ABSTRACT
Bernard Rose’s 1992 horror movie Candyman can be read as a meditation on contemporary perceptions of the city. The film is punctuated by aerial shots of Chicago’s townscapes: the circulation of traffic on freeways, barrack-like housing, monumental but silent amphitheatres. From that God’s-eye view, the city presents a dehumanised geometry. People are as invisible, or as insignificant, as they appeared to Harry Lime in the Ferris wheel high above post-war Vienna. But this abstracted view is not the film’s dominant perspective. From below, on the streets, the black underclass who live in the projects make sense of the city’s irrationality and alienation in terms of myths and subcultural legends: tales of miscegenation, racial murder, and the avenging undead. Urban space, then, is doubly textured. It is concrete, but just as brutally it is fantastic.
