Candyman

Bernard Rose’s Candyman is frightening, intelligent horror whose uneven pacing does not undo its hold on us. Set around Chicago’s housing projects, it makes the telling of an urban legend a question of who has the freedom to be curious. Helen Lyle can approach these stories from a distance that the residents do not have. Rose finds unease in that difference, and the film is more interesting whenever he lets it affect our judgement of Helen.

Virginia Madsen keeps Helen convincing even when the story threatens to overwhelm her. Her performance gives us somebody to stay with through the uncertainty, without demanding that we approve of every decision. Tony Todd makes Candyman seductive enough to complicate the simple wish to get away from him. We were unnerved by the warmth in his voice, which makes the danger sound inviting. He is allowed to be compelling for longer than it takes to deliver a scare.

Anthony B. Richmond’s cinematography finds an unsettling romance in the housing project’s decay. Jane Ann Stewart’s production design keeps that deterioration prominent, so the surroundings remain uncomfortable even when nothing overtly supernatural is happening. The combination works because the place matters before it becomes somewhere to stage a scare. There is a danger of admiring these images and forgetting the people who have to live in them, a danger Rose is not always alert enough to avoid.

Philip Glass’s score encourages the same uneasy attraction as Todd’s performance. Its romantic sweep makes sense of a film that wants us drawn towards its monster, and the music sustains apprehension through the quieter passages. Dan Rae’s editing is less reliable. The pace slackens in places, and the renewed bursts of violence do not always feel earned by what precedes them. Rose has actors capable of holding our attention without another shock; the cutting sometimes seems impatient with them.

The larger reservation concerns the people around Helen. Rose’s writing gives race and class a place in the horror, but her experience takes up so much attention that the community risks becoming material for her ordeal. That is a limitation worth naming in a film interested in the distance between privileged outsiders and the people they observe. Vanessa Williams, as Anne-Marie McCoy, makes us wish Rose had given the residents more attention.

The consensus is less enthusiastic than we are. We think the objections to the gore give too little weight to the fear that Madsen and Todd sustain between the shocks. As a supernatural horror film, Candyman offers the basic pleasure of an imposing monster, then makes our attraction to him uncomfortable.

Give it a quiet room and a little patience with the uneven stretches. The 18 certificate is worth taking seriously; the interest in race and class does not make the violence polite. We would not choose it as a way of winding down.