Cabrini-Green, therefore, entered the popular imagination as the embodiment of the “inner city,” becoming the setting of the prime-time sit-com Good Times, of movies, urban crime novels, documentaries, rap songs and endless media coverage. There was a recurring Saturday Night Live skit in the 1980s about a teenage single mother—her name was Cabrini Green Harlem Watts Jackson. The public housing project had made it onto a Mount Rushmore of scariest places in urban America.
What Candyman captures is this muddling of what is real and imaginary. Cabrini-Green was both an actual place with an array of serious problems, and a nightmare vision of fear and prejudice. A horror movie is often about what isn’t seen; it requires menacing visions to fill in the shadows of the unknown. The real Cabrini-Green had plenty of violent crime, but it was also home to thousands of families who had formed elaborate support networks and lived everyday lives. The fictional Cabrini-Green in which people believed in a murderous, hook-handed spirit was the pure creation of that fear. “The old dark house on the hill has always been the standard setting of horror,” director Rose explained. “But it seemed to me that the big public housing project was the new venue of terror.”
Rose created an elaborate backstory for his film’s killer that tapped into numerous racial tropes. In his previous life, Candyman was a gifted portrait artist, the son of a slave at the turn of the 19th century whose father earned a fortune after the Civil War by inventing a means to mass-produce shoes. Candyman fell in love with and impregnated one of his subjects, a white woman, and the girl’s father hired thugs to lynch him, chasing him to the site of the future Cabrini-Green, sawing off his painting hand before setting him on fire. In his reincarnated form, Candyman (Tony Todd) appears in the movie gaunt-cheeked, towering in a fur-lined trench coat, possibly as hell-bent on miscegenation—Virginia Madsen’s Helen is a dead ringer for his postbellum beloved—as on murder.
“Just as urban legends are based on the real fears of those who believe in them, so are certain urban locations able to embody fear,” Chicago film critic Roger Ebert wrote in his three-out-of-four-star review of the movie in the fall of 1992.