, however, the critic, a white woman, states, “Your kind are the real pioneers of that cycle [of violence].” Although she adds that it is “artists” who come in and gentrify these neighborhoods, her words not so subtly accuse the Black community of being perpetrators of their own victimization. These words almost mirror what Helen in the 1992 film says about residents of Cabrini-Green and the reason they have the Candyman legend: “[They are] a community protecting itself from the horrors of its own self.” Both women, white women who live outside the sphere and mirror of Black existence, attribute to the people themselves the horrors associated with the tragedy surrounding the death-world of Cabrini-Green.

Opening up the mirror in Anthony’s exhibit to reveal a painting of a brutalized Fields exposes the sacred world of Black existence, which includes a level of state violence, brutality, and oppression that is not normal in the profane world of whiteness. This is why it is in the space of the exhibition, a space where Anthony has laid bare the ritual and placed the mirror, that Candyman appears and makes his first kill. While for the audience the ritual begins with the credits, for the characters who do not believe (mainly critics of Anthony’s work), it begins here. As such, Anthony aligns the tragedies that have occurred at Cabrini-Green and focuses them within the art exhibit through the use of a mirror, a specular device that, as Mbembe explains, acts as a doorway for the past to transgress into the present. The mirror is specifically for the Black past of the dead to enter the white living present so that it is at the visceral forefront of public consciousness.

Consequently, standing in front of the mirror, opening up the mirror, or being reflected in mirrors brings not just the characters but also the audience closer to the realities that Black Americans face. The employment of mirrors, in the act of catoptromancy as well as in the films, opens the passage between Black death-worlds and the living white world, between the sacred and the profane. As a result, this initiates a rift that can bring forth memory in the form of a vengeful specter.

Candyman: Naming as a Memorial Rite for Black Existence and Black Afterlife

If you say his name five times in the mirror, he will appear. This is the instruction given for the incantation of Candyman. While standing in front of the mirror or near any type of reflection opens the threshold between the sacred and profane, it is the utterance of his name that strengthens this connection and solidifies the ritual to bring him forth.

Myth-ritual theory states: “Rituals arose as a means of controlling the otherwise uncontrollable of nature. In ritual, the desired end is acted out and thereby, it is believed, effected. Ritual works on the basis of what [James George] Frazer calls the ‘law of similarity’: the belief that like produces like, the belief that the imitation of an action causes it to happen.”⁷ As such, the uncontrollable within Black existence would be state-sanctioned violence or mob violence provoked by white supremacy. The desired end in enacting the ritual of stating Candyman’s moniker (not even his actual name) is to revive a memory of a Black person, any Black person murdered by the systems of white supremacy. The more this moniker is stated, the more this memory, this revenant, is believed in. With this, the person begins to matter in the present, and their ties to the living world are strengthened.

In both films, not only does the naming of Candyman, whether it is Robitaille, Fields, or Anthony, encapsulate the ritual that makes sense of violence against Black people and reinstate their memory, but it also aligns with the Black Lives Matter movement and the calls of “Say their name.” As such, both films (though the 1992 version is before the advent of the Black Lives Matter movement) apply naming within this ritual space as a memorial rite. The repetition of the name solidifies the belief in Candyman, and this reiteration of his name shows that he matters outside his death-world.

In the original film, Helen utters the incantation as a joke with her friend Bernadette. They huddle in her bathroom together, and she states Candyman’s name five times. Bernadette does not. As stated above, Candyman was not summoned when she performed the ritual in her own apartment, because her apartment was in the profane world of whiteness. But once she crawls through the mirror in Cabrini-Green and through the mouth of the painted Candyman, she is encapsulated into the sacred death-world of Blackness.

As such, stating the name in her apartment and crawling through the mirror solidifies her place within this memorial ritual. When Candyman first appears in the flesh, he states: “Helen, I came for you. You doubted me. You were not content with the stories, so I was obliged to come.” Furthermore, throughout the film she hears his voice say, “Believe in me. Be my victim.” Although Helen stated his name and did the incantation in front of the mirror, her disbelief as well as her lack of research into Candyman’s identity is her undoing. (In a scene in which she is describing her project in front of other professors at dinner, it becomes clear that she did not know Robitaille’s actual history.)

This example of incantation and naming in the 1992 film demonstrates how Black death and Black existence are not real to white individuals. Although Bernadette becomes a victim of Candyman, she does not participate in the naming that Helen starts. Even when Helen is excitedly telling her about the murder of Ruthie Jean, Bernadette tells her, “This is sick, this is not one of your fairytales.” This interaction demonstrates how Black death is seen as a spectacle for white audiences to gawk and leer at; it appears to be something for them to use for some underlying purpose but not to empathize with. It also shows how even the story of the Black tortured body is commodified among white academics.

For instance, the killing of Robitaille is described with dramatized glee by the professor, who wields his story to one-up Helen’s claim on Candyman. He describes the crime of miscegenation, how the white mob chased Robitaille down, beat him, cut off his hand, smothered him with honey, and let bees sting him to death before burning his body. Mbembe states: “A new cultural sensibility emerges in which killing the enemy of the state is an extension of play. More intimate, lurid, and leisurely forms of cruelty begin to take shape” (N, 73). This retelling, which demonstrates how much more one academic knows about the legend than the other, encapsulates how the naming of Candyman by people outside the community is more a frivolous game than an act of memorializing. As a result, the memorial ritual turns on the frivolous person engaging in the ritual and devours them.

On a different note, the naming in the 2021 film is taken up with much more solemnity than in the 1992 version. In the 2021 film, when we first hear about Candyman, it is about what happened to Helen in 1992. Yet when Anthony further investigates by going to Cabrini-Green, he gets the story about Fields from William Burke, a person from Cabrini-Green who was there at the time. Burke states of Fields, “His face was beaten so bad that he was unrecognizable, his name disappeared, and he became Candyman.” Often, in America, hundreds of Black and Brown murdered victims are erased from public consciousness, their names turned to static slush as more bodies are added to the growing list of brutal fatalities. In the film there are so many names to remember and so many people to memorialize, but all are morphed by legend and rumor into just one figure: Candyman. Candyman’s name and legend subsidizes the stories and horror of Black individuals in a way that erases distinct identity but also amplifies a system of a faceless but not nameless mourning. Saying his name or not saying his name recognizes the power of invoking the memory of the dead whether it is painful or not. In the film it is Black people in particular who refuse to declare the name. For example, Brianna’s brother states, “Black people don’t need to be summoning shit,” and Anthony’s mother, revealed to be Ann Marie, the woman Helen met in the original film, refuses to say the legendary moniker.

Unlike their white counterparts in this film and the 1992 film, most of the Black people are solemn when considering the implications of naming Candyman. Memory is painful, and naming Candyman brings that pain to the forefront and remakes the memory of him into a vengeful specter, wreaking havoc on anyone and anything. In this sense, Candyman is an amalgamation of all the pain, frustration, and anger within the Black community. Not saying his name is a way to defend the dead and protect themselves from the traumatic memories associated with the extrajudicial killing of Black people.

Sharpe asks: “What does it mean to defend the dead? To tend to the Black dead and dying: to tend to the Black person, to Black people, always living in the push toward our death? It means work. It is work: hard emotional, physical, and intellectual work that demands vigilant attendance to the needs of the dying . . . and also to the needs of the living.”⁸ The Black people involved in this catoptromancy ritual in the 2021 film are all working toward defending the dead and upholding the sanctity of the ritual in their own ways. Some of them are like Anthony, who incites others from outside the sacred world of Blackness to say his name through art, or like Burke, who aids the spirit of Candyman to possess Anthony and create the Say My Name killer so the memory can live on. Both are acts of mourning through the repetition and insistence of naming. Instead of protecting themselves from the possible trauma that can occur when involving themselves in this ritual, they embrace it and expel it outward, forcing others to repeat the invocation five times as well. In “Nothing Matters,” Joseph R. Winters writes:

Taking this into account, the individuals who immediately say nothing are defending the dead and the living through their silence, knowing that the repetition of naming is a conjuring of pain and anger.

On the other hand, the individuals who knowingly incite naming are weaponizing the dead, coercing the living world to acknowledge them, to no longer doubt the stories. Resaying the moniker forces others to be a witness to an insistent Black afterlife. The name Candyman superimposes itself among the murdered and brutalized, and repeating this name is an insistence of the anger and terror that Black existence lives through. It reverberates through an archive of the dead. Mbembe declares, “For an incomplete archive to speak with the fullness of a voice, it has to be created, not out of nothing but out of the debris of information, on the very site of the ruins, the remains and traces left behind by those who passed away” (N, 160–61). As Burke proclaims, Candyman is not just one person or one victim, “it’s the whole damn hive.” It’s a hive of disembodied and disenfranchised voices, a hive that does not tolerate a casual or frivolous naming, a hive that, once knocked with a stick five times, buzzes and solidifies into a specter of vengeance that sows death and destruction and insists on living after everything.

Candyman: The Conjuring of Black Vengeance/ Insistence

Mbembe’s statement “Killing is the lowest form of survival” reverberates throughout the Candyman franchise (N, 88), when Candyman says, “With my hook for a hand I’ll split you from your groin to your gullet.” When one is already considered approximate to death, as Robitaille and Fields were when they were alive, the lowest form of survival is all they have left. Candyman lives in rumor and legend, and once he is summoned through the ritual, it is imperative that these specters of brutalized Black figures, like Robitaille and Fields, do whatever is necessary to keep their memory alive. The only way to do that is to kill, to add bodies and flesh to their legend so that it can remain alive in the consciousness of those who attempt the ritual with thoughtlessness instead of understanding its implications. Summoning Candyman is not just about Black vengeance made manifest; it is about the insistence of Black life after death by any means necessary.

In Rose’s film, after standing in front of the mirror or in front of a reflection, after opening the doorway to the realm of the other, after poking the hive five times to conjure the dead, Helen summons Candyman. He appears in the flesh for the first time nearly forty-five minutes into the film when Helen leaves the hospital after getting attacked. When he appears, he states: “Your disbelief destroyed the faith in my congregation, without them, I am nothing. So I was obliged to come, and now I must kill you. Your death will be a tale to frighten children.” Because Helen irresponsibly and flippantly names Candyman as a joke, when he appears he intends to possess and consume her so that her death becomes a part of his legacy to live on.

Black death, unfortunately, is considered the norm, but when a white person becomes a part of this legend and history, it revitalizes it so that the Candyman, the Black archive of death, can live on. Burke in the 2021 film says about Helen’s connection to the legend, “One white girl and the story lives forever.” This is why in the 1992 film, instead of immediately killing Helen, Candyman uses her. He possesses her, putting her into a hypnotic state, and manipulates situations so that she is considered the suspect when Ann Marie’s baby goes missing, when her dog is killed, or when Helen’s friend Bernadette is murdered. He draws out her pain by harming those around her and making her the prime perpetrator.

In Horror Noire Robin R. Means Coleman describes the 1992 film as an ode to white womanhood: “In the end, Candyman disappears along with the history of racism that bore him. It is all about Helen. As a white woman, she can do what Candyman would not: terrorize those on the other side of the tracks.”¹⁰ This statement is not wrong, but it is important to note that becoming monstrous means becoming the other. Candyman, whose story was academic fodder for professors who recounted his death and torture to one-up each other, whose name was used as a joke by Helen, does not hold currency in the living white world. He exists in the death-world of Cabrini-Green behind the mirrors and in the shadows. By consuming Helen, cutting her off from her world, and making her a part of his legend, he has prolonged his life once more.

It is certainly true that Helen’s attachment to this legend whitewashes the other deaths that have happened at Cabrini-Green. “Helen’s emergence as the face of Cabrini-Green violence also whitewashes the more prevalent incidence of Black victimization [Like Girl X and Dantrelle Williams]. Surprisingly, this whitewashing effort was furthered by the Black locals involved in the Helen incident.”¹¹ However, the silence of the locals goes back to defending the dead but, even more specifically, to defending the living. Who would have believed them? Would saying that Helen was hypnotized and possessed by a Black man have brought justice or more violence to the community? The latter is the obvious answer. Saying nothing, not even his name, protects everyone, inasmuch as they can be protected.

Nevertheless, I agree that Helen whitewashes the other prevalent instances of Black victimization. This is why it is important to read the two films together, since the 2021 film directly connects the story of Helen to the legend of Candyman after the ending of the first film. In DaCosta’s film, Helen’s story is not that of white victimhood; she is the perpetrator. She is labeled as a crazy woman who kidnapped an infant and tried to throw him into a bonfire. Candyman devoured Helen’s ties to the white world and framed her as the culprit. His name and legend are still attached to her, and when people look into the history and the legend, as Anthony does, they will still say his name.

In furthering this point, Anthony’s art exhibit Say My Name garners the attention of a young white girl named Hayley. At school, she bullies a Black girl who locks herself in a stall, and then Hayley, along with her friends, conjures Candyman in the mirror. She and her friends are killed, and it makes the news. The conjuring and subsequent murders that Candyman commits act as an insistence to keep the memory alive. Black insistence ruptures the profane and superimposes the ritual onto those outside the Black community. Mbembe writes: “Neither the human-of-terror nor the terrorized human—both of them new substitutes for the citizen—foreswear murder. On the contrary, when they do not purely and simply believe in death (given or received), they take it as the ultimate guarantee of a history tempered in iron and steel—the history of Being” (N, 7). There are no honorable acts in a horror movie. The slasher villain is violence personified. Candyman splits the world from groin to gullet and insists on his memory, his history of Being, born in blood.

As this specter continues to kill, he gains prominence and his memory persists. Aubrey Cannon, in “Spatial Narratives of Death, Memory, and Transcendence,” writes, “As successive burials accumulate within a common space, personal memory of the recent dead blends with social memory of the forgotten dead and with daily perceptions of the living to reinforce an identity and existence that transcend the individual and his or her generation.”¹² With Candyman himself a common space of legend and memory, he must accumulate the deaths of others to sustain his own existence beyond death. Specifically, it is the deaths of nonbelievers that extend his existence. The figures of Helen, Anthony (though he had been chosen long ago by the phantom), the art critic and gallery owner, Burke’s own sister, and Haley and her friends demonstrate this throughout both films. Those who do not believe (white or Black), who say his name in vain, are in danger of being consumed by this memory and becoming a part of Candyman’s fractured existence.

When he is summoned by someone who does believe in this ritual mourning, who understands his multilayered and bloodied memories, his specter does not turn on the summoner. In the 2021 film, Brianna, Anthony’s girlfriend, witnesses Anthony’s transformation into Candyman, which happens after he is stung by a bee in Cabrini-Green and frivolously says Candyman’s name. She is kidnapped by Burke, the one who originally told Anthony about Candyman, to witness the final transformation of Anthony into Candyman. He then calls the police, saying that the Say My Name killer is there. Brianna ends up killing Burke, and when she has Anthony in her arms, the police arrive and kill him while he lies in her lap.

Brianna is the one person in the film who understands death and mourning. She watched her father die by suicide, and then later on as an adult, she watched the police murder her boyfriend. When she is arrested by the police and handcuffed in the car, the police attempt to intimidate her to cover themselves. “He came at Jones. And Jones, obviously knowing what he’d done before, seeing his hook, knowing you were in danger, had no choice but to discharge his weapon. Does that sound right to you?” The police officer crafts a narrative for her to state, and when she says nothing, he threatens her. “Or she’s [Brianna] an accomplice. She held the victims down. He cut ’em up. He died coming at a cop. She goes to jail for the rest of her life. Which story is it?” It is with this manipulation from the cop that Brianna enacts the memorial rite to summon her boyfriend, who has now become a part of Candyman.

She asks to see herself in the driver’s mirror, and she names Candyman. The specter, instead of turning on her, kills all the cops on-site, and she is allowed to get away. In the end, this new Candyman says to the audience, “Tell Everyone.” This final summoning rite harnesses the power of memory and trauma and expels it onto the structures and forces at hand. This is an example of wake work, aspiration, as described by Sharpe with the practice of Black annotation and Black redaction: “Redaction and annotation toward seeing and reading otherwise; toward reading and seeing something in excess of what is caught in the frame. . . . I am imagining that the work of Black annotation and Black redaction is to enact the movement to that inevitable—a counter to abandonment, another effort to try to look, to try to really see.”¹³ In the excess of the false narrative the cop tries to paint, Brianna’s summoning redacts the name of her boyfriend, a victim of police violence, and names only Candyman. The annotation of the ritual, then, is not just about killing to preserve the memory and the existence of Candyman but also about adding to the purpose of it, killing to preserve the memory and the life of Brianna against unjustified imprisonment.

With this, the ritual’s memorializing and insistence on Candyman living beyond death are enacted to preserve and defend Brianna. Additionally, as the 2021 film inverts the beginning credits to involve the audience within this mirror world and within this ritual, the ending, “Tell Everyone,” also acts as a further summoning to this ritual for the audience to participate, to tell everyone, to utter the name in order to invoke the specter of these memories themselves. At the end of the film, a shadow-puppet narrative displays three instances of lynching and execution, one of them being the depiction of George Stinney Jr. in the electric chair. At the end of this narrative, white text appears: “To learn more about racial justice go to candymanmovie.com/impact/.” This website acts as another Candyman in a sense. It is an amalgamation of educational, artistic, and social initiatives in understanding race, gentrification, Black art, and Black trauma with a focus on the history of Chicago. This Candyman, much like the Candyman in the movie, is about summoning Black existence not from myth and legend but from the screen itself.

The ritual the film enacts begins with inverting the beginning credits, so we, the audience, are brought into the sacred world not just of the film but also of the realities faced by Black Americans. Although we may or may not have said Candyman’s name, the final proclamation, “Tell Everyone,” is an invitation to name this film, this specter. The summoning itself conjures the website. DaCosta’s film does everything possible to involve the spectator to summon Candyman for themselves, not in the frivolous way that Anthony and Helen did but in a way that reflects the solemnity of the ritual that defends the dead and living of the Black community. In the companion guide to the movie, which also works as an effective lesson plan surrounding the film, John Jennings says in the afterword: “Black trauma, history, culture, and creativity have been systematically, intentionally, and violently erased. Candyman is a reification of those actions and stands as a living monument. . . . If you invoke him, he can break through and make his presence felt. By invoking him you shift the agency to a Black point of view.”¹⁴ This Black point of view is an insistence on Black lives. The website not only covers history but also offers resources to deal with trauma, such as the Black Emotional and Mental Health (BEAM) Collective and Therapy for Black Girls. It also hosts various art pieces from students of historically Black colleges and universities that depict the power of Candyman.¹⁵ By having the audience invoke him through the ritual of the movie, the 2021 version completes what the 1992 version started; it directly encourages the audience to “Tell Everyone.” It emboldens the audience to move from watching, from being a spectator of trauma, to speak, to take on an active role that conjures up the body of Candyman through history, art, and education.

Conclusion

Death cannot be the end. Especially when one is already considered socially dead, better off dead, or always in anticipation of being dead. Candyman, then, is a dark ritual of mourning and of proclamation. It reconfigures the mirror space between the white living world and the Black death-world to rupture time and space and pull believers and nonbelievers into the land of the dead. In both films, the naming draws forth the specter of Black trauma regardless of the intentions of the summoner, and the final conjuring declares the insistence of this traumatic memory into the world through the shedding of blood.

This is not a holy ritual. This is not divine mourning. The conjuring of Candyman is supposed to beget suffering in some form. “Through indiscriminate suffering men know fear and fear is the most divine emotion. It is the stones for altars and the beginning of wisdom. Half gods are worshipped in wine and flowers. Real gods require blood.”¹⁶ Zora Neale Hurston’s quote from Their Eyes Were Watching God reaffirms the purpose of Candyman both as a figure in the movie as well as outside the movie. Terrifying the audience is one thing, but granting them the beginning thread of wisdom to understand what Candyman means and who Candyman is, is another. While Rose’s film initiated this ritual by opening the world of Cabrini-Green to white audiences and showing what a Black slasher villain could do, DaCosta’s film finished this ritual, conjuring this specter further off the screen and telling us why this particular slasher villain matters. Due to living in the wake of cyclical trauma and state violence, Candyman showcases a Black existence after death. A living beyond that can defend itself (the Black dead) and can defend others (the Black living) by breathing on through a rumor, a legend, a story, and a name.

Thinking back, I can remember when Black Lives Matter first became a slogan. I was fifteen years old, and Trayvon Martin had just been murdered. Black Lives Matter became a movement, a protest, a slogan, a brand, and, depending on which news broadcast you listen to, a domestic terrorist cell. Either way, it became a way to wake up the world and name the dead. With the repetition of premature deaths and the outrage on the ground and on social media, #SayTheirNames became and is a ritual. And ritual serves to “inculcate and renew belief” that we, as Black Americans, matter, that our dead matter, and that they have voices.¹⁷ They live within these ritual acts, and the films seek to demonstrate this as well. Sharpe asks, “How do we memorialize an event that is still ongoing?”¹⁸ We embody the event in the bones of legend, the flesh of rumor, give it a voice that speaks of darkness (of Blackness), and we wrap these traumatic events in rituals that venerate the names of the dead; so that in the end, they (the living) will say, “Candyman.”

Notes

Works Cited