Search Results

This chapter studies the sequels to Candyman (1992), Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh (1995) and Candyman: Day of the Dead (1999), in terms of what they add to the Candyman mythos. Each attempts to deliver more of the same but arguably without the level of intelligence and skill that Bernard Rose brought to the original. Bill Condon's Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh clarifies the origins of the Candyman, but also the miscegenation subtext of the first film is made more explicit. Released straight to DVD by Artisan Entertainment, Turi Meyer's Candyman: Day of the Dead is essentially a remake of the original film, with certain plot elements of Farewell to the Flesh thrown in to the mix. The chapter then considers the knock offs, looking at the various movies based on the legend of ‘Bloody Mary’, and the Urban Legend franchise, which includes the direct-to-DVD entry Urban Legends: Bloody Mary (2005). The continuing popularity of these films suggests that the urban myth and what it represents is still very much alive.

This chapter looks at ways in which Candyman (1992) offers a discourse on urban myth, and how it utilises actual urban legends such as ‘Bloody Mary’. Social scientists and folklorists have theorised that such urban legends construct and reinforce the worldview of the group within which they are told, sometimes through an acting out of the legends themselves: a form of ‘ostension’. In Candyman, that worldview speaks of minority oppression and the outward projection of the dispossessed as Other. Despite Clive Barker's then-unawareness of the term ‘urban legend’, a number of classic urban myths already appear in ‘The Forbidden’, including the tale of the hook, razorblades in sweets, and the public toilet castration. Bernard Rose would develop the self-reflexive aspects of the story in his adaptation, the sense that the story is very much about itself, about the experience of horror and the nature of campfire storytelling.

This chapter discusses yôkai in the 1970s and 1980s, after Japan's period of fast economic growth. It notes that the trope for this period was the media, and looks at the role yôkai played within various forms of mass media. It studies the manga artist, Mizuki Shigeru, whose popular illustrations renewed the image of the yôkai in the cultural imagination. This chapter also introduces a new yôkai, the Kuchi-sake-onna, the main character of a popular 1979 urban legend about a female yôkai with a horribly slit mouth. It shows that she became a popular media icon, and expressed very real modern concerns about the roles of women in a patriarchal society.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Candyman (1992). In an era dominated by tired pastiche, Candyman remains one of the most original and finest horror movies. Based on Clive Barker's short story, ‘The Forbidden’, Candyman has been widely acclaimed for its social commentary, as well as for its skilful use of horror tropes and cinematic techniques. Its writer-director Bernard Rose has gone on to a distinguished career in Hollywood which has included further notable work in the horror genre, while Candyman has spawned two sequels and inspired numerous movies evoking urban myths and legends, including the financially successful Urban Legend franchise. As a Nineties horror movie, Candyman has prevailed. As well as receiving positive reviews at the time of its release, it continues to win new fans and admirers.

This chapter details the synopsis of Bernard Rose's Candyman (1992), which takes place in present-day Chicago. Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen), a graduate student researching urban legends, investigates a series of murders in the Cabrini-Green housing projects supposedly committed by a hook-handed killer called the Candyman. Residents of the projects believe the Candyman to be the vengeful spirit of a slave's son who was lynched by a mob in 1890 after falling in love and fathering a child with a white landowner's daughter. After being attacked by a local drug dealer who has adopted the Candyman persona and being arrested under suspicion of abducting a baby, Helen is incarcerated in a mental hospital where her psychiatrist Dr. Burke (Stanley De Santis) attempts to convince Helen that the Candyman is a figment of her own psychotic imagination. Helen was able to escape the hospital and return to Cabrini-Green, where she attempts to rescue baby Anthony from the Candyman. Helen manages to save the baby while the Candyman is consumed by the flames of a giant bonfire in the Green. Severely burned, Helen dies soon afterwards. Later, her distraught husband Trevor (Xander Berkeley) invokes Helen in the bathroom mirror; Helen materialises in spirit form and exacts vengeance on her husband.

This introductory chapter provides an overview and a synopsis of John Carpenter's Halloween (1978). Halloween is an acknowledged horror classic, and one of the relatively few horror films added to the National Film Registry by the U.S. Library of Congress, an honour accorded to it in 2006. A large part of the effectiveness of Halloween lies in its willingness to be basic and uncomplicated. Even its stylistic flourishes, highly ambitious for such a low-budget independent production, are smoothly integrated, instead of being showy and ostentatious. Carpenter has characterised Halloween as an exercise in style, and freely uses the term ‘exploitation film’ to describe it. The chapter then considers the relationship between Halloween and the slasher film. It also assesses the role of urban legend themes in Halloween, and how the film evokes a practice that anthropologists and folklorists have dubbed ‘legend tripping’.

This chapter investigates the final scene of David Robert Mitchell'sIt Follows as the ultimate conclusion for whomever is tethered to the entity. It reviews the entity that possesses the ability to move through obstacles at a walking pace until it gets within close proximity to its target. It also discusses the urban legend, which is a story that has exposition, an inciting incident, climax, and denouement. The chapter analyses how certain narratives become salient through the urban legend and become enmeshed in the fears, concerns, even pleasures of a particular cultural moment. It explores how the urban legend is useful as a warning about a local threat within the context of the horror genre.

This chapter discusses the intersection between Clive Barker's work and that of Bernard Rose; surprisingly, the two are closely connected, even symbiotic. Rose's UK debut film Paperhouse (1988) concerned the fantasy world of a young girl, and his subsequent work has shown a tendency towards transgression and transcendence, and repeated returns to social horror. Indeed, Rose was attracted to Barker's ‘The Forbidden’ because he wanted to ‘deal with the social stuff’. Relocating the action from a Liverpool housing estate to Chicago's notorious Cabrini-Green housing project, Rose extended the story, adding the innocent-person-on-the-run plot twist, and took Barker's conclusion further. But the class subtext, the urban legend and the idea of the myth biting back after attempts are made to debunk it, are all there in Barker's source material. The heroine, Helen Lyle, discovers that her normal life is more banal and morally dead than the eternal life-in-myth that the Candyman offers her.

Recently, scholarly criticism has acknowledged the presence of the Gothic in Latin America, which should be distinguished from magic realism and the fantastic. Latin American Gothic evinces regional, tropicalised and hybridised nuances that not only adapt the mode to specific cultural and regional anxieties, but also have helped coin terms such as ‘Tropical Gothic’. On the other hand, Guillermo delToro’s popularity has brought attention to Latin American Gothic horror in twenty-first-century visual media and how it address issues of identity, folklore and haunting. This chapter analyses the appropriation of Gothic motifs in the films Somos lo que hay (We are What We Are, 2010), La casa muda(The Silent House, 2010) and Juan de losmuertos(Juan of the Dead, 2011). It explores Tropical Gothic, medicine and faith in the TV series Niño santo (2011–14) and reviews the #CharlieCharlieChallenge trending topic on social media as an everyday Gothic experience.

“Check Snopes” has become the clarion call of doubters everywhere, from the chalkboard to the chat room. Yet Snopes.com also presents an interesting problem within folklore studies, a problem common to folklore’s relationship with the internet. Certainly Snopes.com demonstrates a breakdown of the clear lines between academic scholarship and popular scholarship, but it points towards other breakdowns as well: between single authorship and community production, between what folklorists study and folklore itself, between human and machine.

This chapter examines the newslore the sudden collapse of the Enron Corporation. It explains that the shameless profiteering of Enron executives confirmed some of the worst fears about corporate America and provided fodder for urban legends. It provides some examples of Enron-related jokes. This chapter also comments on the jokes’ focus on the victims of Enron’s malfeasance rather than on the dastardly deeds of the Enron executives and on MasterCard’s long-running “Priceless” advertising campaign.

This chapter examines the newslore that has attached itself to the person of software mogul Bill Gates and the response to business and government warnings of economic upheaval in the event of computer failures on January 1, 2000, the so-called Y2K problem. It provides some examples of jokes about Gates and the Millennium Bug. This chapter also suggests that the Y2K story connects to urban legends about harmful technology when it cites those who see the millennium bug as a punishment for our overdependence on technology.