Full SPOILERS ahead for Candyman!
Nia DaCosta’s Candyman is both a sequel and a relaunch. While it pays homage to the original films, it also breaks from the trends they established, and builds to a thrilling conclusion that feels both unexpected yet completely fitting.
What happens in the climax might seem complicated at first, given the surprising way it’s set in motion. The film is far from straightforward, but the way its thematic pieces fall in place results not only in a great ending to the movie but a great new beginning for the Candyman series.
Candyman: Why Does Burke Kidnap Anthony?
Slasher movies are no strangers to last-minute villain reveals, and Colman Domingo’s Burke is a sure candidate, between his eerie entrance and his in-depth knowledge of Candyman. Towards the end of the film, he finds Anthony McCoy (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) in a fugue state and decides to turn him into a version of Candyman in full view of his girlfriend Brianna (Teyonah Parris) by sawing off his arm, replacing it with a meat-hook, and dressing him up in a familiar brown coat before calling the police. However, his reasons aren’t as simple as bloodlust or cult-like villain worship.
DaCosta’s soft reboot returns to the setting of the first film — the now condemned Cabrini-Green housing project — whose poor Black community has been forced out so developers can swoop in. Burke is one of its last remaining residents, and framing Anthony is his last-ditch attempt to prevent it from being gentrified. According to Burke’s twisted logic, if there turns out to be another Candyman killer in the project, people might sour on the neighborhood and keep their distance.
Burke is a keeper of myths, and while Candyman has fallen out of the collective memory, he carries the story with him. Before the film cuts to the Church where he holds Anthony and Brianna captive, we’re shown a flashback in which he watches his sister die after summoning the “original” Candyman — Daniel Robitaille (Tony Todd), who was lynched in the 1890s for loving a white woman — by saying his name in a mirror. As a child, Burke also witnessed the police beat an innocent man to death, Sherman Fields, who resembled Candyman and who was accused of putting razor blades in children’s candy. Burke was the only bystander in either case, but as he prepares to mold Anthony in Candyman’s image, he tells Brianna: “Now we have a witness.”
Burke knows both these stories intimately — the supernatural bloodshed and the real violence that permeates his community — though he’s had to shoulder their trauma alone. To him, they’re part of the same legacy, and a story that keeps repeating itself throughout history, with different “Candymen'” becoming victims of racist violence, and that violence returning from beyond the grave to kill innocent people, like his sister. Burke has, in a way, succumbed to this cyclical reality, and to him, perpetuating the urban legend is the only way to shield his neighborhood from a vicious outside world.
Candyman: What Happened to Anthony?
Anthony, upon being framed by Burke, is shot dead by Chicago PD in front of Brianna. As the cops intimidate Brianna into telling their version of the story, she summons Candyman by saying his name five times. When this spirit first appears, he’s surrounded by a swarm of honeybees — the way Robitaille was tortured before being killed — but he looks and sounds like Anthony.
Anthony, who was abducted by Robitaille as a baby in the original Candyman (1992), spends most of the film rediscovering his own history. At first, the myth is just material for his canvas, but it soon begins to consume him, not just artistically, but physically too. As his body starts to rot, he begins to resemble Robitaille’s grotesque, corpse-like appearance in previous films. Whether he likes it or not, he is part of the Candyman story — not just because he appeared in the first film, but because he’s tethered to America’s deep history of racism no matter how much he tries to escape it.
When Anthony returns to Cabrini-Green, where he lived as a baby, Burke considers this to be “perfect symmetry” — an inevitable echo, in which Burke also plays a part by kidnapping Anthony, the way Candyman once did. Burke and Anthony wear similar brown coats, just like several Black characters who made up different “versions” of Candyman over the years, all of whom suffered at the hands of white supremacy. By the end of the film, both Burke and Anthony symbolize the legacy of Candyman, and the pain it represents for the people of Cabrini-Green. Anthony is even absorbed into this history, and he becomes one with Candyman’s vengeful form.
Will There be a Candyman Sequel?
After Candyman kills the officers responsible for Anthony’s death, he briefly reveals his face to Brianna. We then see a returning Tony Todd in all his terrifying splendor, as he instructs her: “Tell everyone.”
The new sequel doesn’t discard any of the series’ mythology, but it builds on it from a new perspective. DaCosta is the first Black filmmaker to helm Candyman, and while previous films all centered on Robitaille haunting white women, the 2021 movie takes closer aim at the story of his murder — and of similar murders over the years — and re-works him into a spirit of vengeance. Candyman still takes innocent lives, but when he flays the police officers in the climax, Anthony’s voice emanates from behind the swarm; “They will say I shed innocent blood,” he whispers. “You are far from innocent.”
These updates to the character don’t retroactively change the previous films — in which white filmmakers told stories of white protagonists, who were outsiders to the racism in Robitaille’s past — however, the new movie captures Candyman’s actions from a brand new perspective. When Robitaille killed a policeman in the second film, Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh (1995), no thematic connections were drawn between white supremacy and structural police violence. However, a story in which Black perspectives are central, and in which white supremacist violence is still alive and well, is a vital realignment of what Candyman is, and perhaps, what he should have always been. When Robitaille tells Brianna to “tell everyone,” he not only wants his legend to live on and for people to summon him as they did in prior films, but he also wants this version of his story told, one that harkens back to his painful origins.
When the film ends, Candyman is neither just Daniel Robitaille nor just Anthony McCoy. He is both of them — and more. He is a symbol of all the Black victims Burke mentions, who died at the hands of white supremacy, and if the series continues under Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions, this is who Candyman is likely to be. The character was always designed to reflect a violent past, but now, he embodies the full scope of that history as it bleeds into the present and he kills with righteous fury.
What did you think of the new Candyman movie and its ending? Let us know in the comments. And for more on the film, check out our Candyman review and watch the director and cast on the legacy and meaning of Candyman.