On Wednesday, director Nia DaCosta tweeted out a stunning new trailer for her upcoming Candyman film, along with a brief explanation of the themes she’s exploring in the movie.
If it weren’t the trailer for a new Jordan Peele production, it’d be an extraordinary short film about the atrocities this country has inflicted on black people:
The beauty of the style and the horror of the content comes across effortlessly on first viewing, but if you never got around to watching Candyman, and also never got around to learning any history, there’s some context you might be missing.
The film comes from “The Forbidden,” a Clive Barker short story from 1985, which is not about race.
When Barker and Bernard Rose adapted the story as a screenplay for Rose to direct, however, they set it in the United States to attract American financing, and you can’t make a film about American public housing without dealing with race.
Picking up on the story’s theme of urban legends, they worked in another one, making Candyman a Bloody Mary-type, conjured in mirrors.
