Don’t Go in the Basement
At one point in the long-awaited new film Candyman, billed as a “spiritual sequel” to the 1992 cult horror flick by the same name, a character is heading toward an inevitable confrontation with the monster. We’ve seen this moment a thousand times. The character knows now that evil is afoot. She knows that it’s of a supernatural variety. Blood has been shed. Her every step is measured and cautious. We can hear the creaking. We are tensed, ready for the jump scare. She comes upon a door, slowly opens it. On the other side is a long stairwell leading down to an eerie cellar. We know that she must go down there. She knows that she must go down there. She considers the dark path before her for a moment before gently but decisively shutting the door.
“Nope,” she says.
Watching a screener, I imagined audiences losing it at this particular moment. How many times have we watched horror films in which the protagonist makes the inexplicable choice to go further into danger just to find out what’s down there? For Black viewers, this habit is racialized: This is white-people shit, the joke goes. They obviously don’t have enough to be afraid of in real life, so they go around looking for dangerous situations, opening the door, releasing the curse, unsealing the tomb. There’s a reason “Fuck around and find out” and its cousin, “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes,” are Black proverbs. The protagonist and the creators of the new Candyman—co-written by Jordan Peele, Win Rosenfeld, and Nia DaCosta, who also directs—are not here to play stupid games.
The original , an adaptation by the British filmmaker Bernard Rose of the British writer Clive Barker’s short story “The Forbidden,” was explicitly conceived and directed through a white gaze. The is the first horror feature distributed by a major studio to be directed by a Black woman, DaCosta. During the making of it, she was intensely conscious that Black pain has always been for Hollywood but is rarely handled with enough consideration to keep it from . “My concern is really getting into what the film is about and who the film is for,” she told me via email. “With a film like this, that traffics in Black pain and trauma, it’s imperative that it is told from a Black POV; it’s imperative that we consider the audience for whom this film could be harmful, and that we are very
