MY LIFE IN HORROR: SURRENDER TO ME BY KIT POWER

My Life In Horror
 
Every month, I will write about a film, album, book or event that I consider horror, and that had a warping effect on my young mind. You will discover my definition of what constitutes horror is both eclectic and elastic. Don’t write in. Also, of necessity, much of this will be bullshit – as in, my best recollection of things that happened anywhere from 15 – 40 years ago. Sometimes I will revisit the source material contemporaneously, further compounding the potential bullshit factor. Finally, intimate familiarity with the text is assumed – to put it bluntly, here be gigantic and comprehensive spoilers. Though in the vast majority of cases, I’d recommend doing yourself a favour and checking out the original material first anyway.
 
This is not history. This is not journalism. This is not a review.
 
This is my life in horror.
 
Surrender To Me
 
The below discussion assumes you’ve seen Candyman, and will contain comprehensive spoilers for the film.
 
This one loomed large in my childhood. At the time of the films release I was 14 years old, and while I didn’t see it until at least a couple of years later, when it finally broadcast on UK TV (my video from the broadcast started 30 seconds or so late and missed the title card, though it still captured much of that beautiful overhead traffic shot), the premise of the legend at the centre of the movie was electric playground gossip. I don’t know how many of the kids had actually seen the film, but everyone was talking about it; and specifically talking about the ‘say his name five times’ thing.
 
Like, it was an obsession; who had claimed to have done it, whether or not they believed they’d really done it, who’d chickened out, who would never even think about doing it; on and on the conversation went, for what felt like weeks. And this may be false memory, but my recollection is that the legend wasn’t immediately connected to a film.
 
The legend came to me first.
 
I have a lot to say about this film, and not all of it straightforwardly positive, but it’s worth starting there; this is a piece of storytelling that was staggeringly successful at what it set out to do. A story about the perpetuation of urban legend in Chicago that itself became a delicious piece of playground gossip and goosebumps as far afield as North Devon, England. I don’t know a horror writer worth their salt that doesn’t dream of creating something with that kind of reach and impact.
 
And at its core, that’s about simplicity, right? The trappings don’t really matter; whether it happened to a friend of a friend, a relative of a relative, boy or girl; no, all that matters is someone staring into a mirror… and saying his name five times, and then… and then…
 
It hits every archetype you want this kind of urban legend to hit; grusome murder, sure, ferocious monster with a hook for a freakin’ hand, check… but the best bit, of course, is the invitation. Say his name five times! Why would anyone…? And yet, once you’ve heard it,  especially as a kid, how can you not at least think about it? You look in the mirror every day, your own youthful, immortal face looking back at you. You’re on the surface rational, maybe even aggressively so, depending on your temperament… or maybe you’re superstitious and ashamed of that, wanting to prove something… or maybe you’re just curious, desperate to know if any of it, the supernatural, is real…
 
I’ve talked before about how horror is often small-c conservitive, and really, this boiled-down horror story archetype is as clear a demonstration of that tendency, the clarity perhaps exacerbated by the purity of the distillation.
 
Because in the legend of the Candyman, he isn’t some manic that follows you home, or stalks you in the street, or even kills you in your dreams.
 
In the legend of the Candyman, you summon your doom.
 
This is one of the darkest, most incendiary concepts in all of horror, maybe the darkest, one that lurks in the depths of many of the most outright disturbing works in the genre; the notion that victims are complicit in their undoing.
 
This is not new territory for Clive Barker (on whose source material Candyman is based) of course. Hellraiser is an exemplar of the form in many ways - “The box. You Opened it. We came.” and so on. But even there, the picture is complicated; nobody in the first movie actually knows the consequences of opening the box, after all. Frank may have been chronically unwise, but that’s hardly an eviscerating offence; and Kirsty is entirely innocent.
 
Candyman, on the other hand, is pure death-drive in action. Consider the opening telling of the story. The movie, all about stories and storytelling, starts with our hero, Helen, being told the story, but then desolves to a flashback/dramatisation as the voice over continues. In it, ‘good girl’ with ‘good’ boyfriend has decided that tonight, she’s going to shag ‘bad boy’. This is classic teenage Sex And Danger territory, a narritive that could play out any number of ways, from porn to romance to crime to horror, or pretty much any combination of the above. I’d argue it naturally skews slightly horror, because at core she’s breaking taboos - fidelity, chastity, and valuing libido over heart - and we know how small c-conservitive horror feels about Women Who Enjoy Fucking, but I recognize other avenues are possible.
 
And then they’re in the bathroom, in front of the mirror, and she’s in her white bra, and they’re both fully panting, and then she tells him the story, and dares him to do the thing.
 
Sex and death, baby. Sex and death and teenagers.
 
There’s a nice twist here, too; one that might not leap out at the first viewing, but a significant moment, I think. The narrator tells us that having said the name four times together, and then sending the horn dog boy downstairs to await ‘surprise’, the girl says Candyman’s name the final time on her own (at which point, we’re treated to the first of several brief but brilliantly executed, erm, executions).
 
And the thought that might fairly occur at that point is; how does anyone know that she said his name a final time, given her extreme deadness?
 
It reminds me of the great urban legend about how, if you have a falling dream, and you don’t wake up before you hit the ground, you die in real life. It’s great because most of us have had falling dreams, and almost all of us have been woken up by the dream, the sensation of falling causing us to start awake (that sensation in turn often caused by some form of snoring or apnea that’s preventing proper breathing). But I’ve never spoken to anyone who has had a falling dream where they’ve hit the ground.
 
So. You know. Maybe.
 
Like all great supernatural premises (including the biggest ones of all, religion) it’s by its nature unfalsifiable. We’ll only ever know for sure it's true if we have that falling dream, land, and die. Or not.
 
Same principle applies here; assuming any part of the story is true, if the girl died, there’s no way of knowing what caused it, because she was alone when it happened. Interestingly, the moment is repeated later in the film, when Helen and her friend Beatrice look into her apartment's bathroom mirror and say his name in unison; Beatrice chickens out, and Helen alone makes the final intonation.
 
The movie is also implicitly about religion in another way, too; it’s about belief. According to the man himself, Candyman is a legend, an urban myth, a ‘whisper in the classroom’ and so forth. Belief sustains him, and when Helen takes actions that challenge his existence (in the eyes of his… followers? Congregation? We’ll come back to that part, because it’s complex and messy and problematic) he is ‘obliged to come’; to reassert the myth and expand the legend, using Helen to do so.
 
I always find stories about stories to be dicey affairs, personally. I always feel there’s a non-trivial risk that they can puncture the entire enterprise. Suspension of disbelief is a tricksy, nebulous phrase that likely obscures as much, if not more, than it illuminates. Nonetheless, one of the things I come to fiction for is immersion, absorption; I want to be taken into another world, or another part of this world, and see it as clearly as I can through the eyes of someone else. And if, in the course of telling me a story in that way, you start banging on about storytelling, you run the risk, I think, of exposing the wires that show me how the effect is done. I don’t mind a ‘making of’ documentary, but it’s not a substitute for watching the actual movie, and I certainly don’t want to sit down expecting one and getting the other.
 
All that said, done well, it’s brilliant; the much-maligned Last Action Hero does a bang up job of interrogating the logic of Action Movie Land, using arguably the biggest action star of all time to do it, and King’s work is no worse for the many, many writers who often serve as heroes or protagonists in his stories.
 
And I think Cnadyman does it about as well as it’s possible to do.
 
It does so by leaning all the way in. The lead characters are academics, researching urban legends. They are sceptics, in other words; but also bright and inquisitive people. This means they can voice every objection the audience will have to the premise of course; but for my money the cleverer part is that when things do start getting actually hinky - when they locate an actual, real-world murder that has been ascribed to the urban legend - their reactions of unease transmit to us very clearly. They are the experts, after all. If they can’t explain it…
 
That said, the movie is playing an interesting game here, because the opening monologue of the film is from Candyman, extolling the virtue of myth as the camera slowly zooms into a swarm of bees. We know the rationalists are wrong, that Candman is real, because he told us so at the beginning. In this respect, we’re converts, believers, watching a tale of the faithless as they stumble around in their blindness.
 
This is ballsy stuff, because it inverts the standard horror trope of ‘what if it’s not real?’ that is usually the staple of this kind of narrative; a series of escalating spooky events, any one of which could have a rational explanation but which cumulatively wear down the protagonist until they are not sure what’s real and what isn’t - at which point either a monster or explanation presents itself. Jacob’s Ladder does this about as well as it’s ever been done, IMO. But Candyman, like Hellraiser, is doing something quite different.
 
That should make the first half of the narrative suffer, really. We should be frustrated by the investigation Helen and Beatrce undertake, knowing as they cannot that they are stalking a legend, not the gang leader who has taken the trappings of the myth to spread fear and intimidation. But I didn’t find it to play out that way; instead, I found those scenes played out with a sense of fatalistic dread that heightened the tension, rather than dissipated it. The sure and certain knowledge that it was all going to turn horribly to shit at some point created for me an almost sickening tension; akin to the classic thriller scenes like the climax of Silence Of The Lambs, as Clarice moves blindly through the darkened cellar, stalked by the killer we know is right behind her.
 
It works, is what I’m trying to say, or, anyway, it works for me. Helen working out how the killer may have entered the victims apartment (a genuinely creepy-as-fuck notion that behind the bathroom cabinet mirror is a crawl space to the apartment next door, way to make sure no-one who lives in a towerblock ever sleeps agian, assholes), and the extended field trip to Cabrini Green drips with tension, as Helen explores the murder scene, and the space the killer must have come from. Even her epically unwise solo return to the Green that eventually leads to her assault and mugging somehow works; at least partly down to some great performances from all concerned, and another story-within-a-story that is brief but incredibly gory.
 
All that said, it’s interesting to reflect on, because even as the film textually removes doubt from the moment of the opening monologue that this is a supernatural tale, you could still read the whole movie as Helen’s psychosis. Sure, there’s no apparent root cause for her to go kill-crazy, but I like the idea that to the outside world, she is someone who researched one to many gruesome stories, and became obsessed enough to start acting them out via a series of psychotic breaks. Even the moments where Helen appears to be hypnotised by Candman fits into that; seeming to suggest her mind slipping from reality (the first occasion, when she finds herself back in the Green, a severed dog head lying in a pool of blood next to a meat cleaver, is another gore-ridden tour de force of performance, direction, and effects).
 
Though that brings us on to the vexed topic of race.
 
So, let’s start by sounding two claxons - white guy over here, talking about race; and also, white Brit talking about US race relations. Chances I say something unintetionally dumb, fairly high. Fair warning, though if/when I fuck up, please let me know - it’s the only way I’ll learn.
 
See, Candman is black. And Helen is a white woman.
 
That matters, textually, for two reasons; one involves Candyman’s origin story, and the other Helen’s exploitation of her white privilege (and, sure, class privilege also)  to first investigate The Green, and later, to help bring down a gang leader operating in the tower - about which the movie is explicit, by the way, I’m not reading that in. Helen fully calls out how gross it is that it takes a white middle class woman getting assaulted before the cops get involved (the older black cop does point out that it’s because she’s not from the Green that she feels safe pressing charges - if she’d had to live in the same tower as the man’s accomplices, she’d have had a powerful incentive for keeping her mouth shut). So in that sense, it feels like the movie understands it's playing the white saviour trope, grounding it in the reality of the extreme poverty of the Chicago projects.
 
When Helen and Beatrice, who is black, first visit Cabrini Green, they dress in smart clothes, and in doing so convince the gang that runs the tower that they are cops. In this moment, they are obviously playing on class privilege as well as Helen’s race; but again,the movie is later explicit that Helen’s whiteness is part of the equation.
 
But then we have the origin story for Candyman, and there, race is also a critical factor.
 
It turns out that, according to legend, Candyman was a black man who lived in the city at the turn of the century. He fell in love with a white woman.They had a love affair, but were eventually discovered, at which point the white menfolk tortured and murdered him, before scattering his ashes where Cabrini Green now stands.
 
The racist fear of a black man and a white woman is deeply ingrained; it's a pivotal image in the KKK-approving film Birth of a Nation, and has been referenced by Ice T, Public Enemy, and many others. Making such a relationship pivotal to the origin story of our titular monster makes sense, and follows a long tradition of including real life horrors within wider supernatural narratives.
 
But it does also mean that the central plot of the movie revolves around a white woman being stalked by a physically imposing black man.
 
And it's a seduction of a kind, albeit one with frankly rapey overtones. Candyman appears to have a hypnotic power over Helen, causing her to black out and wake up in strange places.In the finale, he commands her to surrender to him, as the price for allowing a baby to live, and when Helen aquiesses, he appears to sexually assault her with his hook.
 
This is utterly incendiary subject matter, combining one of the most powerful racist tropes with ambiguity, at best, around sexual consent. And really, I’m being gross by giving it that much leeway; there’s no difference in form between what happens to Helen and what happens to any victim of a date rape drug, or anyone who hase been forced to have sex due to intimidation or threat of violence. It’s fucking vile.
 
It does also highlight the unanswered mystery at the heart of the story; why does Candyman do what he does? Why does he kill?
 
Or, outside of the events of this movie, does he kill at all? After all, in his opening monologue and later in the film he claims to be rumour, to not actually ‘be’. So one reading is that he doesn't kill, but instead becomes attached to murders committed in the area by virtue of the legend. Until Helen solves a ‘Candyman’ murder, putting the myth in doubt.
 
So in one sense, his motives are clear; by killing and framing Helen for the murders before bringing her back to the Green to die, he can reignite the legend. But the question underlying that is why kill at all, and to it's great credit, the movie leaves that question to the imagination of its audience, not providing any answers.
 
What the film does imply, however, is that the ability to become a legend is there for anyone, under the right circumstances. And so it is that when Helen does surrender, only to find herself in the bonfire with Candyman and the baby, she is able, through no small suffering on her own part, to supplant the Candyman image and become a legendary monster in her own right (in a for-the-ages closing scene when her weeping ex-husband says her name five times into the mirror).
 
Still, for all that it’s clear that the movie is aware of the valences of its subject matter, I still found some of the handling of race… difficult, especially in the final scenes when the residents of the Green congregate to burn the bonfire, seemingly knowing it contains the Candyman; and later show up en mass at Helen’s funeral, to drop his hook into her grave. It felt uncomfortable to me, this group of almost exclusively black people behaving in such odd group behaviour, and it’s one of the few moments where I feel like the storytelling comes just a little loose; are they under some form of mass hypnosis? Is the bonfire an annual Gren tradition, part of the legend? Absent that, it came across to me a little odd - an irrational group behaviour that seemed to render the Green residents ‘other’, when the movie had elsewhere taken such pains to humanise those characters.
 
Still and all, I think Candyman hold up exceptionally well, as a horror story with an underpinning as traditional as the form that manages to make a unique film experience. And spawned its own urban legend that fired childhood imagination.
 
No mean feat.
 
KP
14/12/19
 
PS - Gingernuts regular George Danil Lea and I discuss this fim in some detail here.

Kit Power has launched an IndieGoGo campaign for My Life In Horror Volume One! My Life In Horror Volume One!, A collected volume of his My Life in Horror essays, where every single essay has been fully revised, expanded, and will be professionally edited for this edition. The essays themselves have been rearranged to be presented in the order in which he first experienced the subjects. This volume will represent the definitive edition of this work, creating a book that serves as both a passionate appreciation of the works of horror that have shaped his life and as a memoir of my development as a writer.

This is a project that I am passionate about, Kit is an amazing author, and these essays have been a highlight of my time running Ginger Nuts of Horror. With that in mind, I would like to sweeten the deal. With Kit's permission, I would like to offer up to prizes available to two lucky people who back this project from the paperback up perk.

Prize one
Two signed books from my personal limited edition collection, Brian Keene's A Little Silver Book of Streetwise Stories, (valued at around $100) and Night of the Crabs from Guy N Smith (no idea of the value as the publisher went of business before these books went on sale to the public)

Prize Two 

One year's free advertising on Ginger Nuts of Horror on one of our high visited pages. The advert will appear on all articles published to that page and backed up with a weekly social media advert valued at £80.

I am determined to see this project become fully financed, so please, consider supporting Kit, even a £1 ​pledge just to support will edge this amazing book to completion. And if you can't afford this, then please share this article far and wide by using the social media buttons to the left.

To support Kit's project follow this link 

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/my-life-in-horror-volume-one/x/6879211#/