Candyman (film)

Candyman is a 1992 American horror film written and directed by Bernard Rose, based on the short story The Forbidden by Clive Barker, though the films scenario is switched from England to the CabriniGreen public housing development on Chicagos Near North Side. It stars Virginia Madsen, Tony Todd, and Xander Berkeley. The plot follows a graduate student Madsen completing a thesis on urban legends who encounters the legend of Candyman Todd, an artist and son of a slave who had had his hand severed and was then murdered.

Helen Lyle, a Chicago graduate student who is researching urban legends, hears of a local legend known as the Candyman. The legend claims that Candyman can be summoned by saying his name five times while facing a mirror, whereupon he will murder the summoner with a hook jammed in the bloody stump of his right arm. She later runs into two cleaning ladies who tell her about the murder of a woman named Ruthie Jean who called the Candyman in her bathroom mirror and was murdered with a hook by Candyman. Helen then finds out thatother murders in the area are related to Ruthie Jean. Later that evening, Helen and her friend Bernadette Walsh, skeptical of Candymans existence, call Candymans name into the mirror in Helens bathroom. Nothing happens.Helen learns from Professor Philip Purcell that Candyman was the son of a slave who became prosperous after developing a system for massproducing shoes during the Civil War. He grew up in polite society and became a wellknown artist, sought after for his talent in producing portraits. After falling in love with, and fathering a child with, a white woman, Candyman was set upon by a lynch mob hired by his lovers father they cut off his painting hand and replaced it with a hook. He was smeared with honey stolen from an apiary, prompting the locals to chant Candyman as bees stung him to death. His corpse was burned and his ashes were scattered across the area where the notorious gangridden CabriniGreen housing project now stands. ........

Source: Wikipedia