Nia DaCosta Confirms New ‘Candyman’ Includes Original Origin

DaCosta has confirmed that the new ‘Candyman’ film will include an origin story for the character. Read on…

CelebnMovies247.com reports that the 30-year-old director has overseen the “spiritual sequel” to the 1992 horror classic and revealed that her take will give an in-depth look at how the supernatural killer came to be.

Tony Todd will return as Candyman in the new reboot.

Speaking during her Virtual Fireside Chat at the Nightstream Film Festival, Nia explained:

In the original, he’s already a fully formed … I guess monster, we’ll say, because that’s definitely how he’s positioned in the original film, as a monster.

And so, it’s really like a reveal of, ‘Here’s my chest. I’m fully formed, I’m fully grotesque,’ and this one, we really wanted it to be a slow progression, and for me, I really wanted to trigger the response of like, you know when all of us have had a heat rash or something, and we’re like, hmm, what’s that?

Maybe it’s a heat rash, and then maybe it doesn’t go away for a while and you’re like, hmm, interesting. Should I go to the doctor? No, it’s probably fine. And then for a vast majority of people, it goes away.

Nia continued:

In this movie, of course, it doesn’t go away, it gets worse, and so I wanted to have that effect. If someone goes home after watching this movie and looks at their own rash, or bump, or mosquito bite and is a little more freaked out, then I’ve done my job. And that’s really what I wanted to do, it’s about getting inside the head of the audience and really viscerally disturbing them and tracking it psychologically with the sense of the main character.

Candyman Origin:

The Candyman movie was inspired by legendary horror author Clive Barker’s short story ‘The Forbidden.’

The new ‘Candyman’ is set in the American neighborhood where events began; a now-gentrified section of Chicago where the Cabrini-Green housing projects once stood.

The original Candyman was folklore that originated in low-income black neighborhoods, the Cabrini-Green housing projects, according to the film.

The legend states that the Candyman – who, in life, was African-American artist Daniel Robitaille who was lynched for falling in love and fathering a child with a white woman in 1890 – is summoned after his name is said out loud five times in a mirror.

Nia admits she has been afraid of uttering the words “Candyman” ever since she saw the first film when she was younger.

She said:

I remember hearing about it, always got dared to it, still haven’t, and then eventually I saw the movie and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s Candyman, this is what everyone’s talking about.’

To this day we will not say Candyman 5 times in the mirror either.