Candyman (1992 film)

Candyman is a 1992 American supernatural horror film written and directed by Bernard Rose and starring Virginia Madsen, Tony Todd, Xander Berkeley, Kasi Lemmons, and Vanessa E. Williams. Based on Clive Barker's short story "The Forbidden", the film follows a Chicago graduate student completing a thesis on urban legends and folklore, which leads her to the legend of the "Candyman", the hook-handed ghost of an African-American artist and son of a slave who was murdered in the late 19th century for his relationship with the daughter of a wealthy white man, who now appears whenever his name is chanted 5 times in front of the mirror.

The film came to fruition after a chance meeting between Rose and Barker who later completed his own film adaptation of Nightbreed (1990). Rose expressed interest in Barker's story "The Forbidden", and Barker agreed to license the rights. Where Barker's story revolved around the themes of the British class system in contemporary Liverpool, Rose chose to refit the story to Cabrini-Green's public housing development in Chicago and instead focus on the themes of race and social class in the inner-city United States.

Candyman premiered at the 1992 Toronto International Film Festival, and was theatrically released on October 16, 1992, by TriStar Pictures and PolyGram Filmed Entertainment. It received generally positive reviews and grossed over $25 million in the US, where it was also regarded in some critical circles as a contemporary classic of horror cinema. It was followed by three sequels: Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh (1995), Candyman 3: Day of the Dead (1999), and Candyman (2021) which the latter serves as a direct-sequel to the original.