When people talk about the golden age of horror, the 1990s are hardly ever mentioned. Still, it is worth mentioning that this was the decade that began with a horror film winning the “Big Five” Academy Awards: Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs (1991). The “realistic” horror of the ’90s featured protagonists facing crazed serial killers in films such as Silence and David Fincher’s Se7en (1995). Horror noir was in, but there’s one film that gets overlooked that could also fall into this category: Bernard Rose’s Candyman (1992).

Where there is isolation, horror tends to follow, which is why it makes sense that urban horror is relatively uncommon. What genres such as film noir and neo-noir have noticed and frequently reflected on is that even a densely populated city can still be a place of isolation and alienation. This is something that horror does not usually focus on, but in Candyman, the Chicago setting is vital to understanding the themes Rose develops. Candyman is mostly set in the now-demolished Cabrini-Green housing project. Called Little Hell in the nineteenth century, the area where Cabrini-Green was built had been largely populated by white immigrants before becoming 90% black by the 1990s. Given Cabrini-Green’s infamous reputation for crime and violence, Rose’s use of it as the setting for Candyman brings an element of real fear into the film. The true horror of Candyman is a dangerous combination of poverty, classism, and racism. Through this combination, Cabrini-Green becomes an area that is both alienated by white society and alienating to protagonist Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen), who investigates the area as part of her graduate thesis on urban legends. Read more