Chicago’s haunting Cabrini-Green legacy inspired director Nia DaCosta’s ‘Candyman.’ ‘We knew we wanted to shift that perspective completely.’

On the morning of Oct. 13, 1992, 7-year-old Dantrell Davis was walking to school with his mother when a gang member’s stray bullet struck and killed the boy on the grounds of the Cabrini-Green public housing projects.

The night before, a few blocks away at the Piper’s Alley theater on North Avenue — new then, gone now — the Chicago International Film Festival premiered a new horror film set largely in Cabrini-Green.

“Candyman” was not yet the stuff of franchises and reboots and adolescent dares to say it out loud five times in front of a mirror. The commercially successful shocker imagined the white-on-Black torture, grotesque death and vengeful afterlife of the title character, played by Tony Todd, destined to haunt the Chicago Housing Authority’s most conspicuous nightmare.

In the Chicago Reader, Steve Bogira wrote about the 1987 murder of Ruthie Mae McCoy in a story titled “They Came in Through the Bathroom Mirror.” Years later Bogira wrote about how, in his view and the view of others, “Candyman” purloined bits of that news story.

Chicago has lived in so many shadows, for so long. One is the legacy of the Cabrini-Green towers, now home to several patchwork blocks including some mixed-income housing; a Target; a lot of other retail; shiny, pricey condos; and a wide, expectant swath of bulldozed emptiness, waiting for developers.

That’s one shadow. Another is the persistent, undeniable Chicago-ness of “Candyman.”

There’s a new version out now, initiated by “Get Out” and “Us” powerhouse Jordan Peele and his Monkeypaw Productions producing partner Ian Cooper. The director and co-writer is Nia DaCosta, currently shooting her third and biggest feature, “The Marvels,” in London.

Growing up in New York City, DaCosta, 31, heard about the Candyman legend years before she saw the ‘92 film.

“Kids used to say, ‘Oh, yeah, Candyman lives over there, in the projects,” DaCosta, 31, told me in a recent Zoom interview. When she caught up with it a few years later, she said, “What I remember thinking was: Oh! There are Black people in this movie! And the villain is Black, and that’s really cool!”

And then? “Then you watch it again as an adult, and it’s a very interesting perspective from which to pursue this story.” The white University of Chicago-Illinois graduate student played by Virginia Madsen (who’s excellent, as is Kasi Lemmons as her Black research colleague) serves as the audience identification figure, daring the projects in pursuit of Candyman stories for her thesis on urban folklore. Her lens is our lens.

“We knew we wanted to shift that perspective completely,” DaCosta said, noting that she admires a lot about the original.

“What’s scary about the first 40 minutes of the first movie? Before Candyman shows up? Public housing,” said Ben Austen, author of “High-Risers: Cabrini-Green and the Fate of American Public Housing.” The ‘92 “Candyman,” he said, “interrogates that point in a really interesting way. For me, one of the most amazing scenes is when Helen walks into that public bathroom in Cabrini-Green. This is the scariest place you could imagine in 1992 — a public bathroom in public housing. And then, in walks these guys who aren’t Candyman, but who are appropriating the myth.”

Writer-director Bernard Rose filmed six days in Chicago for “Candyman.” It was enough to capture some authentically stark locations before heading back to the soundstages of Hollywood. The story itself, including the Candyman character, came from Clive Barker’s 1985 short story “The Forbidden,” set in a Liverpool, England, council estate.

“Walking in its drear canyons,” Barker wrote, “passing through its grimy corridors from one grey concrete village to the next, there was little to seduce the eye or stimulate the imagination.” Clearly Barker was wrong on that point. In Merseyside or the Near North Side, Candyman’s territory has stimulated the collective horror imagination plenty.

The new “Candyman” tackles the question of who gets to tell the stories, and how to deal with the looming phantom presence of Cabrini-Green itself.

DaCosta and company shot their version entirely in Chicago in 2019. Earlier drafts of the script by Peele and Win Rosenfeld mentioned Cabrini-Green only in passing. When DaCosta first met with Peele and Peele’s Monkeypaw producing partner Ian Cooper, she talked about scouting locations, some casting ideas, and how to explore the legacy of Cabrini-Green while activating the story of Anthony McCoy, the struggling Chicago artist played by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, and his curator partner Brianna Cartwright, played by Teyonah Parris.

First Peele and Cooper hired DaCosta to direct. Then they hired her to rewrite the script. DaCosta knew early on she wanted to create, with her design collaborators, a specific, sleek, usefully eerie evocation of the contemporary Chicago art scene, seen through the eyes of characters eager to carve out an artistic future for themselves.

Several Chicago visual artists joined the “Candyman” project, creating the main character’s paintings, which become increasingly terrifying as the spirit of Candyman inhabits his being.

“There’s a lot of movies and TV shows with artwork in them, and a lot of the time they’re just prints — decoration,” said recent School of the Art Institute graduate Cameron Spratley, hired to create artist McCoy’s early work. “But so many Chicago artists contributed to this movie.” The producers brought Spratley out to Chicago from Virginia and rented him a studio for two months to paint. Spratley now lives in Wicker Park and is represented by the M. LeBlanc gallery in Logan Square.

While different artists filled the movie’s canvases, DaCosta had her eye on the broader canvas of Chicago itself. Several scenes were filmed in the fenced-off 1942 Cabrini row houses, the only remnants of the public housing project. Much of the baked-in Chicago-ness of the new “Candyman” is on the screen; this is the first feature film, for example, to shoot on location inside the Museum of Contemporary Art.

Earlier this year, a terrific ‘Candyman” teaser trailer showcasing the work of Chicago’s Manual Cinema “cine-puppetry” wizards laid out the Candyman lore in high style. For the film itself, Manual Cinema created flashbacks, similar to the 2020 trailer footage, and worked on the main title sequence.

The cumulative visual impression of the new “Candyman” suggests a world defined by steel, glass and telltale reflective surfaces. DaCosta isn’t afraid to step back and observe extreme moments of bloodletting in long shots dominated by a charged negative space. Also, “I like a nice slow zoom lens,” she said. “It plays into my love of measured, creeping anxiety … I like the juxtaposition of beautiful places where terrible things can happen.”

DaCosta once referred to the ‘92 “Candyman” as a horror film that’s also a “weird idiosyncratic art movie.” The same holds true with her own version, if not more so. DaCosta fought for her ideas of how a new “Candyman” could dig into Chicago and America in 2019 and, now that the movie’s finally out, albeit out in a pandemic that won’t quit, in late summer 2021. Mistrust of the police; displacement of neighborhoods; a city’s history, however awful, plowed under by money and ambition: it’s all in there. Will people expecting something a little less adventurous and a little more supergory respond to it?

Watching the new “Candyman” you can imagine the Universal studio brass wondering why DaCosta couldn’t simply concentrate on the eviscerations. Of which there are several. But still.

“Jordan protected me from a lot,” she said. “He’s the reason why (Universal) came up with the money, and then he hired me, thankfully, and made it so I could put my head down and do the work. It’s really cool someone like Jordan Peele exists, and has the career he has. And right now there are so many Black filmmakers working in every genre. It’s liberating.”

DaCosta’s debut feature, “Little Woods” starring Tessa Thompson and Lily James, cost less than $1 million to write, direct and make enough of an impression at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival in New York City to get on Peele’s radar. She enjoyed considerable freedom on that project. “And sometimes, with more money and more support, you also get more voices trying to create something that maybe you don’t want to create.”

As for “The Marvels,” headlined by Brie Larson and “Candyman” female lead Parris, most recently of “WandaVision,” the experience is proving to be a gratifying surprise. She chooses her words carefully on the topic of autonomy, while acknowledging she “has a lot more of it” on “The Marvels” than she did on “Candyman.”

But she understands the reasons. “You’ve got the expectations created by the original ‘Candyman,’ plus Jordan Peele and his huge success with ‘Get Out’ and ‘Us’ — that’s a lot of things people want you to answer to,” she said, smiling. What’s a filmmaker to do?

Then she answered that unspoken question. “All I can do is to make the most compelling and most honest work I can. That’s the only way to go.”

‘Candyman’ is now playing in theaters. Streaming premiere TBA.

The 1992 version of “Candyman” is widely available ($3.99 on Amazon Prime, YouTube and other streaming platforms).

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

mjphillips@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @phillipstribune

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