Movies
Helen Lyle Returns in This Year’s ‘Candyman’! [Exclusive]
“It was always you, Helen. It was always you.”
In Candyman, an adaptation of Clive Barker‘s story that was directed by Bernard Rose, Virginia Madsen plays Helen Lyle, a Chicago grad student who becomes obsessed with a Cabrini Green-set urban legend about a spirit who appears when his name is said into a mirror five times. With a hook in the place of one of his hands, Candyman torments Helen, who eventually dies in a fire and becomes her own urban myth.
The new Candyman, directed by Nia DaCosta, allegedly takes place after the events in the 1992 classic. While Tony Todd‘s Candyman does seemingly play a role, we’re told that one of the main catalysts is Helen Lyle. Yup, that Helen Lyle.
While we’re unsure if Madsen makes any kind of appearance, Bloody Disgusting was able to confirm that Cassie Kramer has taken over the role of Helen Lyle and will star in the spiritual sequel set for release on June 12, 2020.
Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (Us, Aquaman) leads the cast, and Jordan Peele (Get Out, Us) co-wrote the script, which is described as a “spiritual sequel” to the original classic. The sequel returns to the neighborhood where the legend began: the now-gentrified section of Chicago where the Cabrini-Green housing projects once stood.
Thanks to Bloody reader Dorin Dickerson for bringing this to my attention!
Virginia Madsen as Helen Lyle in Candyman (1992)
Cassie Kramer in Happy Hour
Universal has been having a hell of a time getting their Universal Monsters brand back on a better path in the wake of the Dark Universe collapsing, with four movies thus far released in the years since The Mummy attempted to get that interconnected universe off the ground.
First was Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man, to date the only post-Mummy hit for the Universal Monsters, followed by The Last Voyage of the Demeter, Renfield, and now Abigail. The latter three films have attempted to bring Dracula back to the screen in fresh ways, but both Demeter and Renfield severely underperformed at the box office. And while Abigail is a far better vampire movie than those two, it’s unfortunately also struggling to turn a profit.
Where does the Universal Monsters brand go from here? The good news is that Universal and Blumhouse have once again enlisted the help of Leigh Whannell for their upcoming Wolf Man reboot, which is howling its way into theaters in January 2025. This is good news, of course, because Whannell’s Invisible Man was the best – and certainly most profitable – of the post-Dark Universe movies that Universal has been able to conjure up. The film ended its worldwide run with $144 million back in 2020, a massive win considering the $7 million budget.
Given the film was such a success, you may wondering why The Invisible Man 2 hasn’t come along in these past four years. But the wait for that sequel may be coming to an end.
Speaking with the Happy Sad Confused podcast this week, The Invisible Man star Elisabeth Moss notes that she feels “very good” about the sequel’s development at this point in time.
“Blumhouse and my production company [Love & Squalor Pictures]… we are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” Moss updates this week. “And I feel very good about it.”
She adds, “We are very much intent on continuing that story.”
At the end of the 2020 movie, Elisabeth Moss’s heroine Cecilia Kass uses her stalker’s high-tech invisibility suit to kill him, now in possession of the technology that ruined her life.
Stay tuned for more on The Invisible Man 2 as we learn it.
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