“Helen Lyle was out here looking for Candyman. I say she found him…”

Tickets are now on sale for Nia DaCosta‘s Candyman, which is headed to theaters in just over one week on August 27, 2021. While you wait, a new clip from the new movie has been unleashed today, and this one is particularly interesting because it represents the first time the movie’s marketing has made mention of the original film’s protagonist, Helen Lyle.

Helen Lyle was of course played by Virginia Madsen in Bernard Rose’s Candyman, a woman writing a thesis on the Candyman legend who eventually comes face-to-face with the man himself. Rose’s film is something of a love story between Tony Todd’s Candyman and Madsen’s Helen Lyle, with Lyle ultimately becoming a new mythical monster at the end of the film.

In this new clip from Nia DaCosta’s Candyman, Colman Domingo‘s Burke explains the Candyman legend to Yahya Abdul-Mateen II‘s Anthony McCoy, relaying the story of Sherman Fields, one of the many “Candyman” figures who make up the “whole damn hive.” Anthony, whose name you may recall, was the baby from the first film that almost died in a fiery blaze.

Anthony was ultimately saved, however, by Helen Lyle…

In Candyman, co-written by Jordan Peele, “For as long as residents can remember, the housing projects of Chicago’s Cabrini Green neighborhood were terrorized by a word-of-mouth ghost story about a supernatural killer with a hook for a hand, easily summoned by those daring to repeat his name five times into a mirror. In present day, a decade after the last of the Cabrini towers were torn down, visual artist Anthony McCoy (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) and his girlfriend, gallery director Brianna Cartwright (Teyonah Parris), move into a luxury loft condo in Cabrini, now gentrified beyond recognition and inhabited by upwardly mobile millennials.”

“With Anthony’s painting career on the brink of stalling, a chance encounter with a Cabrini Green old-timer (Colman Domingo) exposes Anthony to the tragically horrific nature of the true story behind Candyman. Anxious to maintain his status in the Chicago art world, Anthony begins to explore these macabre details in his studio as fresh grist for paintings, unknowingly opening a door to a complex past that unravels his own sanity and unleashes a terrifyingly viral wave of violence that puts him on a collision course with destiny.”

Michael Hargrove as Sherman Fields in Candyman, directed by Nia DaCosta.