Candyman (1992): The Urban Legend as American History

Sun, 19 May 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Say his name five times into a mirror and he comes. It’s the cleanest premise in modern horror, and Candyman knows exactly what it’s doing with it, because the film is about the summoning as much as the killing. Bernard Rose’s 1992 picture takes an urban legend and asks the question the campfire version never does: who does this story serve, who does it remember, and what real horror is it dressed up to carry? The answer it arrives at — that the legend is a vessel for two centuries of American racial violence — is why the film outgrew its slasher packaging and became one of the genre’s few authentic tragedies.

Hellraiser: Barker's Pleasure-and-Pain Theology

Sat, 13 Apr 2024 08:00:00 +0000

The Cenobites do not chase anyone. That is the first thing to understand about Hellraiser, and the thing that separates Clive Barker’s 1987 debut from every other horror film of its decade. The slashers of the era ran; Barker’s monsters process into a room like clergy, in leather vestments and ceremonial scars, and speak in the measured tones of theologians who have thought very hard about suffering and concluded it is holy. Adapted by Barker from his own novella The Hellbound Heart, and made in London for roughly a million dollars, the film proposed a genuinely new idea in a genre that mostly recycled: hell is not a punishment inflicted on the damned. It is a sensation the damned went looking for.

Clive Barker - vo.rs

Candyman (1992): The Urban Legend as American History

Hellraiser: Barker's Pleasure-and-Pain Theology