Headscratchers / Candyman (2021)

• Why did Burke think making Anthony into a Candyman would create a spirit of vengeance/protector for the Black community? In all the previous films the Candyman only cared about killing those who summoned him, perpetuating his legend, and maybe creating some sort of family for himself. He never cared about helping black people. Going by the film anyone added to the Candyman hive follows the same pattern. Add on that Anthony was deliberately made into one by another Black man in an example of black on black violence and the original Candyman appears dominant. Isn't Anthony more likely to go after anyone who summons him instead of only going after racists? Wouldn't he target Blacks as well? Didn't all Burke accomplish is unleashing a monster again that had been forgotten and forced into dormancy due to events in the previous films?
  • One explanation is that Burke was insane; you'd have to be to want to do what he did. So either he missed that detail or just didn't care.
  • On the other hand, when Brianna summoned him, he didn't touch her at all.
  • That was because he wanted her to live so she could tell everyone what she had seen so that his legend could become relevant again. Killing her then and there would have been a bad decision.
  • if that was the only reason she was kept alive, wouldn’t it have made more sense to kill her and save one of the police officers? Who would people believe more, Brianna or a white cop?
  • Candyman's roots are in rage against racial oppression, and it is a spirit that looks after his community in a way, even if just to further establish his legend. If you look at the first movie in a certain way his main target, Helen, was a white woman who barged through Cabrini Green without considering the consequences and was disrupting the community there. This doesn't mean that Candyman is either a good spirit or an ideal protector, true, but it's still something, and Burke's point is that racial violence is so bad that it's better than nothing.
    • He pursues Helen partly because she ID'd the kid claiming to be Candyman who battered her with the hook, thus weakening him by presenting him as just a guy, and partly because of the notion she was the reincarnated love he had been lynched over. And Helen isn't doing anything malevolent - just investigating with more accuracy than the snooty expert who wrote the book on Candyman; there isn't really any way to tack on the motives of Candyman 2021 to Candyman 1992, it's basically changing him from a spirit gaining his own personal vengeance by proxy to a gestalt of black hate crime victims.
    • It was a change in general from The Forbidden where he really has no other goal than simply preserving his legend. It would actually make a lot more sense to theorize the Chicago Candyman is the same one from the book simply using stolen faces to update his story.
  • but didn’t candyman target Helen because he wanted her to be with him in death?
• Why was Anthony not more concerned about his hand beginning to rot? Apart from idly picking at it (and the bit with the fingernail), he barely shows any concern at all, despite the situation obviously being worse than a simple bee sting.
  • Because by then, his mind was already being corrupted.
  • that doesn’t explain why Brianna didn’t seem to notice his obviously infected hand/face. It was too bad for her to not see and he wasn’t always covering it.
• Why was Helen not in the film? I get that it's a Candyman film, but aside from some flashbacks represented via shadow puppets, the story had been embellished. While I feel that the film missed the opportunity to have a pyrokinetic ghost battle a beehive wraith, did the people of Cabrini Green try to forget her name to the point she became a nonbeing?
  • It seems to be the case that the 'Candyman' murders surrounding her were attributed to her, maybe leading to a change in perspective of her from a wrongly accused heroine who died saving a baby to a fallible woman who tried to redeem herself and died doing so; maybe with that she simply faded from existence with no-one wanting to bring her back as Burke did Candyman.
  • There was an intention to have her appear at one point. At one point, the climax at the church was shown to have a badly-burnt Helen sitting in the pews but this was eventually cut from the film.