Bill Condon wrote Strange Invaders and Strange Behavior before this movie, which didn’t fare as well with the public and critics as the original movie.

Maybe the movie Bernard Rose wanted to make would have been better. Virginia Madsen told Horror News Network, “They originally wanted us to do Candyman 2, but they didn’t like Bernie’s idea for the sequel. They made the Candyman into a slave which was terrible because the Candyman was educated and raised as a free man. Bernie wanted to make him like an African American Dracula which I think it was so appealing to the African American community because they finally had their own Dracula. The Candyman was a poet and smart. He wasn’t really a monster. He was sort of that classical figure. The sequel that Bernie wanted to make was a prequel where you see the Candyman and Helen fall in love. It was turned down because the studio didn’t want to do an interracial love story.”

There was also a plan to turn the Clive Barker story “The Midnight Meat Train” into the second movie years before that story became its own adaption.

That said, this movie — which explores the legend and shows that the Candyman was really an artist named Daniel Robitaille who was born to free slaves after the Civil War — isn’t horrible. It’s just that Candyman is one of the greatest horror movies ever, so making a sequel is such a major burden.

So this one is a slasher where the original was a meditation on race and rage. Maybe I should say something nice about the score.