As kids, there were a couple of things we didn’t do. We never talked back to parents (Lord help you if you did), never walked into a room of adults without speaking to every single one of them, and we didn’t even think of leaving the dinner table without eating every ounce of food in front of us. The more I think about it, there were many things we knew not to do as kids. But at the very top of this list was never, ever uttering his name. We never said that name in broad daylight, at night, in a group of friends, or in private. Saying it in a mirror was asking for a death sentence, so anyone who spoke the first syllable was asking for an ex-communication that would make John Wick envious. 

Candyman scared us in a way no other boogeyman did. Freddy Krueger was hilarious, Jason Voorhees was deadly but dumb, and Michael Myers seemingly only cared about his relatives or those close to them. Candyman felt real. Sure, this guy with a hook for a hand who summoned bees at the drop of a dime might sound silly, but he inspired an innate sense of dread and fear in my friends that no other ghoul or terror ever did. About 20 years after the first film’s release, I figured out why Tony Todd’s horror icon stuck such a nerve: Candyman, both the character and the film, acknowledged Black people in a way other horror franchises didn’t, and some still don’t. 

For Candyman, representation went beyond its title character. Black people existed in the world of Candyman as three-dimensional characters as opposed to knife or machete fodder. By creating a world that felt real for Black horror fans with characters they related to, Bernard Rose’s landmark flick made the horror that much scarier for audiences resigned to spectating on the sidelines. 

Horror doesn’t work if the audience can’t relate. A Nightmare on Elm Street works because sleeping and dreaming are universal for those of us who aren’t narcoleptics. Any franchise not about Freddy Krueger creates familiarity through cast, settings, and the usual things we think about when watching a movie. Unfortunately, especially throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Black people were few and far between. Every now and then, we got a Kinkaid in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 or, my personal favorite, Joel in Scream 2, but the pickings were slim. As a result, the fear never wholly landed with the kids I knew because those movies weren’t about us. Even Freddy, once the scourge of the playground, turned into a laughingstock the older we got because he never seemed interested in anyone with melanin. 

There is tons of digital ink spilled over the past several years about the importance of seeing yourself in the media you consume. That rings just as true in horror. Adequate representation means you’re a whole person with hopes and dreams instead of a token background character destined for body count status. Not for nothing, but when the prevailing thought in a community is that anyone who looks like them will die first with little to no character development, it’s harder to make them fans of the genre. 

That’s why Candyman was, and remains, a revelation for an entire community. Even if we didn’t grow up in Cabrini Green or a place that looked like Cabrini Green, we recognized its inhabitants. Candyman has race at its core, but it doesn’t go out of its way to highlight the majority Black cast. Candyman succeeds because it treats its setting and its characters as standard rather than “other.” Just like Friday the 13th, Halloween, and any other franchise before it, Candyman focuses on relatable people and drops us into their day-to-day. Despite its narrative weirdness, that meant the boogeyman’s victims were also Black and brown. But the film spends enough time with them for their deaths to matter. What mattered the most to the kids I knew then and the adults I know today was seeing legitimate fear on the faces of people who looked like us. 

Who is scared, and why, matters just as much as who is doing the scaring. As one of the few Black horror icons, Candyman shook us like no one before and no one since. In an era where slashers were jokes, Candyman was dead serious. Even his oh so tragic backstory steeped in racism didn’t make him less threatening to people who empathized. Keeping it all the way real, Tony Todd has a lot to do with that. His voice and menacing presence lent Candyman a gravity his counterparts lacked. But his mere existence resonated with an underserved audience looking for anything to latch onto. Todd played the character with elegance and romance, two words typically not associated with horror villains, much less Black ones. He seduced us the same way he did his victims. And all because they dared to say his name.  

As kids, we talked about ways to defeat movie monsters. Silly, but hey, kids get to be that way. While we ran through a list of names that all seemed beatable, the world stopped when Candyman’s name came up. For us, there was no way to defeat him because that was the one movie where we were more than mere observers in someone else’s narrative. Candyman acknowledged our existence either as victims or bystanders. As kids in 1992 or as adults in 2021, that’s thrilling and terrifying all at once. 

When no one else saw us, the man with the hook and the bees in his mouth did. That’s why when it comes to things not to do as an adult, like getting behind on bills or lying to your significant other, saying his name is still at the tippy top of the list. And that’s saying something.