"Candyman" (2021)

The 2021 sequel returns to the same haunted landscape but expands the themes in two directions. On one hand it repeats the original film’s exploration of belief. The protagonist becomes caught in a cycle of madness and sacrifice, transformed into a witness and an offering for the legend to continue. Once again we find ourselves in the dizzying place where reality and hallucination blur. We see how false religion feeds off human devotion.

But the sequel also speaks in the idiom of its cultural moment. The story is steeped in the language of Black Lives Matter and the history of racial injustice in America. Candyman is no longer just an urban legend. He becomes a symbol of a collective trauma, perpetuated and reignited in each generation. A bad actor within the narrative manipulates this reality. He fans the embers of belief not for healing but for his own purposes. He sacrifices the protagonist as a means to keep the cycle alive. In this way, the film suggests that false religion can be sustained not only by fear but by opportunists who profit from it.

Those who claim to want to heal the trauma are often simply feeding it. An art critic observes that the main character’s supposed message against gentrification is hypocritical. She claims artists feed and perpetuate the cycle of gentrification. He rails against the very system that enables his platform. The irony is deliberate. Just as the critic profits from a broken cycle, so too the manipulator within the story profits from the perpetuation of the legend. Both highlight how false systems are often sustained by those who gain influence or prestige from them.

Theologically, the sequel again exposes the dynamics of idolatry. A community invests power into an image. A mediator arises to manipulate that power. A sacrifice is demanded to keep the story alive. It is all ritual without redemption, worship without life. Where the living God calls His people to faith that brings freedom, the false god of Candyman calls his people to faith that leads to death. The film is powerful precisely because it blurs the line between myth and reality, leaving us to wonder if we too have been caught in a cycle of fear and devotion that we mistake for truth.