The Return of Candyman
IN THE ILLINOIS EXURB WHERE I SPENT MY CHILDHOOD, MY DAD’S cousin owned a movie rental shop called Video Vision. If I made the two-mile round trip by bicycle, I had carte blanche to rent any title other than those shelved beyond the saloon-style doors that led to the adults-only section. By the time I’d entered fifth grade, in the early ’90s, I had fallen in love with Chicago by way of VHS tapes. The Blues Brothers, Risky Business, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off — those movies made the big city 100 miles east of my tiny hometown seem like a place of untold thrills and comic misadventures.
was altogether different, something heavier and more mysterious. British director Bernard Rose’s 1992 cult classic, which spawned two sequels and a durable urban legend, got its hooks — or rather, hook — into me early and has never let go. The film, about the ghost of a long-ago lynching victim terrorizing the Cabrini-Green housing project with a very sharp prosthetic, was
