Nia DaCosta's Candyman serves as a direct sequel to the 1982 original film as Anthony McCoy, the baby saved from a fiery demise attempted by the titular spirit. As he returns to his childhood area of Cabrini-Green, now a gentrified neighborhood, Anthony learns of the Candyman legend and begins falling down a rabbit hole causing his mental state to collapse and threatening to reawaken a terror long thought to be dormant.

As Candyman comes home on 4K Ultra-HD, Blu-ray and DVD, Screen Rant spoke exclusively with production designer Cara Brower to discuss finding the look of the film, her and DaCosta's biggest influences and their upcoming reunion on The Marvels.

Related: What Candyman 2021 Reveals About The Marvels

So I know you had worked with Jordan before on Us in the art department, but how did your becoming a part of Candyman come about?

Cara Brower: Well, yeah, for Jordan's film, we had a really small art department, so it was great, because on that kind of a project, you're really getting to know everybody. I started designing after that and I had only done one small film, but Jordan's creative producer, when they started to recruit for Candyman, remembered me and thought, "I wonder if she'd be good for that." So they put my name in the mix and then I pitched for the film and met with Nia and met with Ian [Cooper] from Monkeypaw. I put a whole lookbook of the film together for how I saw the film and references for the art and I really wanted to do the project. I really ended up pursuing it, even though it was Monkeypaw who thought maybe I would be good for it, I really kept going back and back and back, because I really wanted to do this film.

So you mentioned the art inspirations, what were some of your biggest inspirations for the look of the movie?

Cara Brower: I looked at a lot of contemporary artists who I thought could be one of Anthony's contemporaries or peers. I looked at a lot of contemporary abstract work, there are a couple artists like Maggi Hambling and Antony Micallef. Antony Micallef's work I really loved, just because it was a really thick, impasto work, which means layers and layers and layers of paint. I really saw Anthony's work, as he kind of goes down the rabbit hole into the lore of Candyman, I wanted it to feel kind of like he's in this fugue state, where it's just channeling through him and feels very fluid.

So those are the kind of pieces of work that I was looking at and also for his early work to build a contrast work that was really tight and honed, so you would get this visual contrast and the fluidity coming as it was kind of coming out of him in this state. I put so much time and effort into that, I thought that was going to be the hardest thing to nail when I met with Ian and Nia. In the beginning, they were like, "What's the hardest part of the film going to be" and I'm like, "Making authentic-looking art." Because I feel like it's so hard to do that, to get real-looking art in a movie set when you're going at the speed of light.

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So then what were some of your and Nia's other big goals together for finding the right look and progression of the film?

Cara Brower: We both were on the same page and I think this is why they hired me, because we're all on the same page. We wanted it to be like a stylized, elevated horror film, so Nia's big reference was Rosemary's Baby and then I really love Italian horror films from the '70s, like Dario Argento's. They bring a lot of color, a lot of style, a lot of stylized locations. The other big reference for me, I love Stanley Kubrick and I love The Shining and I love Clockwork Orange. That was a big one for me in that I wanted to create a stylized version of Chicago. Like in Clockwork Orange, it's England, but it's a kind of a grounded, hyper-stylized, hyper-realized version of it. So that's one thing that we were on the same page about is that we didn't want it to look like a documentary or anything, we wanted to be grounded, we wanted to bring color to it and we wanted it to be stylish. That was our biggest goal as a team that we were all on the same page about.

Since you mention the colors, the Candyman franchise has always retained a pretty similar color palette of the brown, the white and the yellow, what was it like expanding that palette for this film?

Cara Brower: I was trying to minimize the brown, those heavy browns that I remember so distinctly from the first film, so I kind of put together a palette of sage greens and blues and more pastel colors. I use that palette, specifically in every single location, but different shades of it. When someone said to me, "Why are we doing those colors again? I feel like you're doing the same thing over," I said, "No, no, no, I'm trying to create a specific look for the entire film. Trust me." At the end, they were like, "Oh, okay, now that I see it, I understand," but that's basically what I was trying to do.

There's so many unique scenes throughout this film, in terms of the design and the look, did you have any one that you found to be your favorite of all of them?

Cara Brower: Oh, my gosh, that's so hard. There's a couple, can I answer a couple?

Absolutely.

Cara Brower: I loved shooting in Marina City for the art critic's home and that was an idea that Nia had. Nia, specifically, from the very beginning said "I want to try to shoot in Marina City Towers," and I thought and said to her, "Oh, maybe that could be the art critic's apartment," she was like, "I love it, that's great." So that was a real mission to shoot in there and it was a real mission to find an apartment that we could actually shoot in, because they're tiny, and then one that kind of looked bespoke enough. Because they're all individually owned, so it was a free for all, kind of, of how everybody had redecorated them, and I had this idea of, "Oh, I want everything to be bespoke and sort of original." So that was a big achievement, we looked at a ton of apartments in the building and so I was really excited to shoot in there.

Then, this is such a small scene, but I love doing the mirrored elevator. We had kind of played around with mirrors in Us in the hall of mirrors, so I had learned that you can use two-way mirrors to a great extent. So we built the whole elevator, pretty much mostly out of two-way mirror, so you could be on the outside of the mirror and shoot in and have a mirrored infinity box on the inside. So I was really excited about doing that, because I kind of nerd out on that visual trickery stuff.

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This film is interesting in that it marks a stepping stone for you as a production designer from the smaller Our Friend to the modest budget of Candyman to blockbuster filmmaking with The Marvels. I know you can't give me too many details about the latter, but can you tell me what it's like reuniting with Nia in a much larger scale production compared to Candyman?

Cara Brower: It's such an honor that Nia thought that I could go on this adventure with her and it is an adventure. This is a wild ride. [Laughs] Working on a Marvel feature is unlike anything else, it's just massive, the scale and the scope is massive, and you can just dream up whatever you want to. There's definitely the pace you have to work at.

But I was really honored that she believed that I could make this jump with her and it's been a really great collaboration, which is all that I really wanted, because I really admire her. I think she's so smart and so gifted. This was a huge opportunity for her and I didn't want to mess it up for her by being unprepared, because it was a giant leap for me, because I hadn't really even worked on those types of films in the art department. So it was a huge leap of faith for her to want to bring me on this project with her.

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Candyman is now on shelves on 4K UHD, Blu-ray and DVD.