Candyman's Real Horror: American Public Housing Policy

Like its 1992 predecessor, the Jordan Peele-produced Candyman places Cabrini-Green at the center of its story, making the real-life demise of the complex "the fundamental origin story of the film’s vengeful spirit." Brentin Mock describes the history and trauma that informs the film, which blends supernatural terror with extremely real horrors of neglected public housing projects and bad housing policy. 

While the slasher in the film–"the apparition of a former Cabrini-Green resident who was killed by police in the 1970s"–is very real, writes Mock, gentrification is "the force that conjured it." Cabrini-Green's mostly Black residents "could live in few other neighborhoods in Chicago, due to racial covenants, job discrimination and lack of income." At the same time, "it was mostly Black people there who were first frozen out of their homes, due to the city’s withdrawal of services, and then driven out when the city decided Cabrini-Green had become too much of a blight" and had to be demolished. Today, the destruction of Cabrini-Green is "considered one of the largest losses of affordable housing stock in U.S. history."

This cruel paradox is explained with brevity in the film by Teyonah Parris's character, Brianna: "White people built the ghetto and then erased it when they realized they built the ghetto." Candyman, who shows up in mirrors when summoned, "is a reflection of destruction that white people have long visited upon Black people," says Mock, and the lingering problems that they are afraid to name.