After months of studio silence following countless COVID-related delays, Candyman director Nia DaCosta sat down with Shadow and Act to discuss the exclusive clip provided to the outlet. Check out their conversation — and the clip — below!
Juneteenth is currently on the forefront of American minds. In many cases, that's because the federal decision to make the day an official holiday continues to ignore legislation that will actually help Black communities. Because this is such an ever-present trend, it's no surprise that these themes already existed in Nia DaCosta's Candyman well before the Juneteenth conversations kicked off this year.
Still though, DaCosta described a kind of "bittersweet hope" in Candyman. She noted further that "horror is a really effective tool when it comes to telling stories that impact us on a social level."
Candyman will finally hit North American theaters August 27th, 2021 after multiple delays. The film's stars include Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Teyonah Parris, Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, Colman Domingo and more, with Nia DaCosta acting as director and co-writer alongside Jordan Peele and Win Rosenfield.
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Here's Universal's official synopsis of Candyman:
For as long as the 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 the present day, a decade after the last of the Cabrini towers were torn down, a visual artist named Anthony McCoy and his girlfriend, an art gallery director named Brianna Cartwright, moved into a luxurious loft condo in Cabrini, now gentrified beyond recognition and inhabited by the upwardly mobile millennials. With Anthony's painting career on the brink of stalling, a chance encounter with a Cabrini Green old-timer exposes Anthony to the tragically horrific nature of the true story behind the 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.
