The first trailer for filmmaker Nia DaCosta’s sequel to the 1992 horror film Candyman dropped four months ago, long before the social unrest that swept the country following the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor at the hands of law enforcement. DaCosta shared a new teaser for the upcoming film highlighting the urgent and relevant themes at the heart of the film.
“CANDYMAN, at the intersection of white violence and black pain, is about unwilling martyrs,” wrote DaCosta about the film on Twitter, “The people they were, the symbols we turn them into, the monsters we are told they must have been.”
The film is also written and produced by Jordan Peele, who produced 2017’s Get Out, with additional writing help from DaCosta and Win Rosenfield and production help from Ian Cooper.
The haunting teaser uses puppeteers to share a story, as a version of the original film's "Helen's Theme" song plays eerily in the background. Each scene shows a Black man targeted, whether by the community or the police, or both.
In the original film, the Candyman was purported to be a son of a slave, who became wealthy after he began making shoes during the Civil War. He was accepted by white society, and began painting portraits of wealthy white families. He fell in love, and had a child with a white girl that he was hired to paint. Upon finding this out, the father of the white girl hired a lynch mob to terrorize the man, and drive him out of their house. They cut off his hand and covered it in honey so he would be swarmed and stung by bees as he died, and after, his corpse was burned and his ashes were spread across the Chicago's now-gentrified Cabrini-Green neighborhood. It appears that glimpse of this story are relayed through the black-and-white puppeteer scenes that DaCosta shared in the trailer below.
The updated film follows a young visual artist Anthony McCoy and his girlfriend, gallery director Brianna Cartwright after they move into a new luxury condo in the Cabrini-Green neighborhood and learn the true story behind Candyman. The film stars Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Teyonah Parris, Colman Domingo, and Vanessa Williams, who starred in the original film.
Candyman is set to be released on September 25th. Let us know if you'll be checking it out when it drops.