Candyman

Jon Towlson

• Publisher: Auteur
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781911325550
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Historia y crítica cinematográficas

When Candyman was released in 1992, Roger Ebert gave it his thumbs up, remarking that the film was "scaring him with ideas and gore, rather than just gore." Indeed, Candyman is almost unique in 1990s horror cinema in that it tackles its sociopolitical themes head on. As critic Kirsten Moana Thompson has remarked, Candyman is "the return of the repressed as national allegory": the film's hook-handed killer of urban legend embodies a history of racism, miscegenation, lynching, and slavery, "the taboo secrets of America's past and present."

In this book, Jon Towlson considers how Candyman might be read both as a "return of the repressed" during the George H. W. Bush era, and as an example of nineties neoconservative horror. He traces the project's development from its origins as a Clive Barker short story ("The Forbidden"); discusses the importance of its gritty real-life Cabrini-Green setting; and analyzes the film's appropriation (and interrogation) of urban myth. The two official sequels ( Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh [1995] and Candyman: Day of the Dead [1999]) are also considered, plus a number of other urban myth-inspired horror movies such as Bloody Mary (2006) and films in the Urban Legend franchise. The book features an in-depth interview with Candyman' s writer-director Bernard Rose.

1. ‘SWEETS TO THE SWEET’: FROM ‘THE FORBIDDEN’ TO CANDYMAN

CLIVE BARKER: TRANSGRESSION AND TRANSCENDENCE

Clive Barker’s lower-middle class background, like that of William Blake, partly accounts for his approach as a writer and visual artist: his tendency to rebel against the orthodox, to favour tradition above avant-gardism, and to follow his own instincts rather than the fashion or the ‘norm’. Artists and painters who grow up with a lack of wealth and privilege are compelled to pursue their own paths, which often leads them to fly in the face of convention. William Blake began his career as an engraver rather than as a painter, and at the Royal Academy he railed against the then-fashionable style of Rubens; instead he championed the Classicism of Michelangelo and Raphael. Similarly, as a young artist, Barker declined a place at the Royal College of Art, feeling that he would have been ‘trapped in an educational system that would have taught me a lot of things I didn’t need. Or worse, it would have taught me nothing at all’ (Snyder, 2009). Instead he chose the creative freedom of the ‘dole’ (as was an option for budding artists in the early ’80s) and wrote short stories, plays, and eventually novels.

Barker’s upbringing in a gritty Liverpool left a mark on his creative work in other ways too; his stated ambition, similar to that of Blake, is to take in ‘heaven, hell and earth in between’. Even in his later fantasy novels, such as the Abarat series, there is an emphasis on worlds existing in parallel: the ‘real’ world must, for Barker, exist alongside the fantasy realm. Barker has expressed a dislike of much modern fantasy that adopts only a ‘sub-Tolkien invented world’, as well as small scale, domestic horror such as Poltergeist (1982) where the fantastical elements are reduced. Instead, in his own work, Barker starts with the domestic in order to ‘open out the vistas. Then maybe you expand to take in another cosmos!’ (Wells, 2002: 172-182).

For Barker fantastic art and literature thus express the possibility of transcending the limits of ordinary experience, not only for the characters of his films and stories, but for the everyday reader and viewer:

It seems to me that this kind of art, or horror fiction, or horror films, is, at its best, giving us material to go into our dreams with. It is going to throw up images which are going to represent the ways in which we contextualise our daily experience. Many of those are going to be confrontations with things that we forbid ourselves – forbidden sexual ideas or fantasies, fears about death, or anxieties that we cannot, or will not articulate. (Wells, 2002: 177)

Closely aligned to the notion of transcendence in Barker’s work is transgression, sexual and otherwise. This has obvious links to Barker’s own homosexuality and his desire, as a gay man, to shape the culture. Paul Wells writes that sadomasochism in Barker’s work is used not only to draw together issues of brutality and eroticism, but to present perspectives outside social orthodoxy: ‘“horror” comes out of the fear of a perverse yet partially desired experience of a marginalized or unknown “otherness”’ (2002: 172). It is not surprising, then, as Wells comments, that Barker was, especially in his early career as a writer and director of horror fiction, drawn to the Gothic for its implied discourse of ‘the attractiveness of the perverse and the transgressive’ (2002: 172-173). Barker’s Hellraiser (1987) is, of course, quintessential in this respect. Described by the novelist and Hellbound: Hellraiser 2 (1988) actress Barbie Wilde (in an email to the author) as a ‘sexually transgressive antidote to the new-Victorianism of 1980s Thatcherite Britain’, Hellraiser introduced a new mythos to horror cinema in the S&M-oriented Cenobites whose leader Pinhead (Doug Bradley) is very much a monster from the psycho-sexual id (Barker took inspiration for the character from punk fashion, Catholicism and the S&M clubs he visited in Amsterdam and New York). Pinhead’s spoken credo, repeated throughout Hellraiser and its various film sequels, spin-off comics and stories is the need to achieve ‘sweet suffering’ through the (self) infliction of abject pain.

Barker is not without his detractors. One of his most vociferous critics, Christopher Sharrett, considers Hellraiser’s ‘spectacle of excess’ as simultaneous with a condemnation, rather than a celebration, of transgressive sexuality. For Sharrett (writing in 1993) Pinhead and his Cenobites are representative both of desire and repression:

[T]heir tired conflation of sadomasochism…with sexuality in general, associate erotic transgression with self-destruction, making these films very central to the AIDS cinema or, rather, that branch of commercial cinema advancing the scapegoating politics of the age of AIDS. (2015: 290)

Sharrett argues that Barker’s presentation of sexual curiosity in the film is ‘unequivocally repulsive and destructive’, as rendered in the manifestations of Hellraiser’s demon underworld where characters are seen to be punished for their desires through the administration of torture devices (such as being ripped apart by hooks). For Sharrett, also, the grotesque sadomasochism of the Cenobites speaks to the media representation of ‘postpunk nihilism that debunks the romance of transgression and resistance’ (2015: 291).

It is difficult to deny that much of the transgressive impact of Pinhead has been lost in the frequency of his appearances over the years. Recent incarnations have sought recuperation for the character in the form of Pinhead’s yearning for spiritual salvation and an opportunity to enter Heaven. Indeed, Barker’s dependence on Christian mythology is itself problematic; as early as the novella The Hellbound Heart (1986) (which Barker adapted into Hellraiser), the Cenobites are referred to as ‘demons’, equating their transgression with evil; and the conflation of sadomasochism and ‘Hell’ has been inherent in the series from the very start, as reflected in the titles of the films (Hellraiser, Hellbound, Hell on Earth, etc.) Taken in these terms, of course, it becomes easy to associate sexual transgression with cynicism in Barker’s work, rather than any genuine move towards transcendence: a cynicism that within neoconservative culture (in Sharrett’s words) ‘replaces class consciousness and critical analysis’ (ibid.). Whether these criticisms can also be aimed at Candyman will be explored later in this book.

BERNARD ROSE – ROMANTICISM AND THE GOTHIC

Bernard Rose occupies an equally unique position in British cinema. Graduate of the National Film and Television School (where he studied alongside Terence Davis among others) he started his career as a pioneering music video director in the early 1980s, and moved briefly into TV drama before making his theatrical feature film debut with the fantasy Paperhouse in 1988. Candyman (his first film as screenwriter) took Rose to Hollywood where, after writing and directing an epic version of Anna Karenina (1997), he would go on to challenge the orthodoxy of the film business with Ivansxtc. Produced for less than $150,000 using a high definition digital camera (then cutting-edge technology) and eschewing the involvement of the studios, this adaptation of Tolstoy’s ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’ marked Rose as an iconoclast, although the industry has subsequently caught up, technologically at least, with filming digitally. Rose continued writing and directing independent features (many starring Danny Huston) and now functions as his own cinematographer. Since 2005, Rose has alternated a number of low budget horror films with a further series of Tolstoy adaptations (The Kreutzer Sonata [2008]; Boxing Day [2012] and Two Jacks [2013]). In between, Rose has also written and directed an adaptation of Howard Marks’ autobiography Mr. Nice (2011) and the Paganini biopic The Devil’s Violinist (2013) (he made the Beethoven biopic Immortal Beloved in 1994).

Although it is his work in the horror genre that is of particular interest here, the eclecticism of Bernard Rose is remarkable. Few British directors since Ken Russell have worked in such a broad range of genres, in such innovative ways. Indeed, (and although Rose is perhaps not an enfant terrible in the same manner as Russell) the similarities between the two filmmakers are worth noting.

There is, of course, the shared interest in classical music (Rose is an accomplished concert pianist and composer in his own right) and moreover the lives of the great composers, given frank treatment in the films of both directors. Then there is the essential musicality of the films themselves, the bold visuals, and the influence of Brechtian drama on the narrative. Both directors are able to combine realism and fantasy, stylistic flamboyance, excess and ambition. Both belong to a school of Romanticism in British cinema that also gave us Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, Lindsay Anderson, Derek Jarman, John Boorman and Nicolas Roeg (and a number of lesser-known directors such as Ian Sellar [Venus Peter, 1989; Prague, 1992; The Englishman, 2007] and Chris Newby [Anchoress, 1993; Madagascar Skin, 1995; Dickens in London, 2012]). Romanticism’s dark side embraces fantasy, horror and the Gothic; it is therefore not surprising that Rose is drawn to these genres, as was Ken Russell and the other aforementioned directors.

Another characteristic of Romanticism is an unerring sense of place, as displayed in Rose’s first theatrical feature, Paperhouse. In the film, a young girl called Anna (Charlotte Burke) dreams of a house that exists in an alternate reality, and discovers that by sketching the house and its inhabitants she can manipulate events in that parallel world. She draws a boy at the window, and in her dreams she goes to him. They become friends. When the boy, who is called Marc (Elliot Spiers), falls ill, Anna attempts to change the course of her dreams by adding to the picture; ultimately reality and fantasy collide and Anna must let go of one to preserve the other. The film’s depiction of parallel worlds recalls Barker’s work, an important foundation for Candyman; it also evokes the fantasy of Lewis Carroll, C.S. Lewis and Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974). Although the theme is a magical one, Rose presents both worlds credibly. The ‘real’ world is present-day London, and we glimpse it only fleetingly in brief establishing shots during Anna’s drive home from school or through the bedroom window of her mother’s (Glenn Headley) flat, but we get a vivid sense of modernity in these transitory moments (as we do in Candyman). The world of the ‘paperhouse’ itself is equally vivid; sparely sketched in by Anna, we have the grey house standing alone on a moor, in splendid isolation, framed only by the grass and a blue sky. Its interior is equally bare. These images imprint themselves on the retina because of their very starkness.

Paperhouse (1988)

Dramatically, Paperhouse suffers from an inert script (by Matthew Jacobs), poor dubbing and weak performances. However, its relationship to Candyman – as well as the strength of Rose’s visuals – gives it added interest, especially when it comes to the film’s darker elements. Anna dreams of her father (Ben Cross) – silhouetted against a brooding sky – attacking the paperhouse with a hammer, a powerful image that prefigures Tony Todd’s first appearance to Helen, as a silhouette in the enclosed parking lot in Candyman. And like the Candyman, Anna’s dream father is vanquished by flames. The ‘fear of the father’ in Paperhouse (which anticipates thematically Joe Dante’s The Hole [2009], another children’s fantasy with dark elements) underscores the film’s central theme of a child’s shifting identification from one parent to the other; resolved only once Anna is able to express her sexual feelings for Marc. The film also speaks of Jung in terms of the universal unconscious; Marc and Anna are ‘real’ and contact one another in their dreams – another link to Barker and Candyman.

Self-reflexivity is a key motif of 2005’s Snuff-Movie, Rose’s first horror film after Candyman. Indeed, Snuff-Movie is as much a film about horror movies as its predecessor, perhaps even more so. Jeroen Krabbé plays Boris Arkadin, a reclusive horror director who invites a group of young actors to his mansion to audition them for a new film: a re-enactment of the murder of Arkadin’s wife by a death cult. Capturing events on CCTV cameras secreted in the mansion, Arkadin appears to be staging a real-life snuff movie for the internet. In the film reality and fiction start to merge, until we are unsure where one starts and the other ends. The same members of the cult who killed Arkadin’s pregnant wife make a re-appearance, as history literally seems to repeat itself; and in the very final scene, Rose stages a volte-face that makes us question all that has come before.

Snuff-Movie’s self-reflexivity is followed through formally in Rose’s adoption of a ‘meta’ mode of address which includes the use of surveillance footage, web cam, and alternating hand-held Dogme 95-style shooting with more conventional filming and lighting. It opens with a pastiche of a Hammer-type ’60s heritage horror film, revealed to be an Arkadin production called ‘The Premature Burial’ (this may be a reference to Roger Corman’s 1962 Poe adaptation). From there, Rose goes on to spoof a ’70s home movie, shot by one of the cult gang, depicting a party in Arkadin’s mansion which leads to the murder. This ‘movie-within-a-movie-within-a-movie’ opening is reminiscent of Norman J. Warren’s Terror (1978) which starts in a similar manner and goes on to comment about the genre in a self-reflexive way comparable to Rose’s film. Disconcertingly, the documentary-maker Nick Broomfield appears in Snuff-Movie, playing himself; more allusions to performativity in film-making.

The director’s name ‘Arkadin’ is a sly in-joke too, and probably a reference to Orson Welles’ Mr. Arkadin (1955) whose narrative theme of fragmented identity would echo ironically in Mr. Arkadin’s release: it exists in numerous different versions, none of which can be considered definitive. But Krabbé’s character is more obviously based on the director Roman Polanski, and Snuff-Movie explicitly references the Manson Family murders in which Polanski’s pregnant wife Sharon Tate was killed. Numerous writers have speculated on how Polanski’s macabre films seem to reflect certain events in his life and vice versa. In Snuff-Movie, the notion of life imitating art becomes ever more complex, until the boundaries between the two become virtually indistinguishable. Indeed, Snuff-Movie opens with Arkadin intoning in voice-over that ‘this is the most shocking, most explicit, most terrifying’ film he has ever made, inviting us to see Krabbé as a stand-in for Rose himself, suggesting that Snuff-Movie may well have been intended as a comment on the huge success of the Candyman franchise. Rose, in fact, gives Arkadin a speech about evoking audience sympathy in horror that he himself delivered in Candyman’s 2...