I’m not sure what it says about me that contemplating the Coronavirus led inexorably towards Candyman and Chucky. I guess we all return to our factory settings in a crisis. Chris Martin posts innocuous pop music to heal the masses through banality. Wayne Rooney champions multimillionaire footballers as common decency tries to ‘cruelly’ rip away their dignity. I talk movies. Living through this unique chapter in modern history has revealed the precariousness of contemporary existence. The connectivity that defines this epoch has been turned against itself as houses are transformed into holding cells. Densely populated urban areas have been affected more acutely. New York has been at the epicentre of the American struggle and accounts for nearly half of all deaths throughout the United States. It got me thinking about the unique anxieties that permeate urban life and two paragons of inner-city bedevilment: Candyman and Chucky. Bernard Rose’s Candyman (1992)and Don Mancini’s Child’s Play (1988)are set in the urban sprawl of Chicago and have both recently received the dubious honour of remakes. What has made these two characters such enduring urban archetypes and how do they differ from your more traditional knife-wielding psychopaths?
People instinctively associate the slasher genre with bucolic suburban spaces. Jamie Lee Curtis’s indelible turn in John Carpenter’s Halloween embodies this bloody zeitgeist. Michael Myers inexplicably stalks Laurie Stroud through Haddonfield’s manicured lawns in what remains cinema’s worst ever first date. Jason Voorhies would then go on to terrorize the denizens of Camp Crystal Lake in the Friday the 13TH series (though Mrs Voorhies started it all, much to Drew Barrymore’s chagrin in Scream.) The victims of these films are often defined in ethical terms: hedonistic youth are cannon fodder for automatons that reassert moral balance. But they can also be interpreted through an alternative lens: class. The victims are all complacent victors of the American Dream, stupefied by white picket fences and idyllic lakes. The films satirize class conflict, with Mike and Jason playing the role of silent revolutionaries. But what happens if we relocate this scenario in a place of heightened anxiety, where socio-economic tensions can tinge the minutiae of daily life with dread: the city?
William Lustig’s Maniac is probably the prototypical urban slasher, with Joe Spinell’s demented Frank Zito a ‘victim’ of the city-space’s suffocating alienation. But I feel it lacks both the radical experimentation of Candyman and playful self-awareness of Child’s Play. Candyman is quite possibly the most thematically complex slasher film of all time. The decision to shoot the film on location in Cabrini Green is a masterstroke, immediately lending a grim authenticity to proceedings. Cabrini Green was a public housing project connected to Chicago’s mid-20th century urban renewal. Economic depression in the region led to a descent into squalor and gang rule, creating a monument to the seismic inequalities in American society. Virginia Madsen plays Helen Kyle, a semiotics grad student studying the links between depressed social status and urban legend. Enter the avuncular, honeyed vocal tones of Tony Todd as the titular ‘villain’ Candyman. Born into slavery, he was horribly (though imaginatively) murdered by a white mob incensed at the shame of miscegenation. Candyman exists as a ghostly echo, holding dominion over Cabrini Green like a restless God.
The city space is generally more multicultural than suburbia, allowing for an examination of racial politics unexplored in traditional slashers. Considering his experiences, some film critics thought it illogical that Candyman would primarily hunt within his own racial group. Horror audiences had become accustomed to a cinema of righteous retribution. Candyman complicates the traumatic legacy of slavery by going beyond surface social commentary. It delves into the psychological ramifications of generational racism; how deeply have feelings of inferiority been internalized by the African-American population? Candyman is akin to a Jungian archetype: he is born from the collective pain of a people. The fact that he is summoned through a mirror reinforces that notion, revealing Candyman as a reflection of internal psychic trauma. It’s little wonder that Jordan Peele wrote the as-yet unreleased remake. US is a film that deals with extremely similar issues via the hyper-literal device of doppelgangers.
Candyman brought something relatively unique to the slasher: romance. The film is is eerily reminiscent of Frances Ford Coppola’s version of Dracula, which was coincidentally released in the same year. Helen adopts the Mina Harker role in this cross-generational cry for romantic reparations. The film bravely confronts prejudices regarding interracial relationships that prevail to this day. Candyman becomes the mythic black seducer, threatening the imagined sanctity of white feminine virtue. His bloody hook becomes a phallic symbol that hints at violent penetration. The film also rejects the notion that racial stratification can be understood through academia. Helen has to abandon her critical distance in order to identify with Candyman’s pain. She symbolically sheds her ‘whiteness’ in death, with her blonde hair singed from her head. It suggests that true reformation can only be addressed by radical social change: Helen has to replace Candyman in the hierarchy of historical trauma. This also subverts the ‘Final Girl’ motif, which is perhaps one of the most rigid stereotypes within the slasher genre. Incidentally, the term ‘Final Girl’ was coined by Carol Clover in her 1992 book Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Candyman came out in the same year and is clearly in the vanguard of a broader reappraisal of the role of women in horror cinema.
Let’s shift down a gear somewhat (or at least drop four feet). Don Mancini’s Child’s Play is a far more mainstream depiction of inner-city malaise. Whereas Candyman was primarily concerned with the legacy of slavery, Child’s Play takes aim at another self-destructive American institution: consumerism. That’s not to say that there isn’t a level of racial commentary involved in this film, whether intentional or not. Prior to turning into a Good Guy, serial killer Charles Lee Ray was indoctrinated into the mystical world of voodoo. It’s a cultural appropriation that ends in betrayal: Chucky poetically kills his old mentor with a voodoo-doll. It neatly underscores an instance of racial violence directly emanating from cultural exploitation. There’s also the tension of watching little Andy accompany Chucky around the projects, which plays like some surreal entry into the Mark Twain chronicles. The utter incongruity of these scenes touch on deeply internalized racial fears, with the poor defenceless white boy exposed to the harsh exigencies of inner-city life. This perhaps betrays a conservative heart at the centre of the picture.
But as I stated, this film is above all a treatise on the dangers of rampant materialism. This film was released in 1988 during the heyday of Reaganite Americana, when unfettered deregulation fed an insatiable consumer culture. The Good Guys Company is synonymous with any large corporate entity. At the heart of the film is a woman’s quest to satisfy the material desire of her son. Karen Barclay is a single mother having a hard-enough time just paying the bills. She is still beholden to the pressures of consumer culture, which reveals the unrealistic expectations at the heart of working-class life. Andy’s acquisition of the Good Guy doll fulfils the promise of corporate America. But things backfire as the commodity that seemed so fundamental to his happiness threatens to destroy his family. Chucky aims to possess Andy’s body, thereby consuming the consumer.
I can’t help but think of Tyler Durden’s refrain from anti-consumerist opus: Fight Club. “The things you own end up owning you.” It’s easy to forget how genuinely effective this film was in the wake of increasingly hyperbolic sequels. The 2019 remake was ironically a vapid money-grab, one that rips the ‘soul’ out of Chucky and uploads an insipid demo version.
There will always be a delicious frisson to watching entitled kids being killed at a lakeside resort. That’s science. But I would argue that the urban slasher has extended the genre into more thematically rich territory (Freddy Kruger’s dreamscapes aside). They speak of the tangible anxieties and fears that are prevalent in city life. In a time when an all-too-real monster wreaks havoc in cities around the world, I take a strange comfort in these fictional boogeymen. They stalked the streets of my cinematic youth and will continue to do so long after Covid19 has passed.
