WYRD CANDY

Here we are again, Gravehounds, Halloween on the way at last. 2026 was a landmark year as far as global heat goes, and much like the ever sweltering protagonist of Lovecraft and Barlow’s “Till A’ the Seas” we have burned at the behest of an increasingly wounded planet. October has been cooler so far, but just as bleak. Samhain is a cornerstone of my calendar, as well as a time of rare celebration for those who seek the Barghest Wyrd among the otherwise icy shadows. A perfect time to look deep into my canine void god’s flash bang eye at all the abundant horror that the silver screen can provide.

Many who draw parallels between that Providence born author’s full body of published work and any number of fictional properties seem content to stop at the bestiary he created. Games, films and comics, novellas and television serials. His work is influential, true, but nowhere near as formalised a cosmology as most assume. In fact, anyone who infers that the creation and propagation of the Cthulhu Mythos was deliberate branding by him does so in error. Because that designation, used to codify something warped and disjointed while making it easier to publish, was in fact the later creation of August Derleth instead.

I do love a Halloween project here at The Accelerated Chaote though, so with that in mind it is time to point a bony finger at media that, in my opinion at least, could be seen as a natural offshoot of the underlying themes within Lovecraft’s oeuvre. This is not the usual retread of obviously Old One friendly films, and there will be no talk of groping tentacles or stale fish. Cosmicism will be less obviously represented, as will some genuinely great examples such as The Thing, Prince of Darkness and In The Mouth of Madness. My status as a John Carpenter fanboy not withstanding, we will be going for deeper, more abstract cuts.

    'Hmm... poor Candyman. Her father executed a terrible revenge. He paid a pack of brutal hooligans to do the deed. They chased Candyman through the town to Cabrini Green, where they proceeded to saw off his right hand with a rusty blade. And no one came to his aid. For this was just the beginning of his ordeal. Nearby there was an apiary. Dozens of hives, filled with hungry bees. They smashed the hives and stole the honeycomb and smeared it over his prone, naked body. Candyman was stung to death by the bees. They burned his body on a giant pyre and then scattered his ashes over Cabrini Green.' [1]

So we start this possibly annual tradition with a personal favourite of mine, one which I view in a very different way to much of its audience. A masterpiece of pre-Millenial horror, the original 1992 Candyman weaves conventional slasher scares around an almost hypnotic, dreamlike and alienated narrative. Following the exploits of a murderous urban legend in a damn fine coat, the movie’s namesake is surprisingly reluctant to show himself at first. Lingering glimpses in the background. lustful sentences within otherwise derelict buildings. The hum of bees as the characters stumble ever onwards towards their apportioned doom.

This reticence to commit works in the film’s favour, as does its slower, deliberate pacing. The formulaic, if striking, supernatural killer unites those who have heard his name, be it the graduate student looking for fodder for her university paper or the tempestuous inhabitants of the 1990’s Chicago housing projects. All are called to echo his bloody deeds through rumour and tall tales. He is tangible in absentia, an idea spray-painted on tenement walls. And here lies the first of many eldritch echoes which won Clive Barker and Bernard Rose’s malevolent mirror monster a spot on this Samhain project.

Ghosts as purely supernatural entities are rarely mentioned in such terms within the more pseudo-scientifically grounded narratives of Lovecraft’s solo output. In fact great effort is expended to obfuscate the true nature of what hides in the shadows, though as is seen in The Thing on the Doorstep and perhaps The Evil Clergyman he does allow for scenarios where spirits move freely from body to body, usually via undefined occult means. This does not necessarily set the precedent that they are capable of self-sustaining without a host for any protracted period of time, merely that they are tenuously lore viable.

That said, it remains up for debate as to what Tony Todd actually is as the bees begin to buzz around the empty ribs under his coat. Summoned in a similar way to the real world Bloody Mary, albeit with five repetitions of his name in the mirror as opposed to her three, this latter aspect of the character is purely an invention of the director and not seen within Barker’s original text. Yet far from diluting that artistic vision it instead adds to the already strong weird fiction feel, cementing the bloodier aspects of the story as one that could have happened to a friend of a friend, albeit third or fourth hand.

Such folklore abounds within Lovecraft’s output too, likely a natural side effect of his wide and precocious childhood reading. At some point this interest in mythology seems to have got twisted, leading to a leveraging of the superstitious observances of people who failed to measure up to his frankly caustic conservative social standards towards a distinctly racial horror. The bias is evident in much of his work and is a valid vector for critique, not only of the scaffolding holding the worlds he created together but also the mind of a man capable of resenting people whose standard of living would have been worse than even his own was.

Interestingly, this call to enforced social striation is an unspoken given within many of the stories too. His favourite trope seems to be setting worthy and tenured gentlemen against nighmares grown from the dreams of the supposedly ignorant masses. This snobbery is inherently related, but distinct, from his racial intolerance, yet rarely dissected at length. That is not to either discount nor downplay the more obviously segregationist bigotry given voice through his work, of course. But there is also value in highlighting the acidic, pseudo-gentlemanly gaze with which he observed the shifting social strata too.

     Wilcox, I was sure, had heard of the cult in some casual way, and had soon forgotten it amidst the mass of his equally weird reading and imagining. Later, by virtue of its sheer impressiveness, it had found subconscious expression in dreams, in the bas-relief, and in the terrible statue I now beheld; so that his imposture upon my uncle had been a very innocent one. The youth was of a type, at once slightly affected and slightly ill-mannered, which I could never like; but I was willing enough now to admit both his genius and his honesty. I took leave of him amicably, and wish him all the success his talent promises. [2]

When Candyman is re-contextualised through the lens of Lovecraft’s ingrained classism we do indeed find a reasonably well to do anthropology student taking advantage of the poor population of Cabrini-Green for personal gain. The thesis she presents, that the hook handed killer is a folkloric bogeyman invented as a release valve designed to offset the psychological impact of the violent death that plagues the projects, is just dripping with a smug self assurance. The monster has to be the product of ignorance. A quirk of stairwell whispers and bloody floors, the lack of education writ large in every retelling.

Indeed one of the other overlooked aspects of the whole extended Mythos is the idea of such unbelievable stories carrying a crushing weight all of their own. Once the initial pebble of inquiry is kicked over the side of the scholarly mountain that the usually learned protagonist has enshrined themselves upon, it quickly picks up speed like a cosmic avalanche. The grim fate of Henry Akeley within the pages of The Whisperer in Darkness is a perfect example of such a deadly outcome. And yes, this tumbling descent from ignorant enquiry to knowing terror is indeed mirrored in Candyman’s final third too.

Fear for both preservation of the self and the safety of others forms a compelling character motivation, one that underlies much of the wider horror genre, cosmic and otherwise. By the end of the movie Helen, our now increasingly unhinged and urban legend obsessed graduate student, has faced her own mortality more than once. Yet she retains enough presence of mind despite the ever tightening embrace of Tony Todd’s admittedly alluring killer to generate a final, selfless act among the flames. This refusal to curl up in the corner and accept destruction wholesale flies in the face of the usual Lovecraftian conclusion.

Sanity has always been an expendable resource within Mythos narratives, and her descent first into obsession and then towards a fear induced disassociation feels rooted in those tales. Many of his leading men, and it has to be said that is always men due to the author’s quiet gender bias, seem to display the constitution of wet toilet paper. While it is acceptable that an elderly librarian such as The Dunwich Horror’s Henry Armitage may stray into delirium when first faced with the apocalyptic revelations of Whateley’s journal, many other protagonists seem to lack the will to face the shadows clawing at their backs.

Cultural norms shifted drastically by the 1990’s, though. Media had long featured monsters that those writing weird fiction during the interwar period could only dream of, so perhaps Helen’s sceptical initial reaction to the supernatural and final rejection of her fate is to be expected. One of the more intriguing assertions that Candyman makes, at least in its use of dialogue, revolves around the cold cynicism most held for urban legends and Forteana in the run up to the Millennium. Academia had absorbed the official study of those things, and seemed to be in constant battle with both the media and hobbyists to set the tone.

So there is at least an appetite to extend a kinder glance towards the overly dramatic reactions of Lovecraftian protagonists such as The Horror at Red Hook’s Thomas Malone or the unnamed author of the suicide note which forms Dagon. Though at a functional level the use of possible madness as a way of undercutting the more fantastical aspects of a story with questions around narrator reliability is overdone within the extended Mythos, especially among the types of scholars who should be best equipped with the necessary cognitive faculties, not to mention Wyrd reading, to deal with whatever the Old One’s can offer.

This then forms the final strand of connective tissue between those stories and Barker’s rumour empowered killer. Rose handle’s this aspect of Candyman’s narrative exceedingly well, allowing the audience to experience the actual pull towards the pit which Helen weathers as Todd’s bloody hook draws her ever closer to a fiery conclusion. The pacing is perfect and cinematography just loose enough to give the entire movie a disjointed feel. As a result of that, and the above average acting, it is rightly viewed as a cult classic. But the tall tale does not end there, of course. There is always deeper to dive.

‘Perhaps they’re all weaving some elaborate fiction or other. The story of the spastic’s mutilation in the public toilet. The murder of the old man. Even that hook. All quite familiar elements. You must be aware that there’s something traditional about these atrocity stories. Once used to exchange them all the time; there was a certain frisson in them. Something competitive maybe, in attempting to find a new detail to add to the collective fiction; a fresh twist that would render the tale that little bit more appealing when you passed it on.’ [3]

Few of those who enjoyed the 1992 film on its own merits will have likely also read The Forbidden. This then is the short story by Clive Barker that the later script was, admittedly loosely, based upon. Found in volume five of his excellent Books of Blood series, though originally seeing print in the less widely recognised Fantasy Tales fanzine in 1985, it feels markedly different. Aside from the fact that it is not set in Chicago, but the burnt out and garbage choked flats of the fictitious Spector Street Estate in Liverpool, secondary characters also ooze a quiet passive aggressiveness that is decidedly British in tone.

By far the biggest deviation from the later movie is the form that the Candyman takes as he prowls between the walls of the estate. Jaundiced yellow skin, blue lips and surprisingly colourful in dress, the only commonality between this original version and Todd’s later portrayal aside from the bloody hook is the ever present buzz of the bees nesting within his chest. Even less explanation for his status as local bogeyman is offered here, and apart from the same empowerment through rumour and legendry which Rose greatly expanded upon he really has little direct impact on events at all until very late in the text.

Barker’s version is perhaps more subtle in this regard, and the memetic quality of the killer’s existence is not as directly cemented as it was on screen. Lack of belief is seen more as an excuse for him to prove the dissenter wrong than a direct assault on his ability to maintain a sharpened grip on the real world. Indeed it is doubtful that anything could cause him to stop revelling in the control which is exerted over the small patch of bleak, Thatcherite land which he inhabits. So if not a local Pagan god twisted by modernity into an accusatory fiction, then at least something from outside of sane reality enjoying the joke is at play here.

That is not to say that The Fobidden is a bad story. Far from it. In fact the first person narrative and slow descent into resigned acceptance of the unseen, along with the decidedly cultish actions of the Spector Street Estate residents, really pull upon at least surface level themes found within the extended Mythos. Readers experiencing it after watching the arguably better paced film adaptation, however, may feel slightly short-changed, as it fails to generate the same background hum of immanent dread due to the literary limitations imposed by the short fiction format.

[1] Bernard Rose. Candyman, TriStar Pictures, 1992, Timestamp  31:04 - 32:10
[2] Howard Philips Lovecraft, The Call Of Cthulhu, The Call Of Cthulhu And Other Stories, Arcturus Publishing Limited, 2024, Page 209.
[3] Clive Barker, Books Of Blood Volume V, George Weidenfield & Nicolson Ltd, 1986, Page 18