Candyman, directed by Nia DaCosta, was released in the US in August 2021.
In Candyman, the 1992 film and its 2021 remake, a killer slips past walls and phases in and out of mirrors. This gore-soaked terror inhabits the shadow-realms of crumbling public housing blocks. He skulks the empty halls of blasphemed, boarded-up churches, performing dark rituals that are indelibly tied to the American way of life. Set in Chicago, the two features advance a distinct type of architecture-bound horror, where walls and other demarcations of space are violated as spectacularly as the slashed bodies of Candyman’s victims.
Modernism, in both films, announces itself through lengthy pans of Bertrand Goldberg’s Marina City towers and Walter Netsch’s University of Illinois at Chicago Circle campus, but also in suffocating shots of Cabrini-Green, the public housing complex that once stood in the city’s North Side. For an architecture-inclined audience, the series offers an alluring and poisonous treat, like Candyman’s sweets laced with razors. But if the projects…