10 Movie Remakes That Ditch Classic Elements

Candyman (1992) is already well known as a classic of the horror genre. As far as spookfests go, it ticks all the boxes: a vengeful spirit with a Bloody Mary style of summoning ritual and a ribcage full of bees, mysterious murders, and pretty visceral gory special effects. Tony Todd’s vampiric supernatural figure who feeds off the belief in his urban legend had only a limited backstory in his first outing; a black man in post-Civil War America fell in love with a white woman, and was cruelly lynched when her father found out about their relationship. His violent death at the hands of this racist mob led to his ghost’s manifestation.

Two sequels followed, Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh (1995) and Candyman: Day of the Dead (1999), but unfortunately they are not without their troubles.

Sure, it was nice we got to know Candyman’s name was Daniel Robitaille, and that the exact circumstances of his death caused his physical appearance - his murderers covered his body in honey while bees stung him to death, and one hand was amputated and replaced with a hook - but there were other alterations that didn’t work as well.

The sequels ditched the former’s Chicago setting, with the ghettoised Cabrini-Green housing project making way for more rural New Orleans. Candyman, too, was reconceptualised from a northern, free, black man, to the son of a plantation worker. This latter point especially was a gripe for Bernard Rose, director of the 1992 flick.

This change to his character might seem subtle – insignificant, even – but such an analysis barely scrapes the surface of its real impact. Horror movies are saturated with southern racist stereotypes: tere’s literally a film called Redneck Zombies. There’s no smoke without fire, and it was in those states where slavery was legal, and which enforced incredibly racist ‘Jim Crow’ laws following the end of the American Civil War.

But who are we kidding? Racism happened in northern America too, we just never see it as much in cinema because it doesn’t fit our vision of what the past was like.

The north wasn’t entirely a safe haven from racism, where escaped slaves would journey for their chance of freedom from racist slave owners. The first film dealt saliently with housing segregation in Chicago that had so drastically impacted its African American communities. There was that whole Rodney King Affair in 1991 – you know the one, when an unarmed black man being beaten by the officers from the Los Angeles Police Department was caught on video tape. It’s almost as if turning our preconception of racism on its head might have been a really useful thing for Candyman (1992) to do.

Candyman (2020) promises to be a “spiritual sequel” to the very first film, revisiting the Cabrini-Green region of the first, but maybe dealing with its demolition and the recent gentrification of the area. It’s not clear how much – if anything – is getting retconned, but since it’s been written by none other than Get Out’s Jordan Peele, we can but hope that there’ll be some liberal smatterings of social commentary which this iconic figure really deserves. Whether Candyman’s backstory as the son of a plantation worker remains, or if he reverts back to being a free man, I have no doubt that Peele will use this opportunity to its fullest extent.