Decades Later, A Disappointing Slasher Sequel Is Full Of Important Lessons

Thirty-three years after its release, Candyman is still one of the great horror films of the '90s. Bernard Rose's adaptation of "The Forbidden" by Clive Barker was savvy in its changes to its source material: while Barker's tale was centered on a white working-class community in Liverpool, Rose moved the action to Chicago’s notorious Cabrini-Green housing project and made the title slasher a Black man preying on a marginalized community. In doing so, it turned a story about the power of urban legends into one with a dense and thoroughly political core that challenged the horror genre’s stereotypical images of victim and murderer.

Candyman was a modest commercial hit, and since this was a post-Nightmare on Elm Street/Friday the 13th era, a sequel was greenlit. Never mind that Candyman has a definitive ending without much room for expansion (and nearly all the main characters were dead); Rose had imagined a stand-alone sequel based on another Barker short story, “The Midnight Meat Train.”

The focus would be more on themes of gender than race, as this Candyman preyed on women out of a bitter sense of sexist moralism. But the studio rejected the pitch, and Rose departed the project, leaving a story by Barker, a script co-written by newcomer Rand Ravich, and an up-and-coming filmmaker named Bill Condon in the director's chair. Together, they had the unenviable but fascinating task of expanding the mythos of a stone-cold classic.

Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh follows Annie, a New Orleans teacher whose brother has been arrested for murder. After one of her students tells her the Candyman tale, she tries to refute it by calling out his name five times in the mirror. But the legend is real, and now the Candyman is back and wreaking havoc across the city where the origins of his pain lie.

So much of what makes Candyman sing is its Chicago setting. The layers of the city and the stark hierarchy of privilege they expose made a true urban horror that understood how the cruelties of classism and racism define a place as much as its people. Many of those ideas could have worked in Farewell to the Flesh, as New Orleans has both its own rich history and a long record of segregation and subjugation.

In practice, though, the film seems lost amid the madness of Mardi Gras (any film set in New Orleans must take place during Mardi Gras, apparently). The film also spends a lot of time talking about gumbo, as though to remind the audience that this isn’t Chicago. It's a shallow read on a city that’s been better served by other horrors, like the works of Billy Martin and Anne Rice. It also doesn't help that the focus is almost exclusively on white people who live in an old plantation.

Farewell to the Flesh wants to offer more sympathetic layers to the Candyman’s story. The first film established that he was named Daniel Robataille, a painter who fell for one of his white subjects and was lynched by a mob. His vengeful spirit was tied to the land, and a victim of racism became the new boogeyman to a largely Black community whose suffering was ignored by the authorities.

The sequel reveals that Daniel fathered a child with the ancestor of Annie’s family, but his complexities and troubled past are given less narrative focus than the boring white heroine, who’s nowhere near as layered as Virginia Madsen’s Helen in the first film. It’s a step backward for a remarkably progressive story, and it pushes the Candyman into more conventional slasher territory.

If anything works in Candyman 2, it’s the iconic Tony Todd, whose elegance and charisma make even the shoddiest dialogue sound irresistible. The film is unsure how much we’re supposed to root for his Daniel, a man with some justifiable motives but who also senselessly castrated a disabled child in the first movie. The rage he feels over his oppression and degradation makes you want him to slaughter every person within that plantation, but then the movie still wants you to side with Annie’s mission to destroy him (and be titillated despite their complete lack of chemistry, as though it’s not weird enough that they’re technically related). Farewell to the Flesh suffers whenever it tries to replicate the original’s heat.

It’s still a far better sequel than the third film, 1999’s utterly pointless Day of the Dead. Nia DaCosta’s 2021 reimagining then tried to bring the original’s themes into the 21st century, but was weighed down by too many cooks. You can’t blame people for being inspired by Bernard Rose and Clive Barker’s classic to try teasing out its themes, but so far, no one has risen to the challenge. The deceptive simplicity of that original is why it’s a classic and the follow-ups aren’t.