Candyman (1992): The Ghost of TMI Halloween Special!

Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio. Hello everyone and welcome to Too Much Information, the show that brings you the secret histories and little-known fascinating facts and figures behind your favorite TV shows, movies, music, and more. We are your two dearly derelict in our duties day jobbers with debilitating emotional issues. I'm Alex Heigl. And I'm Jordan Runtog.

Tag yourselves. Jordan, today after tucking that little apology for our posting schedule recently into our intro, we are barreling into spooky month as it is almost over. We're talking about Candyman, baby. The original baby. I like Nia DaCosta's 2021 version a good bit. But you know here at TMI, we hate the 21st century, baby.

We do.

Or at least anything past 2015, baby. Maybe even 2010, baby. In an effort to reclaim my attention span, I've been reading a lot lately, especially in the horror genre. That's very nice. I'm a big Clive Barker fan. I think it all goes back to prowling the horror corridors or the horror portion of the wall at my local vidya store.

And just having Pinhead just stare right out at me, you know, holding the cube, not holding the cube, different faces, but still always Pinhead. And you're not supposed to call him that. As a Clive Barker fan, I would be derelict in my duties if I did not inform everyone that his proper name is the Hell Priest. That is right.

I actually did. Now, you taught me that. So anyway, we'll get more into our man Clive in a bit. But Candyman is based on a Clive Barker short story. And. What an incredible movie this is. It's not for me to call it a masterwork because I think it's a little bit, you know, part of this movie that we're going to talk about is like the way that it interrogates different issues of race in America. Yeah, very much so.

I'm hesitant to stamp it as one of two straight white men on this podcast. I am hesitant to stamp it an unqualified masterpiece, but I think at least as a movie, if not like a thesis, it's pretty, pretty goddamn good. It's a rich tapestry thematically, courtesy of director and screenwriter Bernard Rose, who we'll be talking about at length.

Absolutely top of the game performances from the dearly departed Tony Todd, who we'll also be talking about at length. Virginia Madsen is there, folks. Virginia Madsen. Uh, it's got an, I bear her no quarrel. Uh, it's got a knockout Philip glass score and it's got a beautiful visual sensibility. I mean, this movie is just like, you put this thing up and, and you start looking at movies today and you're like, Jesus, what happened? Like crane shots. Helicopter shots were insane. Uh, beautiful production design lighting. It's all, it's all gone by the wayside and everything's terrible. And you know, it's got some sequels, which we don't really have to talk about. It's got the Philip glass score. Uh,

Slightly sotto voce on the third That.

Was very confusing To hear a Philip Glass score Because I think I heard it before I saw his name I was.

Like wait is that Yeah The little music box theme Has become so iconic And then you just start to hear his trademark Stacked ahs You're like wait I've heard this before Jordan you did not watch this movie Until I asked you to And you just finished I.

Finished it maybe about half an hour ago yeah I got to tell you, Heigl, and this is really going to crush you or make you feel good that you turned me on to this.

I had never so much as heard of this movie, I don't think. Really?

No, when you suggested it, I thought maybe it was a Sammy Davis Jr.

Biopic. Well, so did Tony Todd. Yes, exactly. Get on.

I think I dimly recall you mentioning it at some point.

But yeah, no, I didn't know what to expect. Were you aware of the 2018 reboot? Or 2021, sorry. It was supposed to come... It was, I think, started in 2018, and then it was shelved for so long. And I think they tampered with it, but I don't know too, too much about that. But it did come out eventually in 2021.

I mean, I think I thought it was just like a really cheap, like, 2020s, like, slightly post-COVID, like, horror movie direct-to-streamer.

Like, yeah, I don't know what I was expecting. I did not expect.

Something that was as rich and beautiful as this with a Philip Glass score.

Yeah. It was not what I was expecting.

I didn't like it as much as another horror movie that you forced me to watch, The Thing.

The Thing, I really did like. Stiff competition. Yes. I mean, honestly... I've had a recurring nightmare.

I want to know if maybe it's a fairly common recurring nightmare of like being framed for murders and then running the fugitive nightmare. That's one of my recurring nightmares.

That is so interesting. I wish I'd known that before I recommended this movie to you. Maybe you just cured it. I don't know. Who's to say? We'll find out. All right. It's almost nine o'clock at night. We'll see. We'll see. How do you sleep tonight? Twelve hours. Yeah. So that was really, I mean, I also, I didn't know the source material. I barely know Clyde Barker.

So that was a really compelling conceit to me, was this woman.

Who's just constantly, like, police barging in. Waking up covered in blood.

Yeah, waking up covered in blood with an upraised knife over a battered body when the cops barge in. That hit a little, I don't want to say close to home, but it felt like a little bit of deja vu.

Let me say this, in your dreams, did you commit the murders? No, no, none of them. Oh, okay. Maybe once was like an accident. Like, Maybe one.

Okay, maybe a couple times. Maybe a couple times it's an accident. But definitely not more than half.

Okay. Jesus. Well. Do we have a patient-client privilege? I haven't Mirandized you yet, so shut up. As your attorney, I advise you to get a red car with no top, drive very fast through the desert, and stop telling people about murders you've dreamed. Is this thing on? So from its original source material in England. Oh, my beloved England.

I knew I liked it. To the real life horrors of Chicago that the film depicted. To how we somehow managed to wedge the Beatles into this. To the very real bees of it all. Not the bees! Here's everything you didn't know about the original Candyman. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow.

Wow.

Wow. Wow. Our man Clive, in like Clive, a section I've titled this. Our man Clive Barker was on a real tear from around 1984 to 1993 or so. Three volumes of his short stories came out in 1984 as the anthology's Books of Blood, blurbed with the indelible and constantly repeated Stephen King quote, I have seen the future of horror and his name is Clive Barker.

Is that a reference to the John Landau, I have seen the future of rock and roll and it's Bruce Springsteen?

Almost certainly, unless that is an older reference that keeps going back referencing that we that I'm not aware of. But, you know, Stephen King is Uncle Stevie, as people pejoratively refer to him sometimes for his like self-assigned avuncular role in all of 20th century media. He likes his rock and roll. He does love his rock and roll. And that that Landau quote was like, what, 80?

No, that was before he was his manager. That was like the early 70s. Asbury Park era.

Yeah. Okay. Well, yeah, maybe King read that. It's hard to know what exactly he retained during the 20 years that he was an alcoholic coke head. By his own admission, directing Maximum Overdrive was not one of them. So anyway. King wasn't entirely wrong. The mass market horror paperback industry was reaching its peak in the mid 80s after a long road to domination after the twin successes of Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist in 1967 and 1971. This is, you guys heard about this? Jay Leno voice. There was a third semi-forgotten 1971 book that helped this. The Other, written by former actor Thomas Tryon. This book, despite being like memory hold out of existence, was neck and neck with The Exorcist for like 11 weeks in 1971 at

the top of the New York Times bestseller list. Quick sidebar on horror, because my accent frequently renders it whore. Sorry. I just, I've always wanted to like, we watched child's play recently and I, my, our man, Brad Dory. Oh yeah. Legendary actor, Brad Dory. Uh, in the original, his accent is somewhat like restrained, but as they go on, he's just edging into like full Danny DeVito and like calling people or H O O R. I have to, I have to watch myself with that. Um, you can trace most of what we identify as horror out of Gothic literature.

Also now just known as, generally spooky things like ghosts and birds and family. Why are birds spooky? I didn't see, I didn't just the Raven. That's the only reason I said that. And maybe owls. Owls are spooky. Yeah. Yeah. So from the 19th century and that goes from everything, like the origins of this people assigned to everything from like Charlotte Bronte and Charles Dickens to, you know, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

Yeah.

I'm trying to get her middle name in there, but I forgot it's Byron, right? I think so. Yeah. To Bram Stoker's Dracula. I just saw the new Frankenstein, Guillermo del Toro. Have you seen it yet? I have not, no.

It was fantastic. I saw it in theaters the day it came out, and I saw it like a child. It was really, really good. I literally walked out of the Darkens cinema room with my huge sunglasses on because I didn't want the girl i was with to see that and then we looked at each other and saw she'd been crying too oh it was very good have you ever seen uh the kenneth branagh one i must have seen it in like high school i don't remember it i was just reading that tangentially because i was the other halloween one or spooky season one that i don't know where i'm gonna find the time to do this but i had wanted to do bram stoker's dracula By.

Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula. So he wanted to, when that movie was a hit, he wanted to do Frankenstein next. And he knew he wanted Bobby De Niro to be in the next one. And so when he came to Bobby, it was like, will you be my Frankenstein or whatever? I think Robert De Niro was like, yes, but I want Kenneth Branagh to direct this. I think, I think, or it was like, or Francis was like, if you are in this movie and I don't direct, who do you want? So it was Kenneth Branagh. And who also cast himself as Frankenstein. And by all accounts, that movie is just like the Kenneth Branagh ego show.

Cause like Frank Darabont did a script treatment and like a bunch of people were involved in it. And they were all like, the reason this sucks is Kenneth Branagh's rampaging ego at the time.

So that was when he was leaving Emma Thompson too. And I think that was like when he was, I think so.

So maybe it was like, this is all I have, but Englishly, all I have is making myself hot Frankenstein. Um, look that up now. So in the 20th century, all this gothic started to dovetail a little bit with elements of fantasy and sci-fi. This is kind of what gets lumped into the category of weird tales. This was stuff that was like in public, all published in pulp magazines alongside everything from Edgar Rice Burroughs to like Flash Gordon.

But like you get this, the gothic sensibility starts to merge with the weird tales with guys like Robert E. Howard, who created Conan. And then everyone's favorite racist shut-in, Howard Percival. I don't actually know what his middle name is. It sounds like it would be Percival Lovecraft. Lovecraft was a wildly, wildly racist, irredeemable piece of s * * *, but he nevertheless popularized this idea of what was called cosmic horror, which is this, in a nutshell, basically this concept of, like, not being scared by, like, the night, broadly speaking, or a bird, or a Dracula, but being scared by, like, things that exist beyond the realms of our perception, whether they're these kind of interdimensional beings as they are in

the Lovecraftian mythology, like the elder gods are like these, they're like the size of, you know, buildings and they exist just outside the realms of our perception. And then when you see them, you're driven instantly insane. Lovecraft also had a thing about the ocean because he was from New England. So like fish were very scary to him.

Scary to me too. And the things under the ocean. Fish are scary. Yeah, it's true. Yeah, like anglerfish. I get it. And then just space broadly. Like he was like, what if something, one of his most famous stories is called The Color Out of Space, which is a great story. But it's literally just like, what if there were a color in outer space that we couldn't see that was horrifying?

It's like, that's not really how the visual spectrum works, buddy. But they didn't know about that back then. So you get this meshing of gothic horror. You get this whole weird tales thing. And then in the middle of the century, this starts to collide with how occultism came out of the very in vogue early 20th century concept of spiritualism, which...

Is basically, you know, that sort of evolved out of like this romantic era of worship of the natural world. Guys like Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. And then basically that sort of gets into this idea that like, well, from there, it's just a hop, skip and a jump to the idea that like we our spirits persist. And this is when you get the whole trend of like mediums and a lot of scams. But basically by the mid 60s, you get the occult, which is interesting. That's when I come on board. Yeah. So by the 50s, 40s and 50s, 60s, you get this whole melange of horror fiction. That's everything from just like crime thrillers, because detective stories are a big part of this, to like people fighting occultists, to people fighting a Dracula or a

Wolfman or a mummy, because obviously the universal horror stuff had been huge hits. But like basically this kind of the sort of the idea of the modern horror fiction novel story. evolves out of this, one of the big watershed moments is Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca. That came out in 1938, and it was adapted the following year by Alfred Hitchcock. In about 20 years, Robert Bloch's Psycho, which also adapted by Hitchcock the following year, came out. Also that year, Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House came out.

So that's a big watershed moment for these huge touchstones of sort of like modern horror fiction as a concept. And then in the 60s, after Haunting of Hill House came out in 63, by the mid 60s, the occult was being a little bit en vogue. Satan had a great three year run in the 60s. You know, Anton LaVey founded the Church of Satan in 1966. In 1967 and 68, the Rolling Stones put out their Satanic Majesty's Request, which is an album. And then they put out Sympathy for the Devil. And so by 1969, it was on the cover of Time magazine, which is how we use children, how we used to measure things. Yeah. Time magazine had a cover story on astrology and the new cult of the occult. It's all a rich tapestry.

Now, you obviously know exponentially more about this than I do, but it seems like mid-century was a very prolific era for horror.

How much of that.

Was in response to The Cold War and this vague sense of impending doom.

At all times is very Lovecraftian in a way. No, I think, I mean, I think out of the 50s, really, a lot of it was people responding to World War II because they, I mean, in early horror pulp paperbacks, like the Nazis are almost always the villains and they'll be, it's like Nazi experimentation or the Nazis have like raised ghosts or there's a Nazi Dracula. I can't stress how much of this stuff. Yeah, there's like Nazi werewolves. There's Nazi...

There's a famous one that's Nazi elves. I'm not making that up. There's a great coffee table book called Paperbacks from Hell that is authored by Grady Hendrix, who is a horror author, along with a guy named Will Erickson. And it's this whole portrait of how this paperback market became so successful. And yeah, so like people responding to the horrors of the modern wars goes into a lot of this. So after Ira Levin writes Rosemary's Baby and it becomes this Oscar-winning film, and then after Blatty's Exorcist and Tryon's The Other come out, things really kick into high gear. And so we're talking about the era of basically Stephen King's commercial dominance because Carrie comes out in...

I should have written that down. 74, I want to say?

74.

Well done. Carrie comes out in 74... And actually sold like five copies in hardcover and then seven in paperback. Five figures, you mean? Sorry, five digits. Oh, yeah. That's what I should have said. So Iron Man Clive hit the scene in the 80s with a number of other authors. And people talk about this. They were either kind of coming into popularity in tandem and inspired by slasher movies as distinct subsets of horror, which you can kind of trace back to. you know, stuff like Black Christmas and Halloween in the late 70s. But, you know, this kind of new breed of these writers really upped the gore.

They were also much younger. A lot of the previous, these previous horror paperbacks have been written by guys who were like churning out romance novels and also detective stories under like six different names. So Barker, a couple of these other people, Kathy Koja, I just read one of her books, Rex Miller, There were two famous editors who worked for Fangoria who put out a bunch of compilations.

Fangoria we talked about on the Tales from the Crypt episode, right? That was a real seminal publication.

Yeah, Fangoria is like the number one horror magazine. And then, sadly, we're out of business. But it's back, baby. Anyway, so this whole loose authorial crew were called Splatterpunks. Splatterpunks. Because funnily enough, a lot of their books were like about rock bands. They kind of all wanted to be like rock musicians. So it was like you go back and look at these author photos and they're hilarious because it'll be a guy with like a receding hairline and a ponytail wearing like a leather jacket or like a lot of them were like flat, big, big hats to kind of look all like rock and roll and cool. Barker's really one of the only of those guys who broke through to the mainstream thanks to Hellraiser. which was also

one of these short stories. Actually, that's properly a novella, not a short story. My apologies. And then Candyman, which was a proper short story. So throughout the 80s, Barca had had some of his work adapted. Another short story called Rawhead Rex came out in 1986 and is awful. Just a terrible, terrible piece of garbage. So he was like, I'm doing Hellraiser myself. And he did a pretty good job with it. You know, those first two films are quite solid. And in particular, the first one for a guy who had never directed a movie before. But so that first one did well enough that people were impressed enough by it that they greenlit a sequel before the first film was released. And then the sequel did well

enough that they greenlit a third film before the sequel had even been released. So the third one is where things start to go awry, though. Barker and the producers of the original film actually never wanted Pinhead to be the main villain. They wanted it to be this character, Julia Cotton, who is like this wicked stepmother archetype. But unbeknownst to them, all of the audiences in the world were like, more Pinhead, please. Parker was adapting another one of his novellas into Nightbreed, which he wanted to be kind of like the Star Wars of horror and failed spectacularly in that. but it's just another fascinating failure. Uh, but point is, is that he was battling the studios, Nightbreed flopped. And so he eventually got shut out of

the Hellraiser franchise. They were like, uh, you don't get to do this anymore, essentially. And he would not direct again until he directed Scott Bakula in 1995's Lord of Illusions. Also not a good film, but I have seen it. Co-starring Famke Janssen and, uh, that scary Basso voiced guy from, uh, Guy who had like the most depressing death ever. He like shot himself after losing. Dan Von Bargen. Oh, he was the guy from Seinfeld, right? The guy from Seinfeld. He's, uh, he's, he's death or Philadelphia to the personification of, of death in, um, Oh brother, where are thou? He's the, um, and he got diabetes and like lost, uh, lost a foot and then shot himself in his apartment. Scott Bakula, my least

favorite Star Trek captain. Oh, interesting. Okay. Thoughts on that. Yeah. Star Trek does pop up in this later. Oh, that's right. That's right. Oh, yeah. Oh, my favorite Star Trek. Next gen.

Now we're going to talk about Bernard Rose in a section called Kissed by a Rose.

Thank you for that.

These incredible section names. Candyman wouldn't exist in its knockout form if it weren't for its director, erudite Englishman Bernard Rose.

We love an erudite Englishman.

He hilariously cameos in the film as the blowhard college professor who quite literally schools, Virginia Madsen's ambitious graduate student, Helen in the lore of the titular villain.

He gave himself the most hilarious shoulder length wig.

He was so, I was so, I literally was like, who is this grotesque man?

Oh wait. Oh yeah.

He was so wildly off putting in a movie that featured a lot of blood and things I didn't want to see. For some reason, he's the thing that stuck with me the most.

It's really not nice. Yeah.

Bernard Rose was a film-obsessed Londoner who won a BBC filmmaking contest at the age of 15 and then, to his family's.

Horror, horror, ha! dropped out of school a year later.

He wound up working as a production assistant for Jim Henson and his creature shop, then pulling together the Dark Crystal at Elstree Studios. I think he might have worked on Labyrinth, too. I seem to remember hearing his name when I was doing some of the Bowie stuff. Bernard Rose told Film Freak Central, I just bring people things.

Drive the Muppets from one place to another. Miss Piggy in the trunk, which is a great soundbite.

I was going to say. Wrapped in duct tape.

Incredibly, this was the same time Stanley Kubrick was working on The Shining and Steven Spielberg was making Raiders of the Lost Ark. And to a lesser extent, Warren Beatty was also doing Reds. This was all at Elstree at the same time. Bernard Rose would say, I would see them all in the same crappy cafeteria eating the most revolting food you've ever seen. Elstree was just like an industrial park in North London. There's Kubrick going around the street and there's Spielberg and, you know, George Lucas lurking about and Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty.

All Californians who must have been so miserable in England pulling that together. Taking vitamin D supplements. It's funny because Kubrick Shining is like a lot of these people mention how Scatman Crothers character in that is like one of the more offensive black stereotypes in horror because in the novel he survives. But in the book, he is both literally the magic Negro stereotype because he has magic powers.

And then he sacrifices himself for the white woman and her kid or he's killed anyway. He doesn't. I don't know. That's an intentional sacrifice. But yeah. So that's troubling. Thanks, Stanley. Stan. Yeah. Thank you, Stan.

From his stent-shuttling felt around, Bernard Rose became a music video director, responsible for, most notably, the Relax video by Frankie Goes to Hollywood.

Which was quite transgressive at the time. Very much so, yeah. One of the most striking videos of the 80s. He also did Small Town Boy for Bronski Beat, which is another one that's kind of in the annals of history for at least. Small Town Boy is basically about a closeted gay guy growing up. And it became this sort of rallying in a small town and it became a sort of rallying cry for the LGBTQ community in the 80s.

You've neglected to mention that he also directed the video for WB40 Red Red Wine.

Yes, somehow, somehow that one escaped me. Yes, yes.

WB40 is the name comes from an employment document. Unemployment WB 40 cents for unemployment benefit form 40.

Interesting.

Yeah.

I thought it was a reference to the oil. WD 40. Yeah. But they wouldn't be.

Big fans of, I mean that actually for, for a band, like having a grease palms, that's not a bad.

Oh, wow. Really reaching for that one. Oh, thanks. I think, uh, where are we?

By 1988, Bernard Rose had shot his first feature film paper house in which drew a rave review from Roger the God Ebert. Paper House straddles the line between dark fantasy and horror, and Rose followed it with Chicago Joe and the Showgirl in 1990, starring Kiefer Sutherland, inspired by the real-life Houlton Jones murder case of 1944, otherwise known as the Cleft Chin Murder.

I don't know that one. I was so hoping it would be more than that. It's not that interesting. Basically, it was like this... 18-year-old waitress elizabeth jones the titular showgirl sort of a nebraska situation you know had a whole badlands kind of thing with carl hulting a swedish-born u.s army deserter uh and they killed this cab driver named george heath and um george he had a cleft chin so the ever creative british press dubbed it the cleft chin murders or murder singular Yeah, they really didn't have a lot to go on for that one. Wow. Yeah, from Snatch, Dennis Farina. I thought this country spawned the f * * * ing language, and so far nobody seems to speak it.

Casting about for other works to adapt, Bernard Rose initially had his sights set on In the Flesh, another of Clive Barker's stories anthologized in Books of Blood, Volume 5, published in 1985. He actually met Clive Barker when they were both at L3 Studios when Barker was working on the aforementioned Nightbreed, his directorial.

Tribute. Failure. His directorial failure. Just call it that. There you go.

And so when Rose's wife persuaded him to pick the Forbidden as a star vehicle for herself, which we'll talk more about later, securing the rights was as simple as calling Barker on the phone. The basic plot outline for Candyman is intact from his short story, The Forbidden. Main character Helen is a university student doing a thesis on graffiti who selects a rundown council estate in Liverpool, where Clyde Barker grew up. And I'd be remiss not to add where my favorite band, the Beatles, are from. And it was the Titanic's home port. All good things come from Liverpool. A lot of my interests. Sorry, I'll take that again.

It's a very BBC thing to say.

Main character Helen is a university student doing a thesis on graffiti who selects a run-down council estate in Liverpool as a focus for her study, where the art references an urban legend called the Candyman. Further inquiries lead her to believe that this is connected with recent murders and mutilations, and she eventually encounters the ghostly Candyman himself. Clive Barker was acutely aware of Britain's horrifying class divides, as I imagine every British person was in the.

Era, especially.

During the great Satan Maggie Thatcher's term, or multiple terms, many terms, isn't she?

Is she the longest serving British Prime Minister? Definitely up there. I just, I'm happy to confirm she's dead and in hell. It's my favorite Frankie Boyle line.

They spent millions on Margaret Thatcher's funeral. He'd given out shovels to Scotsmen. It's like, we would have dug a hole straight to hell and handed her over to Satan personally.

God bless Frankie Boyle. He's right, too. Yes, yes, yes, yes.

Clyde Barker explored the horrifying British class divides in a number of his short stories, setting his yarns in places like council flats, which are basically the British equivalent of housing projects. Boar stools, which is a word, shockingly, for an Anglophile like me, I've never heard, which is like a juvenile hall, basically.

Yeah, I mean, they were like combination school and correctional outfits. The only reason I'd heard of it is because when I was going through my de-rigger punk studies as a teen, there's a... Jesus. They're an oi band called Sham69, and they have a song called Borstal Breakout. We talked about them on the Chumbawamba episode. Yeah.

Clyde Barker also set One particularly weird short story About.

Workers' rights It's not really the setting It's more of what happens in it Oh, tell me, what happens? Hands start, like, forcibly rebelling Against their owners It's like a whole metaphor for labor rights It's a very Doctor Strange love Yeah Well, yeah, exactly Yeah, it's interesting I mean, you know, as anyone growing up in Liverpool will, you know He had a healthy distrust of the wealthy. They're frequently like rich people are just the worst in all of his short stories, which I love. He's great. He was right to do it.

He was also a rent boy at one point, which isn't I didn't. Yeah. Yeah. When he was struggling to pay the bills. What a dehumanizing term. I'm going to rent this boy. Yeah, it's quite awful. I think that's like distinctly British. Yeah, I've never heard that. We just call them gigolos, right? It's a little more dignified. Yeah. Yeah, I can't think of any other. Yeah, I guess so.

Staying on topic. A key point to Candyman is the nature of urban legends. In the film, Candyman appears to people who say his name in the mirror five times, which is, of course, a reference on the classic Bloody Mary story. Oh, yeah. But in the short story, technically the only reason he even appears to Helen is because she doubts him by suggesting that he's merely a scapegoat for the real life crime and misery of council housing.

She begins to erode his power. People don't believe in me. I don't exist. Come on.

Do you think that like a murderous ghost would be that thin skinned? I guess a murderous ghost has no skin.

Candyman's trademark slasher weapon, his hook, is a deliberate nod by Barker to one of the most enduring urban legends, which is the one about teens getting busy in a car, and then they hear a report about an escaped lunatic with a hook for his hand, and then it kind of branches in multiple directions. It's like jazz. You improvise depending on the telling. Or the aristocrats. Or the aristocrats, yeah.

The teens either drive away, and they later discover, because they're spooked by scratching noises, and then they drive away, and then when they get away to safety, they discover the hook hanging off the car. In the more gruesome version, which is, I think, also depicted in the film Urban Legends, starring Rebecca Gayheart and Jared Leto, bad film. Basically, the girl hears these noises and she sends her boyfriend out to investigate. And then she hears a scraping on the roof of the car and she gets terrified and drives away.

And the killer had hung her boyfriend and it was the tips of his... toes scraping against the roof of the car. And then after driving away, she discovers the hook. So it's all a rich tapestry. Uh, Bernard Rose took this urban legends theory and just juiced it for his screenplay. I, I have to really say that like, I'm quite impressed by the amount of thought that went into this movie and will either. Yeah. I have an alternate theory that pops up later on, but he does seem to have really taken this quite seriously. He read a lot of books about just the nature of oral tradition and urban and urban legends and, the one that he name dropped is The Vanishing Hitchhiker by Jan van Bruunvand. Every major

sequence in the film, he said, is based on one of these myths. Unfortunately for Jordan, he added, the line I most regretted losing from the screenplay was about a certain well-known film star and a certain furry rodent, which has no basis whatsoever in fact, but it had to go.

Oh my God.

Referring to the Richard Gere gerbil story. No time for this. No time for this. No, we can't get into it. What episode did we get into that? It might have been the Oscars episode. I don't even remember. Just Google Richard Gere gerbil and know that Jordan hates Richard Gere. Our legal team will not allow us to spread that rumor.

So he continues. Rose runs down this list. He's talking to the independent. He runs down this list of urban legends in the film. There's the one about the person who's in the bonfire when it's lit. There's a whole branch of urban mythology about people who have been eaten from inside by bees or spiders or earwigs. There's this idea of looking into the mirror and invoking something by speaking its name. They're all the ones about retribution for unfaithful husbands or wives. And the biggest urban legend of all for me was the idea that there are places in cities where you do not go because if you go in them, something dreadful will happen. Of the whole name in the mirror bit, though, he told Den of Geek,

in the original script, they were supposed to say Candyman 13 times, not five times, because in the Bloody Mary legend, they say it 13 times. During the first table read, they started going Candyman, Candyman, and I was falling asleep. So he changed it to five times. Five? I thought it was three. I thought it was three, honestly. Well, so the next thing he says is, he said, it did come from Bloody Fairy. Bloody Fairy. Oh, that's a very different story. It's very English. Yeah. That's one of his Red Boy stories Moving on Steady He said it did come from Bloody Mary But I had seen Beetlejuice So I'd have to say Beetlejuice should probably get some credit There's also I would be remiss if I did not add that There's a Guardian interview with Tony Todd

From I think 2018 Where the writer of course asks him Have you ever looked in the mirror And done Candyman and Tony Todd Presumably at the end of his rope Answers Why in the f * * * would I go to a mirror with me in the mirror, the actor who played the role, and call out my own damn name five times? Perfect. Yes, yes, that's pretty funny.

Bernard Rose decided to set his adaptation in America simply to secure the largest audience possible. It's the old high-fidelity trick.

Oh, I didn't know that was also why they moved it. Yeah, they set it in Chicago, actually. Yeah, also in Chicago.

Well, I think because Jay got John Cusack, and John Cusack loves Chicago. but it was originally set in London.

In the book.

In his own words, Bernard Rose landed on Chicago somewhat by chance, having been struck by its architecture when he briefly visited for a film festival before coming back to investigate it further.

I'm going there in a couple of days for the first time. None of this stuff exists anymore. Yeah, I know. Literally raised to the ground. I was going to go and see if I could take pictures of it for you, but yes.

Going to Chicago was a kind of slightly random thing, Rose told the NME. I went there to scout it, take a look around. The stuff I saw and experienced in Chicago, meaning the social deprivation, it was genuinely shocking.

He asked the Illinois.

Film Commission to show him the worst slum in the city and subsequently resolved to set his film in the city's notorious Cabrini-Green public housing projects. Rose later told the New York Times the Illinois Film Commission wouldn't go in there without an armed escort of police officers, which I'm sure made them extremely popular. I did get talking to a woman, a young mother who lived there, and I took her telephone number.

And later on, I went back on my own.

And it was a very different experience because I wasn't traveling with cops. There was an unacknowledged sense that it was genuinely a ghetto that had borders that you couldn't really go beyond. An acceptance that that was that.

It's interesting because that moment occurs in the film. When Helen comes back to the second time, she doesn't have any cops with her, which I guess makes her whatever. But yeah, it is funny how much of this he just kind of learned about Chicago on the fly and then wrote it into the film.

Rose also plundered a real-life Chicago crime story for the film. As he explained to Den of Geek, I discovered old articles in the Chicago Reader about a series of murders that happened in Cabrini-Green, including one where the killer came into an apartment through the medicine cabinet.

Which is horrifying. That's right.

Like a snake coming up through the toilet or something. That's like, yeah, fear, new phobia.

Right. Yeah. And it's just, I mean, it's just because they were like, all these things were made so to the lowest bidder, you know, constructed by the lowest bidder. There's like no divide between your neighbor's wall where it meets your medicine cabinet and it meets theirs. That's yeah. Like you think it's something invented for the movie. Yeah.

I've never heard that stupid. Yeah. Really just happened. Second city, baby. I don't like when I call them that. I'm sure they don't. Why do they call them that? Is it for the reason I would assume? Yeah, it's always second place to New York. I mean, at the time, in the 80s, it was the second most populous city in America, I think for a while in the 20th century. So they permanently had this sort of a derogatory nickname of being like, ah, you're forever number two. They don't like that?

I thought they embraced it. I mean, I think the comedy club is a tweak on that, but they don't like the Windy City either, I found out. Do you like going there? I've never been. I do like Chicago, actually. My uncle was a longtime professor at U of Chicago. Oh, wow. I didn't know that. Yeah, I've been out there for, I was out there for Pitchfork one year. Yeah, I like Chicago a lot, actually. It has an amazing music scene. Honestly, some of the best records, records that redefined how people even think about music came out. of the Chicago scene in the nineties, um, still has a great scene. Just so damn cold. Yeah. It's that lake effect snow. Let's talk about the people who died there.

The victim of the real life crime that Bernard Rose plundered, stole, borrowed for his adaptation was a 52 year old named Ruthie McCoy. It sounds like a Jim Croce character.

Hmm.

Rose immortalized her in the film by basically presenting her story verbatim. Another real-life Cabrini-Green resident, Henrietta Thompson, offered to help Rose researching the place, and he hired her as a consultant, basing the character of Anne-Marie McCoy on her.

But I think if memory serves, there is also, like, in one of the first scenes where Helen's, like, doing, like, interviews, one of the students, well, one of the, one of the help, The janitors at the college are two black women, and he brings them in, and one of them says, it happened to my cousin Henrietta or something like that.

so it was interesting.

How she was out in the hallway I was like come in here the lady wants to talk to you yeah exactly obviously being set in Liverpool the original Candyman was white there are black people in Liverpool but okay.

Are there yeah not a lot I mean it's like it's like the novelty of you know Phil Linod being a black Irishman you know We exist. It's awful, but we exist. But Bernard Rose decided to make his Candyman black, a move that Jordan Peele later told Empire Magazine was, quote, pretty revolutionary before adding, if there was no Candyman, I don't know that there would be a get out. Yeah, I mean, I endeavored to have as many black critics in this movie as possible, but it does seem that there is a real divide between people who are like, no, that movie's trash, or at least people who, like, acknowledge its cultural importance without necessarily co-signing all of its politics.

So it was interesting to hear this from Jordan Peele, who was the producer of the recent reboot.

Jordan Peele elaborated on this to Bloody Disgusting, saying, The original Candyman is one of my favorites. It's a very influential movie for me, mainly because we didn't have a black Freddy.

We didn't have a black Jason. When Candyman came along, it felt very daring. It felt very cathartic. And it was terrifying.

This is one of the movies that told me that black people can be in horror. The race swap made the producers of the film a bit nervous and asked Bernard Rose to meet with representatives from the NAACP. Rose told The Independent in 1993, What they said to me when they read the script was, Why are we even having this meeting? Their argument was, Why shouldn't a black actor be a ghost? Why shouldn't a black actor play Freddy Krueger or Hannibal Lecter? If you're saying that they can't be, it's really perverse.

Makes sense. Yeah, very much so.

We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more Too Much Information in just a moment. Heigl, give us some background on Cabrini-Greene.

Yeah, admittedly, I find this so fascinating because, you know, of course, my aunt and uncle lived there. But also it's like such a unique case study of urban decay. But it really can be the trajectory of it can be mapped onto virtually every major city in America. It was originally a shantytown first inhabited by Swedish and Irish immigrants in the 1800s, charmingly nicknamed Little Hell. Because it was visually within distance of a gas refinery that was constantly belching flames and fumes. So by the 20th century, they upgraded it to Little Sicily. Wow. The next layer of hell. That's one above. Yeah. With a bunch of Italian immigrants cycling in to replace the Swedes and the Irish.

So in 1942, the Francis Cabrini homes were completed, named after an Italian saint known for her work with the pork. 586 units in 54 two-story row house buildings they were erected originally with the charmingly racist residency requirements that it was uh mandated to be 75 white people and 25 black people in 1962 the william green homes with just a shy of 12 000 units were completed But then in 1969, the Chicago Housing Authority, not the last time they will pop up in this, were found liable for racially discriminatory housing practices. So in time, that whole unit, the whole unit structure, this whole neighborhood came to be known as Cabrini-Green. Interestingly enough, from 1974 to 1979, Cabrini-Green

appeared nightly or semi-nightly, weekly, in the sitcom Good Times. The actual sitcom is set in an unnamed project, but the exterior shots in the opening and closing credits were Cabrini-Green. Heigl, did they have good times there? Maybe in the 70s, but then things went really downhill really quickly.

I'd like to add before we move on, speaking of Cabrini-Green's pop cultural history, Soul icons like Major Lance, Jerry Butler, and friggin' Curtis Mayfield live there.

Hell yeah.

As did jazz pop pianist Ramsey Lewis of the Ramsey Lewis Trio.

Love Ramsey Lewis. Yeah, me too. So by the 30s, Cabrini-Green had already had something of a bad reputation. One map made in 1931 just labeled an intersection there, Death Corner. Again, no real originality in this. But again, much like every major city in the U.S., Chicago was one of the cities where much of the second great migration of black people following the end of slavery and then later Jim Crow era, black people moved away from the South in droves.

And Chicago was one of the biggest areas or one of the biggest places that this happened. It's basically the reason why we have Chicago blues as a genre. And then following that, just electric blues, period. which, you know, gives us basically the latter half of American music via the British. But the problem is, is that some of the promise of this neighborhood had started to drain out once wartime manufacturing fell after World War II. Again, this is exactly what happened to the Fillmore in San Francisco, which we covered in our Sly Stone episode. So, you know, this happens, the neighborhood becomes depressed, white flight occurs, the resources for it become slashed, and everything just sort of

falls into disrepair. What made Cabrini-Green, though, such a poster child for these trends across the whole country was that it was located at the boundary of two of Chicago's wealthiest neighborhood, Lincoln Park and the Gold Coast. And less than a mile from the, quote, magnificent mile, which was the commercial corridor between Chicago's Loop, the North Loop and the South Loop, and the Gold Coast, which is all the lakefront high-rises. And there were like 15,000 people living in Cabrini Green at its, at its peach, many of them illegally and crammed into all of these like tenement style conditions. But, you know, so it's, it wasn't like the Marcy houses or the Tompkins houses in New York, the sheer size of this place. And the fact that,

you know, it'd be like if the Mar, if Jay-Z had grown up in the Marcy also with insight of like fifth Avenue, you know, I don't know if that actually holds water. Well, wait for wait for me to get canceled.

Well, it seemed like in the movie when Helen kind of is in her apartment and pulls the shades back and like points on and she's been clearly in like an upscale apartment and points off into the distance and is.

Like, there they are. Yeah. So that was very real. But with this juxtaposition, the Chicago Housing Authority's institutional neglect of Cabrini-Green was drawn into stark relief. Lawns got paved over because it was just too expensive to maintain them. Basic quality of life repairs were just completely eliminated. At one point, people claimed that the trash was backed up in the trash chutes until the 15th floor. And then they solved that not by repairing the, you know, the root problem, but by fencing in balconies where people had begun to just throw their trash directly out because the trash chutes no longer worked. So this made the whole thing just look even more like a prison. On July 17th, 1970,

two Chicago cops were fatally shot from an apartment window by gang members. And then 11 years later, in the first three months of 1981 alone, 11 people were murdered and 37 others were shot at in Cabrini-Green, which spurred this political stunt, really one of a kind so far, that drew the nation's attention, mostly after it went horribly awry.

Chicago's first female mayor, and really the first female mayor of any major metropolitan city in New York, because again, at the time, Chicago was second to New York in total population. She had a personal connection to the neighborhood. When her grandfather immigrated to Chicago from Ireland, first place he lived in was Little Hell. So in March of 1981, she made this daring announcement that she was going to be moving into the Cabrini Greenhouses. She told the press, I will keep that apartment in the way that many suburbanites keep a downtown or in-town apartment, which is a hilarious dated sentiment in an era where people can't even afford one home, much less a home and an apartment.

Capitalism is a failed experiment. She continued, I will consider it as a place to go on some nights and not others. And then in the most damning quote, I will not give up the apartment so long as I am mayor. Byrne admirably, or perhaps stupidly, went for the gusto. She chose 150 to 1160 North Sedgwick Street, literally known as The Rock, one of the worst of the buildings in the entire project, as her new home. This stunt was an education in how things actually were from the beginning.

They found two vacant units that they were going to move her into, and they were both occupied. The Chicago Housing Authority estimated that around 6,000 people living in Cabrini Green were not on any sort of lease. Was squatters? Is that what that means? Squatters or just like over overpopulated apartments. A lot of the vacants were simply controlled by the gangs to use as just headquarters. Second graders at the nearby Byrd Elementary wrote letters to Mayor Jane Byrne urging her to stay away. Some of them, there are samples of some of them from, I think this was a Chicago Reader Report I got a lot of this from. a lot of black people live here and you are a white person, simple and effective, uh, roaches

and rats might drive you crazy. You may be shot, stabbed or assassinated. And these are children. These are children, elementary school children. Okay. Byrne's husband, who's a city hall reporter named J. McMullen, was stranded in a broken elevator between floors when he first visited, along with something like 11 other reporters. Although he did manage to quip to the assembled people, it ain't the Ritz, but I've slept in some pretty unusual places in my life. So Byrne and McMullen moved in on March 31st. Their neighboring apartment had been cleaned out for 24-7 guard detail. and the windows of Byrne's unit were replaced with bulletproof glass, a precaution driven largely by the assassination attempt on President Ronald

Reagan that happened the same month. Byrne had received death threats for this as well, but she wrote in her diary, quote, another great, she basically just memorialized another great quote from her husband. I was mostly philosophical about such threats, and Jay was grimly humorous, stating, you'll be safer in Cabrini.

The place has such a bad reputation, most assassins will be afraid to go there. I couldn't find this because the Tribune link was part of dead internet. But apparently on the first night of her residency, there was like a big police raid with like 11 people arrested who had like 70 guns or something. It was like just part of the police presence. In part, yes. It's all a rich tapestry. And interestingly enough, Byrne conceived of this ambitious stunt probably and largely because her reputation with Chicago's black community was justifiably in the toilet. She had won the black vote in the election that she beat incumbent Michael Blandick in the 1979 election and then naturally proceeded to sell out that community once in office. She installed

a black interim police chief, which was a huge deal, and then gave the job to white force veteran Richard Blandick. He's Polish. Berserksek. Berserksek. Then she removed two of the five black members of the 11-member school board of the city, replacing them with white folks who were openly opposed to desegregation efforts in the 80s, in Chicago, the North, where black people lived.

And this is me coming in as the Pollyanna of our duo. It must be said that Byrne did use her time at Cabrini Green to effect some change. She began construction on not one, not two, but three new baseball diamonds and a football field, which does not markedly improve lives, but still with other area parks receiving upgrades as well. And she created a new food co-op there as well. Predictably, city services descended on Cabrini-Green to catch up on repairs that had been neglected for probably decades at that point. Byrne also cracked down on crime. Seven area liquor stores were closed. Which, is that really the priority?

I mean, I guess I sort of get it.

Yeah.

And hundreds of families suspected of housing gang members were evicted.

Oh, great. Yeah, that was a real great move. I think it was because, and I think it was even, like, they didn't have any proven ties. They were people who had been on parole. So they were basically like, if you were living there and paroled, they just took the, they basically took, if you had a gang-related conviction, they just kind of took a precaution of being like, yeah.

You might be. Yeah, yeah, essentially. Wow, wow. A retired Green Beret and a major general was put in charge of security for these units. That's wild.

50 federal agents from the ATF were assigned to deal with gun trafficking, and the Chicago Police Department's presence as Cabrini-Green was drastically ramped up on top of that. The move achieved the desired press notoriety and helped in the polls. 60% of Chicagoans responded that they'd vote for Byrne in an immediate election, with 27% saying her Cabrini-Green stay changed their vote.

I would like to know the racial breakdown against that.

I think you know what it is. This whole show is basically Heigl's woke corner at this point. So gotcha, bitches. There was, of course, a backlash to this. Residents of the many other public housing developments in the city complained that theirs were equally in desperate need of repair and didn't have the benefit of having been chosen for a mayoral PR coup. And residents of Cabrini-Green accused Byrne of actually worsening conditions for them. She had established a new misdemeanor court, as we mentioned, specifically to deal with the anticipated rush of arrests. And there were an enormous amount of arrests, hundreds of them, though virtually every case wound up dismissed for procedural errors or lack of evidence. Residents

were stopped and frisked multiple times during the day, simply running errands. And one resident who had for years operated a club for at-risk teens in the project was unceremoniously evicted over his 17-year-old son's marijuana conviction. Even the Polack burn put in charge of the cops, police superintendent Richard versus X. Candidly, you got to censor Polack. I don't think they like it when I call him that. We'll just add Chicago to the regions I've pissed off. Number two under France. No, no, it was Dutch, too. The Dutch. Yeah, the Dutch. Yeah. He, even in a rare display of candor from an elected official, admitted that the CPD were treading, quote, a very, very fine line between maintaining order and becoming oppressive.

Try getting out of a police superintendent these days. Yeah. All of this boiled over at an Easter celebration that Byrne essentially foisted on Cabrini-Green. She made the catastrophic mistake of erecting a giant white cross for the celebration. Again, you'll remember many of the city's black residents had been victimized by the Ku Klux Klan years earlier. And then on the day when few people showed up, literally begged the scant attendees to return home and get their siblings and friends to come and then publicly blamed all of the gang members for scaring people off, possibly missing from the same briefing that said, don't put up a giant white cross in a black neighborhood, you moron. They also

neglected to mention that she was holding this event on Division Street. which had become a fitting for its name because it was literally the neutral territory between the two feuding gangs, the Cobra stones and the disciples that occupied the two towers. This gets even more granular because there were red and white divisions between those two opposing gangs.

And the colors actually mattered more than the enveloping gang affiliation. Meaning if you were a red Cobra stone, uh, You also hated white Cobra stones in addition to also hating the disciples. Basically, this is like having a 4th of July party in the DMZ during the middle of the Vietnam War. A longtime community organizer in Chicago and a Cabrini tenant, Marion Stamps, had been one of the most vocal opponents of Burns' stunt and organized a protest that coincided with the Easter quote-unquote celebrations. She led a chant saying, We need jobs, not eggs. And she also correctly pointed out that Burns' whole public goodwill campaign literally followed the white colonial playbook to a T. She appeased the quote-unquote

natives with a religious celebration at Easter. She erected new sporting arenas for them and put up petty entertainments and handed out junk food and trinkets. Then, of course, the CPD naturally got fed up with this and just started tossing people in paddy wagons, including a lawyer who simply said, what are these people being arrested for? Byrne left for vacation to California the following week and from that safe distance decided to terminate her stay at Cabrini Green after just 25 days. I didn't realize that. To her credit, to her scant, scant credit, She did return occasionally. She opened the new athletic complex that she had got underway.

She attended the opening of the area's only newsstand by two teen residents. And she would continue to watch ball games there during the seasons when her husband was coaching the team. Damage. Yes.

What was the cover story for her leaving this?

I don't think there was one. I mean, yes. I don't know. I mean, you know that this episode is already 20 pages long and I didn't want to get too granular into like what the coverage was at the time, but it was immediately on a national scale, like a failure. I'm not sure how it broke wide, but like once the fact that she was like, I didn't, she didn't last a whole month. That's when like even ABC was doing like like Nightline was doing coverage of it. What the cliff notes to this whole story don't cover, though, like we often hear like you hear Mayor Jane Byrne moved into Greeny Greens and left after before a month.

You don't hear the fact that Byrne was besties with Charles Swibel, who had been head of the Chicago Housing Authority since 1963, almost 20 years at this point. They were buddies. He was one of her biggest fundraisers and one of her closest advisors, which may be why nine separate reports, nine different assessments of the Chicago Housing Authority had been filed in four years between 1978 and 1982.

And they all went ignored and all of them were universally damning. The ninth one was by an urban planner named Oscar Newman, and it featured the indelible line, In every area we examined, from finance to maintenance, from administration to outside contracting, from staffing to project management, from purchasing to accounting, the CHA was found to be operating in a state of profound confusion and disarray. No one seems to be minding the store, and what's more, No one seems genuinely to care. The FBI took notice, though, and conducted a nine-month investigation, ultimately charging six housing authority maintenance workers with stealing millions of dollars of assorted repairs, supplies, which went a little bit towards explaining the fact that

over half of the elevators across the entire city in public housing were not operational. Byrne stuck by, bro, though, She only fired him after the National Office of Housing and Urban Development, HUD, said, we will remove all your federal funding if this man stays in office. She then made the classic move of installing her campaign manager in his place and then packed the board. She went and packed the CHA board, expanding it from five to seven members and appointing three white commissioners, changing its demographic from majority black. To majority white. Perhaps needless to say, she was defeated in the 1983 election. Well, that went well. Yeah, man, it's really tough because like I haven't I'm not bringing

this up with my aunt and uncle, but, you know, a lot of people in Chicago were like, this is the first mayor, like lady mayor. She's doing good things. But like, what a cluster. And this brings us to crack cocaine.

The other historical note is that Chicago was one of the first cities where crack cocaine appeared, with the earliest reports of the drug there dating to 1981. It was a CIA plant, right?

That has only been alleged about L.A., but yeah, why not everywhere? Sure.

By 1987, six years later, there were supposedly only four states in the U.S.

Where crack cocaine was not available. What do you think they were? Utah, Massachusetts. Oh, no. Massachusetts.

Oh, yeah.

You're right. Utah. I want to say like Wyoming. Yeah. Maybe Alaska. I was going to say Alaska. Hawaii.

Yeah.

All right. Good. Glad we did this. Good talk, son.

Naturally, as you might have heard, crack cocaine sent crime rates soaring in urban centers. A year prior, in 1986, Congress had passed laws that created a 100-to-1 sentencing disparity between penalties for trafficking or possession of crack cocaine versus powder cocaine, a move that was widely viewed as disproportionately impacting black men, because powder cocaine was seen as the province of rich white people. Add to this the fact that from 1984 to 1989, the homicide rate for black males aged 14 to 24 effectively doubled.

And you can.

Begin to understand the atmosphere around Cabrini-Green when Candyman shot there for only three days.

In 1991.

Wow.

I didn't realize it was only that they shot there for only three days. Yeah. All the interiors were soundstages. Wow. Because of what we'll talk to you about one paragraph later. No, I remember this.

Crime at Cabrini-Green hit a new low in 1997. when a nine-year-old girl, her identity kept a secret for privacy reasons, was found in a seventh-floor stairway, having been raped, beaten, choked, and poisoned with a can of insecticide. Her body was covered in gang symbols, but she survived, and in an unusual twist, the area's gang members, incensed by the attempts to pin the crime on them, helped find the culprit.

That same year, Mayor Richard Daley, the second, announced the redevelopment plans for the neighborhood, and in 2011, the last remaining high-rise in the Cabrini Green housing project was demolished. Candyman and cinematographer Anthony Richman did recall at least one incident of legitimate danger while filming there, which was also verified by actress Casey Lemons. For shots that swooped up the facade of the apartment buildings, Richman and his team used a device called a Chapman Titan, which is essentially a huge rideable crane. Richard recalled, I'll never forget that because we were at Cabrini Green and they wouldn't let us shoot at night there.

We had to do it all at dusk.

I had a big arc light on top of the crane and it was so cold. We started to shoot and there were all these people coming out and all of a sudden there was a bang, bang, bang. And they shot out the generator. The generator driver just got up and ran. So I quickly came down off that crane.

In a lighter note, We move on to a section I like to call Tony, Tony Todd. Black people have historically not been treated particularly well in the horror genre. Well, in anything. Can we expand that? Particularly well, full stop, but also particularly horribly in horror. There's a book called The Black Guy Dies First, Black Horror Cinema from Fodder to Oscar from two authors, Robert R. Means Robert R. Coleman, and Mark H. Harris thoroughly explores this, and there's a great documentary called Horror Noir that also delves into this topic.

The director of that film, Tana Reeve-Dew, had a quote in The Guardian about why black people had become such a reliable audience for horror movies, despite being uniformly mistreated by the genre. There's a lot of racial PTSD in the U.S., and horror is uniquely suited to give people who have survived trauma or people who fear trauma an outlet.

My mother loved horror films. She watched all of them. If she had lived to see Get Out, that would have been her favorite. Although The Black Guy Dies First names the most obvious trope that horror movies are famous for, you can trace all manner of pervasive black stereotypes back to shit like King Kong. Like, literally as long as the medium has existed. Although, as another Jordan Peele movie note takes pains to point out that the first moving image by Edward J. Maybridge... Muybridge, Maybridge, Muybridge, was of a black jockey riding a horse. Oh, wow. Well, we don't have time to get quite as deep as this topic, as it merits. There are a few historically important films that do pop up when mentioning black people's presence in

the genre. One is George A. Romero's literally game-changing Night of the Living Dead, which stars black actor Dwayne Jones as Ben, who is portrayed as calm, collective, and assertive throughout the film, while his white counterparts fall to bits. metaphorically and literally. Romero has long asserted that he kind of lucked into this because this movie was shot so on the cheap and in fucking Pittsburgh, he was like, yeah, he was just the best actor I could find. But this movie came out the same year as the assassination of Martin Luther King. So it was something of a breath of fresh air for the genre that would remain quite rare until the 70s came along and we got hit with blaxploitation. And then in short order, we got

hit with Blackula, Black and Stein, the endearingly weird Ganja and Hess, which is one of the most baffling movies. But go check it out. And the blatant exorcist ripoff, Abby, which we did cover in the the exorcist episode, which was so low budge and literally just repeated all of the plot points in the movie that it was sued into oblivion. 1973's Blackula is probably the best one of these.

It stars William Marshall, who really gives it his all as an African prince who was turned into a vampire by Dracula when he traveled to Transylvania from Africa to try and enlist Dracula in the battle against the transatlantic slave trade. Far-fetched, albeit thematically rich, it could have been much worse. The director, William Crane, who's also a black man, remembered it as one of American international pictures... famed low budge production company hail mary's they were in dire financial straits at the time and they just wanted a black vampire movie the original title was horrifically count brown's in town oh wow.

I have a a question and this may be too much to get into for an episode that's already pushing it time wise but blaxploitation to me just the nature of the name alone seems to imply that it's exploitative and therefore offensive or a bad thing.

Sure.

I get the sense that that's not the case and it was actually embraced by the black community.

Is that true? Well, the portmanteau was actually coined by Junius Griffin, who is president of the Beverly Hills slash Hollywood branch of the NAACP, which at the time must have numbered several. So it did basically start out as an attempt to capitalize on the then novel fact that black people were allowed to see movies in the late 60s in the north. But you have stuff like Sweet Sweet Sweet Bats, Badass Song in 1971 and Shaft. And they were.

Is he the is he the black private dick that's like a sex machine to all the chicks?

Talking about Shaft. OK, thanks. That's what I thought. That movie actually came after a similar movie called Cotton Comes to Harlem. That was like another another big watershed moment. cause Aussie Davis was in there or Aussie Davis, uh, directed it and co-wrote it. I guess the overall arc of them is that while they were deliberately trying to, uh, cheaply get at black people's money, they did become a form of empowerment because you get people like Jim Brown through the hard way. Uh, you get people like Wooden Marshall directing black and Blackula, you get Pam Greer and stuff like Foxy Brown. Um, and then you just get people like, um, Jim Kelly from his cast in Enter the Dragon alongside Bruce Lee. He becomes a major, major

blaxploitation star in martial arts. Fred Williamson's character from the original Inglourious Bastards also led to him being a major star at the time. And then, of course, you do get into stuff like Shaft and, of course, Superfly, which is just kind of openly embracing black empowerment. Scored by Cabrini Green resident Curtis Mayfield. callback reference segue message so i love that bit message uh that is in uh don't don't be a menace to south central while drinking your juice in the hood which is a wayans joint i don't think i can say that i've noticed that my voice is uh when i my voice gets hoarse i uncomfortably start lapsing into like current trump where his voice is like verging into like tom wades i don't

think i can say that um george romero steps into the middle of this and either quite cleverly took advantage of the fact that night of the living dead was being hailed as had got this progressive reputation or again just colorblind cast the film because again he shoots around in pittsburgh as john carpenter famously said someone's got to do it So Dawn of the Dead comes out in 1978 and is another black milestone. The black guy lives.

One of the film's main characters is a black helicopter pilot played by Ken Foray. He later told the BBC, I found out later that so many African-Americans were so happy and impressed just by the fact that I survived. It was something of an accomplishment in their eyes. A lot of them approached me and said, hey, man, you lived through it. You're the first African-American to live through a horror film. So, Candyman actor Tony Todd brought all of that to bear in his incredible performance in the film.

He had previously been best known as a character actor in stuff like Platoon, and he was also in the 1999 remake of Night of the Living Dead, assuming the Dwayne Jones role. Todd also had some heat at the time for his four-episode arc on Star Trek, TNG, as Worf's brother. Borf? Blorf? Too soon. When I first... Kern, you know, like corn. Are you ready? Not, no, we're not, we're not getting out.

Nope.

Nope. Stay away. Okay. Um, Todd, Tony Todd told entertainment weekly in 2022 that when he first read the candy man script, he looked for traps. He said, I wanted to make sure that if I was going to be one of the first significant black actors in a horror film, I better make sure that it's complete. It tells a story from beginning to middle and end. And that is what I saw in the script. He got quite involved.

He worked with wardrobe to come up with his character's distinctive fur-lined coat and frilly collar, which befits the origin story that they came up with, that he was the son of a slave who had become a talented painter and an artist, a professional. And then he also helped make up artist Bob Keen with Candyman's grotesque stump hook.

And he notes in Fangoria that he requested an eye patch for the character. which Bernard Rose shot down.

By the way, Bernard Rose has officially and repeatedly dispelled the eternal accepted as fact rumor that Eddie Murphy was in the running for the titular role of Candyman.

This pisses me off. It's everywhere. I actually went in and edited the Wikipedia article for this because I have a disease. You're an editor on Wikipedia? I am now. Literally, I was moved to do it solely because of this podcast. Of course, I read I scan the Wikipedia articles, but I saw right in there the falsehood in two separate interviews, though.

At this point, Rose has said it was not Eddie Murphy correctly pointing out that if Eddie Murphy had wanted this role at the height of his fame in the early 90s, he would have gotten it. This was before Vampire in Brooklyn.

Bird and Rose elaborated on this to Den of Geek. Tony Todd pretty much came in and was fabulous, and that was that. He just had it in every sense of the word, and it was pretty obvious. There wasn't even a discussion about it. Todd's haunted performance is equally seductive and terrifying, you write, which makes the following Sanguria quote all the more hilarious. It was one of the first gigs I.

Ever got where I actually didn't have to audition.

I was on a roll at the time because of my work in Star Trek, and I had already done Living Dead. I get a call out of the blue from my manager at the time, saying a director wanted to meet me to discuss a project called Candyman. I thought he was joking. I thought, as I did, that it was a history of Sammy Davis Jr. But Tony Todd, upon clearing up this mistake, was deeply invested in the role.

He'd often referred to it as my own Phantom of the Opera, which I completely see. That was my first thought upon seeing it, for its combination of romantic obsession and terror.

Who... Among us. Fangoria magazine. Tag yourselves. In an interview at the time. Said that Todd and the film's female lead. Virginia Madsen. Improvised a backstory for the titular villain. During the rehearsal process. They gave him the name. I'm sorry Ken says without laughing. They gave him the name. Granville T Candyman. Jesus. I mean probably it was Candyman. Everything becomes funnier if you give it the kind of like.

long island pronunciation like i do with slenderman slenderman larry slenderman he owns a toyota dealership over in siosset granville t candyman which is a reference to an actual overlooked black uh inventor named granville t woods although in the sequel which the immediate sequel to this film which the director did not return to but tony todd did solely because he wanted to keep playing this role They flesh out the character's backstory. They give him the name of Daniel Robitaille in the sequel. The basic bones of the story, of that backstory, are this. Candyman was the son of a slave and a talented painter, and he gained his access to white society by painting portraits of the money class and then transgressed with one of his client's white

daughters and then was subsequently horrifically lynched by a mob who cut off his painting hand, jammed a hook in its place, and then covered him with honey from a local apiary, apiary, as Bernard Rose pronounces it in the film, and he was subsequently stung to death. This obviously plays into the classic black men lusting after white women trope, but it functions in the film as an interesting inversion of the Helen character. She is a white woman whose access crossing the boundary over into black culture begins with her photographing the art, the graffiti, in Cabrini-Green. Rose helpfully underlines this moment in this great shot, which is somewhat lifted from the original. Actually, this painting is in the

original short story. She steps through a tiny, the medicine cabinet opening in a wall, and then the shot reverses perspective, and it's revealed that that opening is just part of the mouth of this enormous mural of a black man's screaming face. So not particularly subtle, but... Had to be done. Yeah. Again, rich tapestry. Another theme in this movie is mirrors, not just because they summon Candyman, but in the way that the medicine cabinet mirrors function as these portals between worlds and the fact that in the film, Helen's apartment is revealed to be a mirror of the design used for the Cabrini greenhouses. Once again, it is all a rich tapestry.

Of course. You see. Nothing would be. This is my design. Of course, nothing. Nothing in Hollywood would be would be complete without some good old fashioned racism. Todd continued. The only hurdle to me having the character was meeting with the studio. They wanted a personality test. I didn't know what that was. I didn't know if I was supposed to sing and dance, but I put my best foot forward.

It happened to be at eight in the morning. It was a bunch of executives pouring fresh squeezed orange juice from their carafts and buttering their bagels. Oh, what a grotesque image for summer. I know I shouldn't I shouldn't laugh, but I am. I felt like an animal in the zoo, he said, and I stopped laughing. So that ended, took about 45 minutes of complete torture. I asked, how did I do? And they said they thought I had zero personality.

But Bernard fought for me. I guess I just didn't do the shuffling and jiving part. Jesus Christ. It gets worse.

Yes, that racism persisted into the film's edit, Todd revealed. Ten minutes of footage of he and Virginia Madsen's character ultimately were cut. The studio was afraid of the interracial love angle because at the core, that's really what the story is, he said. They thought it was too sympathetic to the Candyman character. Virginia Madsen said in a different interview that this racism persisted into sequel discussions. Bernard Rose wanted to show the next part of the story where Candyman and Helen, spoiler alert, stop listening now if for some reason you haven't actually seen this movie, now a murderous ghost herself, continue their love story in the afterlife, but the studio balked again.

At the interracial love angle.

Madsen told Entertainment Tonight, I think we both felt that the cut scene was like the most beautiful thing we did because the thing about Candyman is he's a poet and a painter and an artist.

He's so romantic.

Because of our chemistry, the more that became apparent, the less the studio wanted of it.

And yeah, it makes me mad. Yeah, apparently it was just an extended sequence of them the first time that they get together in the lair. Like they're like twirling around. And some of that exists. You know, they put them on a center dais and spun the camera around them. in the film, but they went out and took ballroom dancing lessons for this scene, which I think is so cute.

And another fun post-production, another movie magic fact is that when Tony Todd, whenever he actually walks in a scene, he has no footprints because he's a ghost. Footsteps? Footsteps, not footprints. He has no footsteps audibly in the film's audio mix because he's a ghost. In Candyman.

Bernard Rose was keen to tackle what he described to the AV Club as, quote, one of the main problems with horror films, once you show the monster, how do you actually continue the film without it either just escalating the number of murders or becoming laughable? He cited Freddy Krueger's turn from child-molesting dream murderer to Catskill's stand-up comic, as the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise continued, while also identifying Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist, And of course, Jaws, as films that successfully addressed this problem, largely by obscuring, or even in Rosemary's Baby's case, actually never showing the titular monster.

Jesus Christ, that was a long sentence. I apologize. You nailed it. Thank you. It was well written, though.

Luckily, he said, Tony was so wonderful that you start to root for him. Todd does not appear in the film until 44 minutes in, which was something that Bernard Rose said was inspired by Orson Welles' classic, The Third Man. Every single conversation in the first half of The Third Man is.

About Harry Lyme, he says.

So when Orson Welles finally appears, it's one of the great entrances in film history because you're just dying to hear what he's got to say.

So this is interesting because, and I'm even leery to say this, because I'm telling, I'm now telling some of the black critics whose thoughts I sought out that they are wrong because a sticking point that people have brought up with this movie is they're like, It's not about Candyman. It's about Helen, which is correct. She's the point of view character. But as Bernard Rose has claimed, this was all intentional from the start. So the people who say like, oh, he doesn't appear in the movie 45 minutes in until then it's just Helen. Like if that was intentional from the start, then people are kind of missing the forest for the trees there. But I'm not going to tell them their interpretations are wrong because I have this pet. Well,

I have this pet theory that I do mention later on where it's like Rose either impeccably designed this whole film from the start, which is obviously the interpretation that is more innocent and generous to him. Or he's simply been paying attention to all the criticism of it in the intervening years. And whenever it came back around in 2018, he started reverse engineering all of it. So it's like, oh, my genius master stroke from all along. I was playing eight dimensional chess the entire time. So anyway, Tony Todd was originally a theater actor. A theater? A theater. He crawled the boards in his youth. Tread the boards? Whatever. British, you're stupid. In that sensibility, plus his six foot five height,

his uncanny, what I would love to quote, as the New York Times said about Nico, his improbable bone structure and that voice all contribute to his star making turn as Candyman. She wrote a tribute to him after his passing last year. But Virginia Madsen said, I remember when Candyman came out and some people asked me what they did to his voice to make it so smooth and powerful.

I was like, nope, it's just like that. Tony Todd actually had a fairly sad childhood. He was born in D.C. He was an only child. And then he was raised by his aunt from the age of three onwards. His mother died. battle drug addiction. So it was one of these things that like his whole extended family was like, it's better for you if you go with your aunt.

He described his childhood as a lonely one. At one point, giving an absolutely heartbreaking image of himself playing Monopoly alone, using his right and left hands as different players. Think about that for a while. Wow. I'm also sad that we didn't include that in our Monopoly episodes. Those of you with Dickensian upbringings might have adopted this strategy. He discovered his passion for acting and eventually won a scholarship to the Tony Award-winning Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Connecticut.

He got his role in Platoon, his second ever on the screen, when Oliver Stone saw him in a one-man version of Dalton Trumbo's anti-war novel Johnny Got His Gun at a Hell's Kitchen Off-Broadway Theater, where Todd was also working the bar. Classic, classic Hutzel. Anyway. Yeah, he's so good in this movie, man. Helen. Sounds like Nico. So good.

So good. Yeah, also these days. And now into a section I like to call the bees of it all. Mind your own bees, Nass. No, this is better.

Part of Candyman's backstory involved being.

Yeah, switch voice, switch tones for their buddy. Yeah. Damn. Tragedy voice. Part of Candyman's back... Get closer to the mic. Use a deeper tone of voice. Take the laughter out. Part of Candyman's backstory involved being... Jesus Christ.

Involved being covered by bees and stung to death. And consequently, bees are a big part of this whole gestalt.

This whole deal. Part of the rich tapestry.

This is drawn from the original story. Clive Barker was inspired by the biblical tale of Samson killing a lion and discovering bees and honey in its corpse, as well as.

Candy. It didn't really give you anything more to go on than that. That's very Paul Lind. Candy. Candy.

Rose was keen to highlight this, and in a pre-CGI era, he told Ten of Geek that he located an apiarist. Somebody raises bees, which is a word I did not know until reading this episode outline.

But again, in the movie, it's so funny. Apiarist. Oh, yeah, that's right. They journeyed to a local apiary.

He sought out a local apiarist named Norman Gary after seeing him on The Tonight Show playing a clarinet. while covered in bees. It was a simpler time. Plate spinners and a guy playing clarinet covered in bees.

He was quite a character, Bernard Rose said. Yeah, no kidding. He had synthesized queen bee pheromones and had hives of bees on the top of the studio, and he was hatching them for the first 48 hours of their lives when their stingers aren't fully developed. He also can't fly, so he basically had to live hatch bees bees for this appearance on the tonight show.

Rose observes that they're not really that dangerous at that point when they can't fly and have stingers but still i don't want them crawling all over me norman gary the apiarist clarinet player used the same combination of immature bees and pheromones for the production of candy man painting actors with queen pheromones to show them where to move and then gently vacuuming the youngsters into a pouch when filming.

Was complete and whisking them away to their own trailer. Not a joke.

Despite Norman's presence, shooting the film's notorious bee scene, in which they swarm Helen and Candyman's embrace, appearing out of his sleeves, mouth, and rotted chest cavity, was predictably difficult, as any situation involving 200,000 bees would be.

They really went for the gusto.

Yes. Everybody got stung quite a bit, and certainly when we were doing those scenes, there were quite a lot of crew members who just stopped turning up to work, Rose said. I remember asking Norman, how do you prevent yourself from getting stung? And he said, you don't. You just decide it doesn't bother you. I will say, I was stung for the first time in a while, not that long ago, and I actually was surprised that it wasn't as bad as I remembered.

You achieved mind over matter. I did, yeah. I think just so many other things in my life hurt me more. What next? That's all you got? Fees? And you die after, so I guess who comes out ahead? Me. Yeah. They do die after, right? Yeah. It literally disembowels them. Cool. Yeah, it's pretty metal, right? Yeah, I don't think I realized that. Wow. Sick.

What kind of evolutionary tactic is that, then? Well, they're expendable, you see. They're drones. Much like us in capitalism Only instead of a central queen We just have a series of bosses And politicians Tony Todd naturally got the worst of the bees I didn't realize when I write that How funny it is You get the worst of the bees Tony We saved the really ill-tempered ones for you.

You have three hours in makeup. Then you get painted in bee stink. And then we're just kind of let them loose. Just a real feast on you. This is so gross.

All he had for protection was a kind of denture set with latex sheets in it placed in the back of his mouth to keep the bees from going down his throat.

In a particularly horrifying quote, I did not put in here and will now insert. they were doing this and he felt this thing start to break down mid take and like have a bee start to crawl towards his throat. And he heroically finished the damn take. And then was like, there's one of them in my throat.

He apparently decided that he just wouldn't be bothered by stings anymore. If he received a thousand dollar bonus for each one of these stings, and he ultimately made between $ 23, 000 and.

$ 27, 000 for his troubles. The number varies in the telling. He joked in an interview, I had a really good lawyer at that time.

That said, in the 2024 documentary In Search of Darkness, 1990-1994, A Journey into Iconic 90s Horror, Bernard Rose said that this whole bit is an urban myth itself, and that it has no basis in fact. He might have been messing with the filmmakers, though.

Yeah, I mean, print the legend. It would be hilarious if they had been indulging in, like, a generations-long con to just, like, reinforce a theme about urban lore. But it's also equally funny if he was like, I'm going to f * * * with these documentary makers in particular.

We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more Too Much Information in just a moment.

Now on to a portion we called Helen Man. No iconic villain is worth a damn without a foil. And Todd's is Virginia Madsen, who has the distinction of being the only native Chicagoan in the principal cast. Chicago has other notorious housing projects, she said in a 1992 interview, but Cabrini is staring everyone in the face because it's literally three blocks from the Gold Coast. When I was growing up there, I never went near the place. The dialogue you hear in the film is, I don't even want to drive by there. That's all very true. She continued, it makes you feel so terribly ignorant that you know absolutely nothing about these people. Pause. What do you mean, these people? You know what she means. And you couldn't

even begin to understand what it's like for a kid to grow up there. We're not doing the right thing by these people. And you can make all the speeches in the world about, well, why don't they pull themselves up by their bootstraps? But you know, a lot of them, that's exactly what they are doing. That's why they're still alive.

She gave a much more succinct quote to Fangoria. Filming Candyman made me embarrassed to be white. That's what it took. That's a golf swing worthy one. Madsen starring Will was a stroke of luck, pun intended, but we will delay gratification on that. According to her, director screenwriter Bernard Rose's wife at the time was the unfortunately named Alexandra Pig.

And she actually brought the Barker story to his attention, pitching herself as Helen. Madsen was good friends with the couple because she was then married to Rose's frequent collaborator, Danny Houston. Danny Houston is most known, I think, in this country as being the lead vampire in 30 Days of Night and also like the villain in Wonder Woman.

He's just been playing villains for like decades. So it's funny. He was married to Virginia Madsen at the time. who was cast for her beauty as the princess of the universe in David Lynch's Dune. Anyway, she had been slated to play the best friend role, and then when they swapped the races and Casey Lemons was cast, she was out a role. One of the other pieces of criticism I read in this film that they could have made Helen Black, which no, they couldn't have, because then your POV character wouldn't have had this doubling of the Candyman backstory of transgressing the boundaries between the worlds. Anyway, it's all a rich tapestry. Immediately before shooting, however, Alexandra Pig found out she was pregnant. Stroke of luck. Get it?

Madsen was reluctant to take the role until Alexandra personally visited her in her compromised state to tell her, it would just kill me to see someone else play this role. Then Alexandra Pig and Bernard Rose... God, their names with the pig roses on their stationery. How incredible. The pig roses cordially request your presence. I love that. They divorced later, adding insult to injury. When Todd died in November of 2024, Madsen wrote a tribute to him for a variety. Cancer.

He was only 69. Nice. Oh, I'm schvitzing in here. You can't make these jokes. I'm about to pass out. I'm very dehydrated. Oh, no. Would you pause and get some water, for Christ's sake? No. I first met Tony at a lunch, kind of a chemistry read. Or maybe we were just meeting because we were going to go through a lot together. He walked in and he was so tall and handsome and he had that wonderful smile.

And I just knew he was 100% the right guy. He was so kind to me. He could have dismissed me as some little starlet, but he treated me like an equal from the start. Madsen chopped her hair down and gained 10 to 15 pounds for the role at Rose's request to make her a bit more of an everywoman. Remember, she was cast as the princess of the universe for her role four years earlier. Anyway, apparently, had she turned this down, though, one of the producers' second choice was Sandra Bullock. Look at that. She had a presence in Hollywood at this point, but she would not yet attain the stature that she did with 1994's The Bus That Wouldn't Slow Down. That's so much funnier than my, she's America's sweetheart, you know. Well, so, spoiler alert, I kept saying,

I kept using It's All a Rich Tapestry in this solely because that was something that one of my first editors, Peter Smith, would say to me all the time, and Researching it, I found out it's a Simpsons reference. Marge's therapist dismisses a number of fear of flying incidents that include her literally taking the Clark Gable, Gregory Peck or Clark Gable in North by Northwest? Gregory Peck. Gregory Peck.

uh there's a flashback that shows her getting flown down a la north by northwest and she says do you think that could have contributed to my fear of flying doctor and the therapist says yeah well it's all a rich tapestry bus that wouldn't slow down is also simpsons reference we are we are aging white men we are slaves to that show oh word choice Rose said that while Helen is the film's POV character, he was keen to keep that character from being seen as a one-dimensional heroine.

To NME, he said, it's an inversion of the white savior narrative, which is what everyone tackles onto this film about how Helen has to go in and eventually save the little black child, little black children. That is New Orleans slang. which came to my attention in a confederacy of dunces uttered by a white woman. That's not a black thing. Don't at me. So he said, Helen is an inversion of the white savior narrative. She goes in there and makes things worse. That's the point. He also gave another hilarious quote to the independent around the time of the film's release, clarifying his distaste for films with easy to just narratives and neat feel good endings. Which this film does not have. Spoiler alert. It's a huge downer.

It always seemed to me monstrous arrogance that people would go to your movie and come out the better for it. I'd rather they came out worse. And then he interestingly tagged this to Den of Geeks saying, Candyman is an entirely subjective movie told from the perspective of Helen, your classic unreliable narrator. Whatever happens in the film, it's what she thought happened and isn't necessarily objective. So there is definitely an interpretation of the film where she just broke into black people's apartment and kept murdering them. That's an interesting point.

The aforementioned bee scene was equally harrowing for Virginia Madsen. She told Bernard Rose at the outset that she was allergic to bees, to which he simply kept responding that, no, she wasn't.

She was just afraid. which is a good bit.

She actually had to go to UCLA to get a battery of venom allergen tests to prove this to him, which got her the consolation prize of revealing that she was actually much more allergic to wasps than bees. Nevertheless, paramedics were on hand. Despite only filming in short bursts, it took up to 45 minutes to clear all the bees from Madsen and Todd before resetting for another take or shot.

While shooting, she simply said, I really just had to go into this zen sort of place.

Madsen may have been helped along in getting to that place because in one of the more famed bits of trivia about this film, Bernard Rose accompanied her to a hypnotist before shooting. It's very annoying to hear people screaming, he said in a making-of documentary. So to avoid the typical horror film hysterics, he had the hypnotist put Madsen in a trance, which is very sinister-sounding. While she was under, the guy gave Rose a keyword that would, quote, reactivate her.

Two days later, I tried it to see if it would work, and lo and behold, it did, Rose remembers. So henceforth, before scenes with Todd, Rose would clear the set, take Madsen aside.

and bring her back.

Into that state to achieve the requisite dreamy mien. For their first interaction, she's also lit with the classic band of narrow light straight across the eyes, an old technique borrowed from the golden age of Hollywood, when they'd shoot their starlets that way for publicity shots. You also remember that Barry Sonnenfeld used this to light Angelica Houston's Morticia in The Addams Family. In that same documentary, Madison says, Bernard, I think, didn't know whether I was just getting really into character or whether he'd been able to do it.

And I think he finally realized when he had to, like, snap me out of it because I was just sort of sitting there. And in this interview, she trails off and stares vacantly into the middle distance. Once he would start hypnotizing me, Madison continues, I was not very aware of my surroundings. I couldn't really see the crew. I could see the lights, but they become very, very blurry.

because my pupils would be dilated, and pretty much the only thing I could hear was Bernard.

As you might expect, this got weird. Heigl, tell us how this got weird. In a different interview, Bernard said, Can I call him Bernard? I feel like we're on a first-name basis by now. Sure, we've earned that. You're on one tonight. You are on fire. Happy to be back, baby. There was, I think, one day when she didn't really remember the entire day of shooting. Ooh. I think that pissed her off a little bit. So she didn't want to do it after that. Madsen naturally concurs. I was like, you know what? I can't do it anymore. Bernard, don't come near me with that look on your face because I'm not going under. So, but again, this is kind of lends credence to the fact that they all, everyone involved in this film agreed to like lie about it

for decades. Because in a different interview with cinematographer Anthony Richman, he said, We're ready to shoot. And I would whisper like, Virginia, move to your left a little bit. And she would. So she wasn't hypnotized. Bernard went f * * * ing crazy. She wasn't hypnotized. Hi, question. Have you ever thought about hypnotizing me to make me more pliable and make these edits better for you? Best part of the show. Oh, okay. Well, whatever the case may be regarding the alleged hypnosis, and aside from the B's, Rose also tortured Madsen in more old fashioned ways. He did not inform her that Candyman's hook would be bursting through a mirror directly at her face in one of these scenes. And she was so

genuinely terrified by it that she ran off set and hid in a parking lot. That's sad. It is. I mean, I just love the fact that she was like, hey, man, I'm allergic to bees. And he was like, no, you're not. No, you aren't, Oprah. Mind over matter. Yeah. That has been just passed. Anytime Lo and I have to respond to each other in the negative, we also almost always say Oprah at the end of it. Other bits of movie magic.

They hired the team from Backdraft to handle that bonfire scene at the end. They constructed three sections of it to film in, and the largest one of these was 70 feet wide by 30 feet long, which it does not even appear to be that in the film. However, for the actual structure, when it came time to come down...

They simply packed it with around 1,500 gallons of propane and caused it to collapse simply by yanking a steel beam out from the middle, which collapsed it like your classic box-on-a-stick trap. Funnily enough, Virginia Madsen's dad was a retired firefighter, and she said she was worried about his reaction to his daughter being surrounded by his lifelong nemesis. Aww.

The film's stunning aerial shots of Chicago, set to Philip Glass's instantly iconic score, more on him later, were accomplished with the SkyCam. Now, this is a cable-stabilized system for shooting downwards, which was actually invented by the same guy who gave us the Steadicam, Garrett Brown. Today, it is mostly known for its implementation in the NFL. Yes. But Rose said at the time, you know, it was this semi-novel to use it for these aerial shots because you could get as much of a zoom lens as like a 500 millimeter on it. And it would still remain stabilized while shooting. Hilariously enough, in an interview with The Art of the Title, Rose stated that Anthony Richman, the film's cinematographer, declined to shoot the sequence himself, pointing at

the helicopter and correctly stating, people die in those things. So that titular scene is just Rose himself alone in a helicopter with the pilot. Back in that era, he said, you couldn't point the stabilizing mount at 90 degree angle from the helicopter. So the only way to achieve that shot was to actually fly the helicopter at a 45 degree angle. Jesus. Which is quite safe in a town nicknamed the Windy City. Ha! Ha! We had a door open on the chopter and we're flying at a 45 degree angle. And I said, follow the cars at the speed on the freeway. I went up there and we did a couple of runs, but it was so cold that it snapped the film in the camera a couple of times. I did a couple of runs with the pilot,

but then he landed me. He threw me out of the chopper and he was like, you're going to fall out. It's not a good idea. I was like, I've had enough of this, too, to be honest. I like Bernard Rose. I know, dude. He's he's he's hilarious. It cost him his career in Hollywood, as we will talk about later.

But he is very funny. Another tricky shot in the film occurs when a student tells Helen the opening sequence what her version of the Candyman myth is. And there's a great jump scare when she turns off the light and he simultaneously appears looking at her in the mirror. And the camera angle doesn't change. So it's like a little bit of like an optical trick where you're like, how did they shoot that? Here's how they shot it.

Cinematographer Anthony Richman has, that was all an in-camera effect. He said, it's a normal mirror that she's looking in, but I'm using what's called a two-way beam splitter, which is a piece of glass that you put in front of the camera at an angle, and then you light it. The light on Tony is on a dimmer, So you don't see him, but then you instantly bring the dimmer up and he appears in camera mirrored.

I think that's an old Victorian effect.

Like something's ghost. Did we talk about that? Probably. And it is interesting because also in the context of Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula, because that film was deliberately done with no assisted imagery. They wanted to do everything in there with in-camera effects. Pepper's ghost is what I was referring to, by the way. Pepper's ghost. Tell us about Pepper's ghost.

It's an illusion technique used in theater, cinema, amusement parks, museums, television, and concerts in which an image of an offstage object is projected so that it appears to be in front of the audience.

It's reflected in a pane of glass. Bernard Rose, Bernard Rose did not give our boy Anthony Richman any shot lists or storyboards. So he just had a freedom in crafting. Basically, he just had free run of it. And in our obligatory mention in this episode, and I'm shocked you didn't recognize his name. Cinematographer Anthony Richmond shot the Beatles' Let It Be documentary. I didn't know that. Most recently seen with Peter Jackson's torturous 77-hour documentary about it. I thought you liked it. But more germane... I know you did.

I thought you liked it. And you would. I thought you liked it. I mean, it's great footage. You knew his way around a camera. More germane to this conversation, he also shot Nicholas Roeg's Don't Look Now, which is how he actually got Nicholas Rogue and Bernard Rose were friends. And let's just get another Jordan fixation out of the way.

America's worst family. Some of Candyman's interiors were shot at the Ambassador Hotel in LA, where RFK was shot by Saron Saron. I always want to call him, I always want to give that a Saron, in 1968. I'll be damned. Yeah. They also filmed that thing you do there. In the Ambassador? Mm-hmm. Wasn't it torn down shortly afterwards?

No, it stayed up and was used as a filming location until, I want to say, I think the last film to shoot there was Emilio Estevez's Bobby in 2006. It kind of lingered until the late 2000s and they sort of tore it down slowly.

What do you think about that film? I never saw it. It looked bad. You just know that? Well, I know a lot about The Ambassador Hotel. Because it's cool.

In the kitchen where RFK was killed apparently was completely disassembled wholesale and reassembled in a FBI lab.

Which is a totally normal thing to do. Jesus Christ. If. Well, I mean. Totally normal. Totally normal thing to do. So like we mentioned earlier, another one of Richmond's moves was to light Virginia Madsen's eyes constantly in the film, actually, with this sort of exclusive band of light where you just take a diffuse lighting source and then literally just make it light the person and then just put screens over it Until it just frames their eyes. And it's the classic kind of golden era starlet shot, you know, where like you get these stunningly crisp black and white images where they're just like their eyes are like mysteriously, incredibly incandescent. And then the rest of it's sort of varying shades of black and black and gray. And he

explained a little bit. And I don't I don't think this is racist, but he explained a little bit of the challenges that you have when you have black people in your movies next to white people. He said when their skin tones contrast that differently, you basically have to light them differently. And he used a backlighting technique that is just called kicker light. It lights people from the back.

So it gives them a kind of halo effect, which helps people with darker skin tones stand out. One of the things that he did in this was actually use it from the side and use a lavender tint on it. So if you actually do look at this, it's interesting because Tony Todd is set off by, in occasional shots, lavender light rather than when he's shot against the parking lot or a white background. Yeah, so lavender filter on that.

Kicker light, today's movie magic term that you learned from this podcast. For one of the film's tracking shots that flows through. So it's a great tracking shot. It's actually, I wish they'd done it in a single take, but it's interspersed with like her hallucinations while she's being carted through another of Chicago's iconic locations. That f * * * ing tunnel.

Oh, yeah.

Is that Lower Wacker Drive? Is that what it is? I think so. The shot pushes through the medicine cabinet. And I don't actually know how they got him on a dolly through that. But then he dismounts. He's shooting handheld on the dolly. And then he dismounts it, walks through this next antechamber, and then starts to go up the stairs into Candyman's eventual lair. And he said, you have to control... I'd never heard anyone talk about this.

He said, you have to control your breathing when you're shooting handheld. A crane is a rock's steady shot because it has a stabilized head. And a steadicam has a different feeling to that, sort of floating... But when you're shooting handheld, you have to coordinate your breath with your footprints so that you don't get two separate movements rocking the camera. Wow. Crazy.

In a special effects feature on the 2018 Blu-ray reissue of Candyman, it's revealed that production commissioned a blacksmith to make Candyman's iconic hook out of iron. And this is something I really don't understand. When they came to pick it up, the blacksmith refused to sell it to them.

Gary Tunicliffe Jr.

a frequent Barker collaborator, said that the guy simply put it in the drawer and said, me and my son, we love the good Lord Jesus.

The Lord is in our hearts. See, that's how I know you grew up in the North. Lord is in our hearts. Is that better? No, I just mean the idea that this would be alien to you. Oh, yes. That makes a tremendous amount of sense for a Southern Baptist.

He continued, you're Satan spawns, basically, and told us where to get off. Turner Cliff then had to make the thing himself. So there's a lot of anger and venom in that hook, he said. They actually made between six and 12 hooks out of different materials, rubber, fiberglass, et cetera, to fulfill the different needs it would have in the film.

Sexual, emotional, et cetera. Apparently what it was was that they had mentioned that it was going to be for like a horror movie when they first commissioned it. And the guy was like, yeah, whatever. No problem. And then in the interim, they looked up Clive Barker and discovered that he had a movie called Hellraiser. Oh, God. And that was like basically enough for them.

You know, Candyman originally received an NC-17 rating from the NPAA. Bernard Rose would tell the AV Club it was to do with the scene where Candyman eviscerates the psychiatrist. They didn't like the amount of blood that was spurting out. They didn't want any shot of the hook going in, entering him, if you know what I mean. They were very funny about any form of penetration back then. It was almost like they were looking for sexual imagery in the violence. They've always been an odd bunch.

Yeah, that's for sure.

He added that they deliberately prepared alternate versions of scenes they thought the MPAA would object to, so they'd be ready to swap them in.

But, quote, there were a couple of those that they never noticed. When he gets yanked out of that window... Oh my God. Yeah. They actually just did that. Jesus Christ. It just pulled him out of the back of a window, had a harness under his clothes, just yanked the guy out. God. I think, I mean, he was a stunt guy, but they didn't do more than a couple of takes because they were like, first of all, the glass, like they could, he could just get shredded. And also they were, it was a building. So he could have just fallen to his death if something had gone wrong. Well, they say every rose has its thorn, but Bernard Rose has some scorn. Heigl.

God damn you to hell. I could have workshopped that better. God damn you to hell, Jordan Runto. Take us there. In that same interview, Rose added, there was a point where there was some idiot who thought he was an expert who wanted to come along and say, oh no, this film is really slow. We need to cut out all this stuff. Cut it all to ribbons. Make it much more just a bunch of kids getting knives stuck in them. That kind of thing. And then there was a test screening and it just went through the roof.

And afterwards, we politely said to this guy, Maybe you should just go back to your office, take out the waste paper bin, and put yourself in it. Such an English diss. So, Rose is a piano player himself, apparently, and a huge Philip Glass fan. But by the time he approached Philip Glass to do the score for Candyman, old Phil was hardly the taxi-driving, struggling artist he'd been before and during his big breakthrough with the quasi-opera Einstein on the Beach. He'd been nominated for Grammys for Satyagraha in 1987 and String Quartet No. 2 the following year.

And he'd already contributed scores to Paul Schrader's Mishima in 1985, the war drama Hamburger Hill in 1987, and Errol Morris' documentary The Thin Blue Line in 1988. It was the first of those, Mishima, that brought him to Rose's attention. One of Candyman's producers was Alain Poul. Alain Poul, I assume he's French. He'd been a producer on Mishima. And Rose told Film Freak Central, we got to talking because I love that movie. We were discussing about who should do the score for Candyman. And I said, well, really, ideally, it should be someone like Philip Glass. And Alan literally said, oh, Philip, let me call him up. I gave Philip a brief to just score it for organ, voices, and piano. He loved that idea of it being very minimal orchestration. And

of course, the score is amazing. It's very economical, very tight. That main theme is so instantly memorable and recognizable. But then, of course, they get into the But it's great because like by the end of the film, like when it's really blossoming and all that crazy, it's like it has assumed this kind of drama of religious proportions. This is where it gets funny because Ross did show Philip Glass a very loose early cut of the film. And he said he said in the 90s, rough cuts look much cruder than they do now. So that was what Philip came and looked at. And let me tell you, it was very long and kind of slow and this and that.

He watched it and went away and wrote a suite and sent it to me. I used it to cut the film with, and then he had the director of the Philip Glass Ensemble, Michael Reisman, who always did this for him at that time, orchestrate the stuff to the cut versions that I made and recorded. Unfortunately, when the finished product came out, as Rose recalled, Philip finally went to see it with a bunch of his friends when it opened at some Times Square grindhouse, and he was a little taken aback because it wasn't how he remembered it.

Apparently Alan Poole had sold him on this project by saying, oh, it's a literary adaptation. It's going to be an indie adaptation of this great British author's short story. And when it turned out to be this quite professional, essentially a slasher movie, Philip was horrified and apparently did not see what he had seen in the rough cut. So Bernard Rose says, Philip caught up with Alan, the producer, a little bit shocked or mad and said, you never told me this was a horror film. And he goes, well, you saw it, Philip. It's the same movie. And so Glass was reportedly so aghast that he never allowed the original soundtrack to be issued for sale. Although part of that might have been that he didn't write enough cues

to occupy a whole album so that when he returned for the sequel, writing more music for Candyman 2, he Then it was all issued as an album. But for years, Rose said that he thought his relationship with Philip was over. And he finally caught up with him in New York for something completely different and eventually said, Philip, what was the deal with Candyman? I thought he really resented what had happened, whatever it was that had happened. And he went, Bernard, I was being stupid. And I said, so what changed your mind? He said his accountant had shown him what he'd earned on just the licensing of that one soundtrack over the years for different things, and he reached out to his manager and told him to get back in

touch with me immediately. They did do like four more films together. Now, upon release time, the film came out only a few months after the Rodney King riots, so it did not escape the scrutiny of Black filmmakers. The Chicago Tribune published a piece in which some contemporaneous names expressed their disappointment in Candyman. Carl Franklin, who directed the films Out of Time and Devil in a Blue Dress, said, There's no question that this film plays on white middle-class fears about black people. It unabashedly uses racial stereotypes and destructive myths to create shock. I found it hokey and unsettling.

It didn't work for me because I don't share those fears, buy into those myths. Reginald Hudlin, who directed House Party, Boomerang, and Marshall, as well as going on to produce Django Unchained, described the film as worrisome, although hilariously, he told the Tribune he didn't want to speak on the record about his specific issues, telling the paper, I've gotten calls about the movie, but I think I'm going to reserve comment.

Some of my friends are in it, and I may someday want to work for TriStar. He did not, although it is quite funny that he produced a Quentin Tarantino film with Quentin Tarantino simply loving to cast himself in this film and any of his films constantly using the N-word. The film did reasonably well with critics when it came out.

Roger Ebert gave it three out of four stars, writing, What I liked was a horror movie that was scaring me with ideas and gore instead of simply with gore. Janet Maslin of the New York Times compared it to an elaborate campfire story. with an unusually high interest in social issues. I like that. Yeah.

The film ended up doing $ 26 million against the $ 9 million budget, and two sequels followed. But the original's success didn't translate into a firm foothold in Hollywood for our sweet Bernard Rose. Rose said he pitched a sequel involving, quote, the two genders, cannibalism and royalty. which was then shot down by a producer who called it, quote, the most disgusting thing I'd ever read. His next two big-budget movies, Immortal Beloved and Anna Karenina, were both flops, and his 2000 indie film Ivan's XTC viciously skewered talent agents, which almost certainly got his name written down on some kind of industry blacklist. But he never left Hollywood, frequently re-teaming with Todd and directing four Leo Tolstoy adaptations, starring another friend,

Danny Houston. Who I believe was married to Virginia Madsen and is the brother of Angelica Houston.

Really? I believe so. Check me. I'm the son of John Houston. It's got to be son because he's British, right? Isn't he? God, he's creepy looking. No, he is British. Okay. Are they related? He is the son of director. He's the director. He is John Houston's son, but he's half brother to Angelica. Much like everyone in the world, he decided to become an actor at the age of six after playing Peter Pan. It's just so funny to me because he's like the first place I saw him, and I think a lot of people saw him in America, was 30 Days of Night, which is like an absolutely horrifying vampire film in which he plays the lead vampire.

But Bernard Rose is very zen about his stalled career. He told the New York Times in 2021, everyone feels ignored and undervalued in Hollywood. So either it doesn't matter to me or I don't notice it or don't care. There's a low-level air of desperation you sometimes feel in L.A., which, weirdly, I kind of quite like.

Ugh. A prince among men. Candyman became a quick favorite among horror fans, but as we mentioned at the top of this episode, it polarizes some black artists who view it as less of a triumph than a decent swing that's still missed. Tana Reeve-Dew, who directed Port Noir, told The Guardian, it's a good example of a film that really wanted to have a sophisticated take on race. It has moments where it accomplishes that, but at the same time falls victim to racial tropes. It's a story that presents visually as if it's a black story, but it really isn't a black story. Another black writer, Evan Narcisse, wrote in Rolling Stone in 2018 that the original film spotlights how folklore by black people and folklore about black

people have often been at odds. White hegemony has made it so that the morbid whispers of the latter category can multiply in force until commonly accepted. ultimately becoming powerful enough to permanently imprint on a nation's psyche. Before adding, Helen's symbiotic relationship with the killer knowingly draws on the way that white women in peril have been used to demonize black men in America, a tradition stretching all the way back to D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation.

I distinctly remember Candyman becoming a huge part of the black community. It's a black and queer writer named William O. Tyler, told Fangoria in 2021. The character is so charming as opposed to being this savage beast that black people are always portrayed to be in movies. So it was an interesting thing where a lot of people were like, yeah, it's Candyman. I love Candyman. Even though he's the villain of the movie, he was still an icon for us in a positive way. It was just cool to see a character like that. Tyler acknowledged that when he rewatched the film, it was like, you know, it takes a little bit for Candyman to even show up because we're so focused on the white woman for so long. you

start to notice who is actually the center of the story. And on top of that, the way Candyman presents himself to Virginia Madsen's characters through all these nightmarish killings that are happening to other black people. And that's kind of devastating to think that he would do a cat and mouse game with her at the expense of all these black people. That's a tremendously valid point and something they did not address in the reboot. Candyman is like, he still kills black people. It's very weird. Ultimately though, Tyler continued, I appreciate the steps taken by bernard rose and the rest of the crew creating the story in this way but at the same time it's definitely a teachable moment where you're like you can do even better than this

so again this gets to my idea that i'm like well i think bernard rose had like pre-movie justifications as the third man and like jaws and all this stuff for not revealing tony todd until 45 minutes in but again is he simply lying to us again is bernard rose like the master of reality He's just a puppet master pulling us all at his strings for decades, lying about Eddie Murphy, lying about hypnotizing Virginia Madsen. How deep does this rabbit hole go? The bees of it all.

This gets really just quite f * * * ing insulting. There was a proposed, after Freddy vs. Jason, which has its whole hilarious own Genesis story, came out and did well, they proposed a sequel treatment that was called Candyman vs. Leprechaun. Which Tony Todd said, I would never have anything to do with that. Thankfully, it died. And the film was eventually given the requel treatment. We got a reboot and a sequel by director Nia DaCosta and producer Jordan Peele.

It came out in 2021. The main character, and spoiler alert, spoiler alert, don't listen any further. new Candyman, is eventually revealed in that film as Anthony, the baby that was kidnapped and rescued in the first film. Vanessa Williams, not that one, reprises her role as the mother and Tony Todd also appears in a brief cameo. The film does put an interesting twist on the setup to the original.

In the, in the requel, Anthony and his girlfriend are these ambitious art world strivers. He's an artist and she's a gallery manager. And there's one point where like a white critic says like, Oh, but this is what you people always do to neighborhoods. You move in and take it over. And he's like, excuse me. And she goes artists, which is like a whole, you know, it kind of makes you think it makes you think that movie did crazy. Well, I didn't realize this. It made 77 million on a $ 25 million budget. And actually, on average, has better reviews than the first one. But it also retcons some of the lore around Candyman. Though the original character played by Todd, they still acknowledge that he was the first because it

happened in, you know, slavery times or whatever, 1880s. Apparently new Candymen are created whenever innocent black men are murdered, creating multiple Candymen. There's multiple Candymen throughout the universe. And the film also used the tagline, say his name, which is a, I want to say a bit of a Craven move, or at least a very canny one, because that was the whole hashtag that arose around the police killing of Breonna Taylor, say her name. As I mentioned, the 2021 film has a higher aggregate rating than the original, but one of the most scathing critiques that I remember, at least in like the circles of film Twitter that I kind of lurk around, was from vulture critic Angelica Jade Bastien. who is a black woman, and boy, she

hated this movie. She called the original an unnerving, sometimes outright frightening masterwork, whose, quote, interrogation of Chicago's history with gentrification remains vital and fascinating. But, she says the 2021 version misunderstands the allure of the original, has nothing meaningful to say about the contemporary ideas it observes with all the scrutiny of someone rushing through a Starbucks order on their way to work. to which I say, stop it, he's already dead. What an incredibly scathing line. But she does echo the line that it makes little sense as to why Candyman, as himself a victim of racial violence, would continue to target black people in the afterlife, which again happens in the reboot movie, which seems like such

a weird oversight to me that they're like, yeah, we're going to retool this whole thing to be about racial violence towards black men, but he's still going to kill black people. But again, what do I know? Just a white guy with a podcast and a big heart. I'm sorry, I'm making this attitude. i mean orders of magnitude worse bastien calls quote the molten core of the film confused politics intertwined with juvenile artistry in which a meaningful conversation about gentrification is imagined without the prominent voices of those harmed by it which interestingly minus the juvenile artistry line was one of the chief complaints about the original. Sunrise? Sunset? Anyway, that's one of the reasons that I love this film

so much, is that it is such fertile ground for these kind of conversations. Each generation of black artists or white podcasters add to the complex message of this film with their individual assessments. Not us, though. We just parroted a bunch of stuff. In a way, echoing the oral tradition of urban legends that the film itself is keen to highlight. It is a rich tapestry. The sad capper on this is, of course, Tony Todd's death in November 2024 at the age of 69. With respect to Yahia Abdul-Mateen II, star of the 2021 film, it will take a very long time, perhaps until the heat death of the universe, to associate that character with anyone other than Todd.

And bearing in mind his Dickensian childhood, as he himself told The Guardian in 2018, I'm an African-American man who wasn't supposed to make it. And somehow I beat the system. I want to be an inspiration. Because somewhere out there, there's a little boy who's confused, just like I was. And I want to say, you can do it. The writer William O. Tyler, in that Fangoria article, wrote, Candyman represents an unheard voice in slasher films. We still don't have that many other black slashers or characters who are presented in quite this way. So he's still at the top, still giving sweets to the sweet. Thank you folks for listening.

My name is Alex. And I'm Jordan run tug. And we'll catch you next time. And this has been too much information. A rich tapestry. Can we rename the podcast? A rich tapestry with Alex and Jordan. Too Much Information was a production of iHeartRadio. The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtag. The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder-June. The show was researched, written, and hosted by Jordan Runtag and Alex Heigl.

With original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra. If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. For more podcasts on iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Thank you.

Candyman (1992): The Ghost of TMI Halloween Special!

Kapitelklicken springt direkt hin

Shownotes

Transkriptvom Podcast bereitgestellt · Zeitmarken springen hin