In Jordan Peele and Nia DaCosta’s 2021 reimagining of Candyman, the monster is not just the hook-handed ghost who haunts Chicago’s Cabrini-Green. The monster is the story; who gets to tell it, who gets to rewrite it, and who is forced to live inside its reflection every day.
For those of us who work in criminal justice reform, this film is not just horror.
It’s an uneasy, too-familiar mirror.
The Real Ghosts in the Hallway
In Candyman, the ghost story is not an urban legend invented for cheap thrills.
It’s rooted in the real violence inflicted on Black communities by systems that erase, relocate, or silence them when they become inconvenient. Cabrini-Green was once a vibrant community that was starved of resources, stigmatized as dangerous, and eventually gentrified out of existence, except for the ghost stories.
As a criminal justice advocate, I see echoes of this every day. Families who live in housing projects neglected by the same governments that over-police them. Neighborhoods treated as cautionary tales when they are convenient, and invisible when they need investment. Young men who become “monsters” the moment a mugshot is published; their humanity exiled to the same broken mirrors Candyman crawls through.
Who Controls the Narrative?
One of the most haunting elements of Peele’s Candyman is its obsession with art; how violence becomes legend, how trauma becomes a story we repackage and sell. The protagonist, Anthony, is drawn to the story of Candyman because he wants to capture the truth. But the truth keeps shifting. In the film, each iteration of Candyman is another Black man brutalized by the system; from Daniel Robitaille, the original Candyman lynched for loving a white woman, to Sherman Fields, a man killed by police for the crime of handing out candy.
For those fighting to reform our carceral system, this feels deeply personal. We see how narratives of “crime” and “criminals” shape policy, policing, and public perception. It’s easy to sell fear of “the hood.” It’s easy to make the monster Black and the hero the system that claims to protect us.
But what happens when the system is the real monster?
The Reflection That Stares Back
What Peele and DaCosta do brilliantly is remind us that Candyman is not just an avenging spirit. He is a reflection of a wound that never closes. He is rage that has nowhere else to go. He is what happens when a community’s story is buried and only the ghosts remain to tell it.
As a criminal justice advocate, I think about how many “Candymen” are living among us; men and women who become horror stories when it’s convenient, then discarded and forgotten. Our work is to break the mirror. To ask why it’s cracked in the first place.
To stop repeating the same stories that keep producing more ghosts.
Say His Name — and Listen
The film’s final moments are a visceral reminder: Say his name. Not just Candyman, but the names of the real people lost to state violence: George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Rekia Boyd, Laquan McDonald. Names that should not be folklore, but living testaments to the work we still have to do.
For those of us in this fight, Candyman is more than a horror movie. It’s a grim reminder that if we don’t face what’s in the mirror, the ghost will always come back.
And maybe, just maybe, he should until we learn to see him not as a monster, but as our reflection.
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