Candyman is considered among the best horror movies from the 1990s, and it could have had a now popular actress as the female lead had the casting process gone differently, as Sandra Bullock was considered to star. The horror genre has gone through many ups and downs through the years, with the 1980s considered its peak, but when the 1990s rolled in, the genre went through a rough patch. Of course, not all horror movies from that decade were bad, and Candyman is among the ones considered to have kept the genre afloat.
Directed by Bernard Rose, Candyman is a supernatural horror movie based on the short story “The Forbidden” by Clive Barker. It follows Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen), a semiotics graduate student working on a thesis on urban legends and folklore, which leads her to the legend of “Candyman”, about the ghost of an artist and son of a slave, who was murdered for his relationship with the daughter of a wealthy white man. The legend says that if you say his name five times in front of a mirror, he appears and kills you with a hook attached to the stump of his right arm. Her investigation unleashes a series of murders that drag her into them as the prime suspect and make her life a living nightmare. Candyman was a hit with critics and viewers, with the title character becoming one of the scariest horror movie characters of all time.
Candyman’s female lead, Helen Lyle, was played by Virginia Madsen, who at the time was best known for playing Princess Irulan in David Lynch’s Dune and for her appearance in Dire with Fire, but Candyman definitely gave her an extra push. Madsen was a friend of Bernard Rose, and according to her (via Horror News Network), she was originally going to play Helen’s friend Bernie and Rose’s then-wife Alexandra Pigg was going to play Helen. However, they ultimately made the character of Bernie African American and Madsen was out but was later offered the role of Helen as Pigg found out she was pregnant. In the audio commentary for Candyman, producer Alan Poul revealed that other actresses read for the role as well, and out of all of them, the one they liked best was none other than Sadra Bullock.
Poul explained that there were “young, pretty much unknown actresses” arriving to read for the part, but they decided that Madsen was the one for the role – but in case she was unable to join the project for whatever reason, Bullock would have been the one. Bullock wasn’t exactly a newcomer by the time Candyman was in development, but she wasn’t the big star she’s now. Bullock’s debut on the big screen came in the action thriller Hangmen, in 1987, after which she appeared in A Fool and His Money and Who Shot Patakango?, both direct-to-video movies. The same year Candyman was released, she starred in the rom-com Love Potion No. 9, but her big break arrived in 1994 with the action-thriller Speed, where she starred alongside Keanu Reeves. Since then, Bullock has appeared in a number of movies from different genres, most notably comedy (Miss Congeniality), drama (The Blind Side), and even horror with Bird Box.
As for Madsen, following the success of Candyman, she was the co-host of the Unsolved Mysteries revival in 1999 and appeared in the movies The Number 23, Red Riding Hood, and the TV series Swamp Thing. It’s hard to say if Candyman would have been better or worse with Sandra Bullock as the lead, as Virginia Madsen did a great job playing Helen Lyle, but Bullock’s career would have definitely been different as her big break would have arrived earlier than it did, and whether she would have starred in big projects like Miss Congeniality and The Blind Side or not is up to the imagination of the audience.
