Thirty-three years after its release, Candyman is still one of the great horror films of the '90s. Bernard Rose's adaptation of "The Forbidden" by Clive Barker was savvy in its changes to its source material: while Barker's tale was centered on a white working-class community in Liverpool, Rose moved the action to Chicago’s notorious Cabrini-Green housing project and made the title slasher a Black man preying on a marginalized community. In doing so, it turned a story about the power of urban legends into one with a dense and thoroughly political core that challenged the horror genre’s stereotypical images of victim and murderer.
Candyman was a modest commercial hit, and since this was a post-Nightmare on Elm Street/Friday the 13th era, a sequel was greenlit. Never mind that Candyman has a definitive ending without much room for expansion (and nearly all the main characters were dead); Rose had imagined a stand-alone sequel based on another Barker short story, “The Midnight Meat Train.”
