Candyman At MCM: Everything We Learned At Tony Todd’s Panel

This week Arrow Video unleashes a freshly restored Candyman on Blu-Ray. The disc, as always with Arrow Video releases, is filled to bursting with exclusive content and is a must for collectors everywhere. Released in 1992, the film saw student Helen (Virginia Madsen) investigate the urban legend of The Candyman (Tony Todd) for her college thesis. Along the way, she discovers that he might be much more real than first thought.

As chance would have it, Tony Todd was in London this weekend attending MCM Comic Con at the Excel London. The event gave fans a chance to interact with the man infamous for playing the hook-handed killer, though the highlight was a special panel on the main stage. The panel was hosted by Kim Newman and saw Todd joined by Candyman‘s wirter and director, Bernard Rose. During the forty-five minutes of stage time, the pair shared a plethora of information about the cult classic. Here are some of the highlights:

Bernard On Which Book of Blood the Film was Originally Meant to be

I was sent a project to do, ‘In the Flesh’, it was another story in the Books of Blood. It was proposed to me as a potential project. I thought it would be very difficult to do. It’s set in a prison, almost entirely in the dark. Certainly in that era – in this day and age when HDR you can do something in complete darkness – but back then it wasn’t something you could capture. Darkness is something that is very hard to replicate on screen because obviously it’s never completely black, it’s grey. So I thought this idea wouldn’t really work. I was sent the full book and the next story is ‘The Forbidden’. I thought, ‘now that would make a good film!’ I met Clive Barker while he was shooting Nightbreed and called him up to ask him about doing The Forbidden as a film, and he said ‘sure’. The next week I pitched it to Steve Golin at Propaganda Films and he bought it on the spot.

Bernard On Relocating the Action from Liverpool to Chicago

At the time both Clive and myself were in the process of moving from the UK to America. I think both of us were like, ‘let’s make it American.’ I then went to Chicago to do some research. I was looking for housing projects and the first one they showed me was Cabrini Green. It was this infamous housing project on the gold coast of Chicago. When I went around it, the whole history of the story came alive, changing the character and bringing in the back story all came from there.

Tony Todd On Cabrini Green

Cabrini Green is probably the most notorious housing project, not just in America, in the world. They literally had five towers, seven different gangs and a store. Residents were told to get their supplies before ten in the morning otherwise it was no mans land. Somehow we survived shooting there. [To Bernard] You told me later that we actually had police snipers above and beyond the protection of the gang members. You even put a few gang members in the film. Not everybody there is corrupt. Some people are there because they can’t afford to be anywhere else. That’s why the store is there. Most of them are mothers on their own who are trying to keep their sons on the straight and narrow. I think one of the positive things that came from shooting there is that Candyman became somewhat of a folklore hero for some of them.

Tony Todd On Getting the Part

When my agent originally told me about a film called Candyman I thought maybe they were talking about a Sammy Davis Jr story – I’m a little too tall for that. But then my agent told me that the director had seen my work in Platoon, my very first film, and picked me out for the role.

Tony Todd On Preparing for the Film

Virginia and I did fencing, horse-back riding and ballroom dancing to get into the atmosphere for the piece.

Tony and Bernard on Candyman Not Being a Monster

Bernard: I think what was good about the film, and what it really fed on, was using the horror genre as a vehicle for social commentary. It’s now becoming something that people acknowledge more. I think when it first came out people didn’t really get that, or appreciate that.

Tony: They wanted a monster movie and that is certainly something that he is not in the literal sense.

Bernard: No he’s not a monster at all. He’s a victim of a lynching.

Tony: Something that somehow passes by people sometimes.

Tony and Bernard on the Hidden Depths of Candyman

Bernard: In the book he’s a multi-coloured scarecrow kind of character. I think one of the things that is interesting about it is that people say, ‘well Get Out has a black lead’. But the black lead in Get Out is the hero. He’s not the villain. The villains are all white people in that film. Tony remains the only one, and Candyman isn’t strictly the villain, he’s much more the hero. Before I was doing the film, a lot of people were nervous about doing it. They were saying ‘you shouldn’t do that, its wrong.’ I said ‘what do you mean it’s wrong? Are you telling me a black man can’t play Dracula or Frankenstein?’ What they were saying was fundamentally wrong because the way these movies work is that there is a weird transference that happens where the boogieman of a horror film becomes the hero. The ruthless destructive force that they represent is something that people feel intensely attracted too. The victims are always interchangeable, but the boogieman figure is always the same. In a way they always have sympathetic back stories, Phantom of the Opera, Hunchback of Notre Dame, Frankenstein’s Monster, even Dracula, they all have things that make you understand their pain and their unhappiness and their exclusion from society.

Tony on Getting into Character

I was contracted to be there the whole time. I was there in Chicago when they were shooting there, even though I didn’t film in Chicago. I had to work out my own backstory because he’s a ghost, I had to come up with things to ground him in reality. I did all kinds of sensory work. He had his favourite colours, his favourite sounds, things that I could latch onto. He’s an autumn character.

Tony and Bernard On the Bees

Tony: The bees were all real. I wasn’t so happy about it at the time, but now, all these years later I’m proud we used actual bees.

Bernard: CGI bees suck! They’ll be in the perfect place. These bees were on their own time.

Tony: They would apply a Queen bee pheromone to keep the soldier bees attracted to me. For the first time in my life, I felt what real love was, I couldn’t shake them off.

Bernard On the New Blu-ray Release

Bernard Rose: Me and DP Anthony B. Richmond spent a whole week re-grading the movie for the Blu-ray release. Honestly, previous video transfers sucked. I think it’s a problem in general with nineties video transfers. They were done to the specs of VHS which means there’s no black level. The colours were much too warm, there was no contrast. The scene at the end with Tony looked like it was shot in the day on VHS. Now there’s so much we can do we’ve tried to recreate the look of the original print. We haven’t digitally fucked with it, but it now looks more like how it looked at the 1992 premiere. It’s way superior to all other versions.

Tony and Bernard On Their Future Projects

Bernard: I’m doing a couple of genre films in the UK. The deals aren’t done yet so I can’t share anything. Even the thing I just finished which I’ve been working on for two years, which is kind of an epic, I’m not really allowed to talk about it. What I will say is it was entirely shot in Japan, it’s a samurai picture and it’s in Japanese.

Tony: There’s Death House. Death House came about from Gunnar Hansen, a script that he wrote before he sadly passed away. I can’t speak for everybody, but the reason I got on board was because Gunnar was a friend if mine. It was his lifelong wish to get this film made. I’m not sure where it’s at with UK distributors, but I hope it gets into your hands soon. To have a load of people from the horror world devoting both their time and services to this film speaks to how fondly everyone thought of Gunnar. I’ve also just done a pilot for a show called Leap of Faith which Amazon are looking at, and I’m also working on a horror reality show.

Candyman is available to buy on Blu-Ray through Arrow Video now.