The Horror Pod Class: Nia DaCosta’s Candyman
Tyler Welcome to Episode 132 of the Horror Pod Class. My name is Tyler Unsell and by day I am a just an ordinary teacher but by night I transform to an ordinary teacher who likes to talk about spooky shit. I am joined tonight as I am most nights by The cohostest with the mostest. The sagacious skeleton I know…Orrin Grey. What have you been up to since we last appeared here man?
What Have We Been Watching/Reading
Tyler: Double Walker, Last Survivors, etc…
Dark Corners of the Web:
Free Library
https://openlibrary.org/books/OL2726631M/In_the_flesh
The Forbidden
In The Flesh
Essential Question: What can Nia DaCosta’s Candyman tell us about Generational Trauma.
IMDB Summary: A sequel to the horror film Candyman (1992) that returns to the now-gentrified Chicago neighborhood where the legend began.
Top cast
- as Billy
- (as Rodney L. Jones III)
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/nielaorr/candyman-movie-review-jordan-peele-nia-dacosta
“It would be too easy to reduce Burke’s desecration of Anthony’s body as Black on Black violence. But it’s more than that, it’s the act of taking that narrative and controlling it — it’s violence as a means of revolution, hideous it may be. Burke is literally forcing Anthony to confront the history and pain he thought was separate from him and become a part of it, a part of the hive.”
From: Richard Newby
Horror has always been political, best when it lets images and characters and sonic dimensions speak to a certain work’s integral concerns. But Candyman moves in a way that speaks to this moment in both Black filmmaking in Hollywood and the so-called “prestige” horror boom, in which its creators can’t find a political message they won’t hit you over the head with until you’re as bloody and begging for release as the characters onscreen. If the original heaves and breathes with ripe contradictions and precise aesthetic compositions, DaCosta’s sputters and fizzles.
From: Angelica Jade Bastién at https://www.vulture.com/article/candyman-2021-movie-review-nia-dacosta-jordan-peele.html
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https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/10/candyman-horror-movie-black-pain/619825/
2 Movies that are similar
Tyler: Velvet Buzzsaw, The Purge: Election Year
Orrin: Black Christmas (2019), Wes Craven’s New Nightmare
Sean:
Anonymous Letterboxd Users Who Missed the Point
This movie was racist. In like every conversation, they brought up white people. Not to mention this entire movie made white people look like the enemies. Never understood why movies with black actors, they always have to bring up the white race. It’s annoying. Just watch the original Candyman movie. That’s a lot better.
Next Week: Doctor X (1932)
Tyler has been the editor in chief of Signal Horizon since its conception. He is also the Director of Monsters 101 at Truman State University a class that pairs horror movie criticism with survival skills to help middle and high school students learn critical thinking. When he is not watching, teaching or thinking about horror he is the Director of Debate and Forensics at a high school in Kansas City, Missouri.