Candyman director Nia DaCosta reflects on the Juneteenth holiday and the deeper meaning behind the film's story in a featurette for the horror movie.
"Juneteenth, I think, for me, especially last year, I was thinking a lot about the duality of the Black experience in America," says DaCosta, speaking in the video. "At once, it's a place of this great hope, which I think is what Juneteenth represents in one way, it's a celebration of us, of life, of freedom, of possibility. On the other side, it's incredibly difficult and there's a lot of pain and they kind of walk hand in hand. And I think that's something about this film as well. There's still this bittersweet hope."
DaCosta goes on to reveal she began working on Candyman in late 2019, noting "So much changed in that time. We had the [COVID-19] pandemic happen, we had the really amazing show of political and cultural and emotional force. And throughout the making of the film, the thing I always came back to was the truth of the pain that was at the center of the story of Candyman. In the real-world, we create monsters of men all the time. People are murdered, they become either saints or they're vilified. And so, throughout the last year and a half, it was always coming back to that truth."
Although she refers to the horror genre as "a really effective tool when it comes to telling stories about things that impact us on a social level," DaCosta previously spoke about the ways horror both helps and hurts Black filmmakers. While she admitted it's useful for Black storytellers who want to address "racial violence and racial trauma," DaCosta added, "I also think we need to get some different types of ways to talk about really important things like racial terror."
The official synopsis for Candyman reads,
For as long as the 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 the present day, a decade after the last of the Cabrini towers were torn down, a visual artist named Anthony McCoy and his girlfriend, an art gallery director named Brianna Cartwright, moved into a luxurious loft condo in Cabrini, now gentrified beyond recognition and inhabited by the upwardly mobile millennials.
With Anthony's painting career on the brink of stalling, a chance encounter with a Cabrini Green old-timer exposes Anthony to the tragically horrific nature of the true story behind the 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.
Directed by Nia DaCosta from a script by Jordan Peele, Win Rosenfeld and DaCosta, Candyman stars Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Teyonah Parris, Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, Colman Domingo, Vanessa A. Williams, Rebecca Spence, Cassie Kramer and Tony Todd. The film arrives in theaters on Aug. 27, 2021.
Source: YouTube