Nia DaCosta’s Candyman isn’t just a sequel; it’s a reclamation project with a hook. It takes a 90s boogeyman born out of urban legends and public housing panic and drags him, buzzing with bees and generational rage, straight into the age of gentrification, performative activism, and curated trauma in gallery spaces.
And somehow, it manages to be stylish, scary, sad, and pretty funny in a very bleak way. Like an art exhibit that whispers, “This piece is about systemic violence,” and then literally murders a critic in a mirrored gallery.
The Hive Evolves
The smartest thing DaCosta’s film does is expand Candyman from “one vengeful ghost with a hook” into a collective haunting—a hive of Black men murdered unjustly over generations, all wearing the same legend like a mask.
We start with Sherman Fields, falsely accused in the 70s of putting razor blades in candy, beaten to death by cops, later proven innocent. He becomes the “Candyman” of the local whispered lore. But he’s not the only one. The film reminds us of Daniel Robitaille, the original Candyman from the 1890s, and then folds in other real-world atrocities during the end credits—making it clear that this isn’t just one story. It’s a pattern.
The result is a monster that isn’t just supernatural—it’s historical. You don’t just summon Candyman in the mirror; you summon him every time society repeats the same violence and calls it justified. Which, given the plot, is… often.
Anthony McCoy: Artist, Meat, Myth
Our main doomed protagonist is Anthony McCoy, played by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II with this mesmerizing mix of swagger, insecurity, and slow-motion collapse. He’s a visual artist living with his gallery-director girlfriend Brianna in a very nice condo built on what used to be Cabrini–Green. So yes, he quite literally lives on top of buried trauma. Always a great sign.
Anthony’s stuck in a creative rut until he hears the story of Helen Lyle and the legend of Candyman, then wanders into the old neighborhood and meets William Burke, the laundromat philosopher who’s been marinating in this lore since childhood. From there, Anthony becomes obsessed, turning Candyman into art—and then Candyman turns Anthony into art right back.
The bee sting on his hand is one of the best slow-burn body horror threads in recent memory. It starts as a nasty welt, then spreads across his arm and face like rot, or infection, or the physical manifestation of history crawling up his skin. By the time you see him in a mirror, he’s not just a man anymore; he’s something in between host and avatar, being grafted into the myth against his will.
He wanted inspiration. He got possession, cultural and literal.
Brianna: Final Girl with a Real Career
Teyonah Parris’s Brianna is a gift. Finally, a horror movie girlfriend who:
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Has an actual job and success of her own
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Is not just “the nagging realist”
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Has her own trauma arc (her father’s suicide) that informs how she responds to Anthony’s spiral
She’s not just there to cry, scream, and hand him emotional band-aids. She’s constantly evaluating him, the art world, and the danger around them like someone who has had to survive on both emotional intelligence and professional competence.
And when things go truly sideways—kidnappings, hooks, cops—she doesn’t stand there frozen. She fights, runs, stabs, and ultimately becomes the last witness, forced into the position of telling this story so it can’t be buried again. The final shot of her staring at the transformed Candyman, with him instructing her to “tell everyone,” is equal parts command, curse, and PR assignment from hell.
Gentrification as Haunting
Candyman has always been about place, and this film doubles down. Cabrini–Green isn’t just a backdrop; it’s the wound.
In 1992, the horror was about neglected housing projects, poverty, and fear of “the other side of town.” In 2021, the horror is what happens after—when those places are suddenly valuable, scrubbed, and remarketed as “up-and-coming” while the people who lived through the worst of it get erased.
Anthony and Brianna live in a sleek condo literally built over the ruins. The gallery scene that celebrates Anthony’s work is full of people who fetishize trauma but are safely insulated from it. Critics and curators treat Cabrini–Green as a concept, a vibe, a talking point.
Candyman doesn’t.
When people summon him for a thrill—like the teenage girls in the high school bathroom—he doesn’t come for the poor, the dispossessed. He comes for those playing with the pain as if it were a campfire tale. It’s petty, it’s brutal, and it’s the closest the movie gets to a slasher montage, but with a very specific edge: this is what happens when you treat someone’s horror as aesthetic.
The Art World Eats It
The film absolutely gleefully skewers the art scene. We’ve got:
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Clive, the sleazy gallery guy, happy to profit from Black pain as long as it sells
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Finley, the critic who dismisses Anthony’s work as shallow until she can use his “urban” themes as fodder for her next thinkpiece
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Fancy white-walled spaces full of mirrors where people sip wine and say “provocative” a lot
So naturally, Candyman shows up and absolutely redecorates them in red.
The “Say My Name” installation is a particularly sharp touch. It’s a mirrored piece that invites viewers to speak the name, tying together:
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Invocations of Black victims of violence
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The literal act of summoning a ghost
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The performative repetition of traumatic names in media
When people actually do say it five times, the film doesn’t feel sad for them so much as it goes, “Well. You wanted to engage the work.”
Police, Myth, and Manufactured Narratives
One of the nastiest and most effective turns comes in the climax. Once Anthony is fully transformed, emotionally and physically, he’s positioned by William Burke to become the next Candyman—another Black man shot and framed by police, his story rewritten into something palatable and blame-shifting.
The cops don’t disappoint. They swarm, they shoot first, and then they immediately begin rehearsing the script in the police car, pressuring Brianna to say Anthony was the aggressor. It’s not even subtle; it’s not meant to be. The real horror is how routine this sounds.
Brianna’s decision to summon Candyman in the back of the squad car is one of the most satisfying acts of rage-magic in modern horror. She weaponizes the mirror they’re using to control her statement.
Candyman appears, kills the officers in a disturbingly beautiful sequence of gliding shots and buzzing bees, and then reveals Daniel Robitaille’s face—reminding us that this isn’t new. This is the same cycle, different decade.
He tells her: “Tell everyone.”
Because the one thing more terrifying than Candyman is the way these stories get silenced unless someone keeps repeating them.
Style: Mirrors, Shadows, and Bees Like Memory
DaCosta directs the hell out of this thing (literally). The visual language is loaded:
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Mirrors reflecting Candyman while we see only empty space
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Long, slow shots that turn modern apartments and bathrooms into stages for invisible violence
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Gorgeous, eerie shadow puppetry that retells the myth in the opening credits and again at the end
The kills are relatively sparse but memorable. There’s not a constant stream of gore; instead, each death feels pointed, purposeful, and framed in ways that reinforce the themes. Sometimes you barely see Candyman at all—you just see bodies dragged, lifted, slashed by an unseen hand. It’s like the film itself is honoring its own rule: you don’t have to show the monster if the idea has already infected the room.
Legacy and Farewell
There’s a bittersweet layer in seeing Tony Todd appear as Daniel Robitaille one last time, his face emerging from a storm of bees. It’s brief, but it’s powerful—a symbolic passing of the hook to a new iteration of the myth while still acknowledging the original’s spectral presence.
Candyman here isn’t just a singular ghost or a sequel-ready villain. He’s a living, evolving story of Black pain and resistance, shaped by the times but rooted in the same old poison.
Final Word: Say His Name, Understand the Story
Candyman (2021) is not a simple scare-fest. It’s messy in the best ways—full of grief, anger, history, and jokes that land like little stings. It’s a horror film that actually trusts you to sit with metaphor and still enjoy a good hook-through-the-spine moment.
If you come just for guts, you might leave frustrated that there aren’t ten more kills. But if you’re here for horror that remembers why urban legends mattered in the first place—what communities used them for—then this is one honey-slick, blood-streaked mirror worth looking into.
Just, you know. Maybe stop at saying his name four times. No need to get too immersive.
