Director Nia DaCosta’s long-awaited Candyman reboot is finally arriving after myriad delays, but how scary and violent is the horror reboot, and does the movie feature many jump scares? Released in 1992, the original Candyman brought legendary horror scribe Clive Barker’s short story “The Forbidden” to life and transplanted the creepy tale’s action to Chicago from the writer’s native Liverpool. The original Candyman was a socially conscious slasher with a satirical edge, so few horror fans were surprised when Get Out director Jordan Peele announced that he would produce a remake set for release in 2020.
The Candyman reboot has since been rescheduled numerous times due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, finally landing in theatres and on streaming services in August 2021. With the original movie being a bloody horror that rarely pulled its punches but kept a few gory murders offscreen, fans of the franchise are understandably curious about how violent and gory the new Candyman reboot is. Of course, viewers also want to know whether the remake is filled with jump scares, or if the satirical slasher’s chills are more cerebral.
Fans of the original Candyman trilogy can rest easy knowing that, like 2021’s earlier horror hit Fear Street, Candyman’s reboot does not skimp on gore and violence. However, the nature of the violence featured in Nia DaCosta’s movie differs from the original Candyman, as some of the reboot’s kills take place offscreen. As a result, the body horror endured by the movie’s protagonist makes up a lot of the reboot’s most wince-inducing moments whereas, in the original movie, it was mostly the eponymous Candyman’s killing sprees that made up the movie’s more explicit content. That said, there are still plenty of gory hook-hacking deaths in the reboot’s runtime, but the new Candyman does not rely on genre cliches for its scares. There are not too many of horror’s worst habit, jump scares, in the reboot, unlike some of the original Candyman outings (particularly Candyman 2: Farewell to the Flesh, which infamously overindulged in this tired trope).
DaCosta’s retelling of the Candyman myth changes a lot of details from the original movies, but the R-rated horror keeps the intense violence and sense of dread present in 1992’s Candyman. The reboot also alters the satirical slant of the movie’s plot, condemning police brutality where the original movie focused on generational trauma, but both versions of Candyman offer a vicious critique of gentrification in their gory stories. One of the major changes that DaCosta’s movie makes turns Candyman into a Freddy Krueger-esque figure but, luckily, the reboot is far from derivative, as proven by its impressive performance with critics.
2021’s Candyman has been repeatedly delayed and left genre fans waiting for over a year, so some viewers are understandably anxious that the project will be over-hyped upon arrival. Fortunately, the presence of plentiful gore, the inventive retelling of the original plot, and the lack of unnecessary, corny jump scares ensure that DaCosta’s Candyman is worth the wait. Few Hollywood horror reboots can hold a candle to the original, but 2021’s gory, scary Candyman has proven an exception to that rule.
