Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh (1995)

After a British author who wrote a book about the Candyman is murdered by evisceration with a hook in New Orleans (in this version, the place where the Candyman legend has its source), Ethan Tarrant (William O’Leary), who had a violent altercation with the man about his responsibility for the death of Ethan’s father, confesses to the deed, even though the audience already knows quite well the actual killer was the indeed Candyman (Tony Todd) himself.

Ethan’s sister, the school teacher Annie (Kelly Rowan), doesn’t believe her brother he is a killer, whatever he says, and thinks he’s just trying to punish himself for the guilt he feels for their father’s death. Plus, there has been a whole series of murders in New Orleans committed in the same manner, and it would be preposterous to think Ethan is responsible for all of them. Annie can’t help but look into the matter everyone else treats as an open and shut thing or just ignores over the Mardi Gras season, leading her to a hidden truth about her family history but also inviting the Candyman into her life and that of her loved ones.

As is the critical consensus about the Bill Condon directed sequel to Bernard Rose’s classic Candyman, I don’t think the first film was in need of a sequel at all, having said what it wanted to say about the still on-going consequences of slavery in the USA, the creation of myths, and a guy with a nasty hook, quite eloquently.

However, if there has to be a sequel, Condon’s film is certainly at least not the kind of embarrassing nonsense that would turn its titular character into a standard issue quipping supernatural slasher. There are some conceptual weaknesses to the film, however. First and foremost, it does tend to waver a bit between the deadly sequel sickness of trying to make the same film with the same plot beats again and the much more interesting attempt to re-locate and deepen the film’s mythology and metaphorical resonance. I was also not terribly happy about the importance a certain mirror will have for the resolution of the plot, or rather, I understand why you’d want a physical object in the film that makes it possible to not repeat the first film’s ending – and at least the mirror has a connection to Candyman’s slightly revised origin – but the way the first film and this one has turned Candyman into a living myth makes it pretty difficult to buy that any physical object, even one intimately involved into turning the victim of violence into the supernatural perpetrator of it, could be dangerous to what amounts to a killing idea. The film’s final weakness is an early insistence on including a huge number of false scare style jump scares, adding the insult of nothing actually happening to the injury of the jump scare. After the first half hour or so, that element of the film just stops completely, though, leaving at least this viewer a bit confused about why and how it was there at all to begin with.

But let’s get to the good stuff, for while this certainly isn’t as good as the original, Farewell to the Flesh does quite a few things very well indeed. There is, for example, the great use Condon gets out of the film’s relocation from Chicago to a New Orleans in the thrall of carnival season. It’s not just that (pre-Katrina, obviously) New Orleans as it is used here is an excellent, moody and picturesque place that, in this season, seems to sit right on the threshold between heaven and hell, it is also that the city’s history lends itself particularly well to what the film says of the US history of slavery and racism, and the sin of trying to be mute about it. Though it has to be said that the Philip Glass score doesn’t sound much like New Orleans. Ignoring his entries into the Twilight series (which I haven’t seen and probably never will), Condon as a director seems particularly interested in liminal spaces and their connection to identity or its construction, so this aspect of the film is quite clearly right up his alley. The film also understands class as another dividing factor of people’s lives much more so than many horror films do, but also realizes that people aren’t only the sum of their tribal identity of their class and their race, so we also get a character like Annie from a certainly privileged (in the old meaning of stinking rich) background who is a more than just decent human being.

Once the film hits its stride, the more directly horrific elements of the plot become rather effective too, with a handful of nightmarish sequences that make use of quite a lot of old-fashioned tricks having come down from the Hitchcock school of suspense, as well as some cool set-ups for somewhat graphic sequences that don’t stop at being cool but actually carry thematic and even emotional resonance. Condon does a great job at fitting all of this into the proper mood of dread and doom too, with a dark and rainy New Orleans (or in part dark and rainy New Orleans as portrayed by an LA soundstage, I assume) full of desperate revellers mirroring what’s going on around Annie (or perhaps the other way round).


All of that’s not bad at all for a sequel nobody asked for.