The director behind the upcoming horror film Candyman has revealed the reasons behind it being delayed until 2021.
Candyman is a spiritual sequel to the 1992 films, forgetting the two films that followed originally, and was originally scheduled for release on June 12, 2020. That got pushed back to October 16, before now being delayed until 2021.
Director Nia DaCosta has revealed that the film has been pushed back because of the current situation around the world, which would detract from the collective experience of viewing it in theaters.
“We made Candyman to be seen in theaters,” she is reported as tweeting by Cheat Sheet. “Not just for the spectacle but because the film is about community and stories — how they shape each other, how they shape us. It’s about the collective experience of trauma and joy, suffering and triumph, and the stories we tell around it.”
“We wanted the horror and humanity of Candyman to be experienced in a collective, a community, so we’re pushing Candyman to next year, to ensure that everyone can see the film, in theaters, and share in that experience.”
Actor Tony Todd is back for the latest instalment of the series, reinforcing the imagery that made the first film so popular when it was released in 1992. Candyman became something of a cultural phenomenon, with many slumber parties in the nineties seeing people dare each other to say ‘Candyman’ into the mirror five times. That ritual summoned the fearsome killer in the film and having something that people could do in the real world to create scares, helped drive home the character.
Indeed, Candyman has since become one of the characters from fiction that continues to scare in the modern age. Often, characters become engrained in culture when they also feature in other media, such as games. Candyman inspired a board game which helped promote the films and keep him as part of common culture, which fits with other popular characters such as Dracula and Jason Vorhees. The latter inspired the console game, Friday the 13th, which helps to promote him as a bogeyman at Halloween, even for people who haven’t seen the films. As for Dracula, he has appeared in comics, films and games across a generation, and continues to do so. The leading gaming portal Foxy Games has titles inspired by horror characters such as Vampire Sempai and Full Moon Fortune, again helping to make them enduring figures of fear. Candyman has certainly joined the elite list, even though he has yet to feature in a video game or mobile title.
The new Candyman movie could change that, with the previous three coming at a time when consoles could not necessarily generate the fear-factor due to graphical and musical limitations. Tony Todd’s antagonist has been described as an ‘iconic villain’ by DaCosta, but she is seeking to pull back the curtain on the character and sees what makes him a villain. Adding that backstory and fleshing out the character as more than just a hack and slash perpetrator is something that could likely lead to further presentation across media, as we have seen with Dracula, Jason Vorhees and Michael Myers.
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