8 Horror Movies With Surprising Deeper Meanings

On the surface, Candyman is just a big screen adaptation of the popular folk story Bloody Mary. Dig just a little deeper and you can see how the movie tries to take on issues involving race and sexism. However, if you keep tunneling your way into the plot you realize the movie is actually about a dead man who simply does not want to be forgotten.

The film gives us the origin story of Candyman. He was a black painter in the 1890s in America, just 25 years removed from the American Civil War. After falling in love with a white woman, a lynch mob attacked him and cut off his hand, the hand he used to create things he would be remembered for. They then cover him in honey attracting bees that sting him to death. It is gruesome, but it gives birth to Candyman. His paint brush is now replaced with a bloody hook and painting is replaced with his newfound notoriety as an urban legend.

We can see how seriously he takes his new artform when a gang leader who has taken on the moniker of Candyman is arrested and gets charged with the murders committed by the real Candyman. Candyman is enraged by this impostor taking credit for his art and warns he now must “shed innocent blood.”

Fear is his new artform, an artform he will use to be remembered even after death. When he was alive he painted to remain relevant. In death, he kills so he does not disappear into irrelevancy. Like all of us, he simply does not want to be forgotten.