While studying urban legends in the projects of Chicago, a skeptical grad student summons a mythical hook-handed spirit that promises death.

Growing up in San Antonio, my sisters would frighten me with gossip about a local urban legend called The Donkey Lady: half-animal, half-woman who lived in squalor deep in the Texas oaks. Urban legend has it, if you call her, sounds of a braying donkey and hooves clip-clopping emanate from the other line – enough information to traumatize me for years.

As an easily scared kid, my attempts at evading spooky triggers were always unsuccessful. Especially with sisters. Before I knew it I was being dragged into my cousin’s bathroom to chant repeatedly for Bloody Mary to appear (the thrill of that youthful risk would come way later for me). CANDYMAN (1992) takes on the ‘ghost in the mirror’ legend by concocting an entirely new evil spirit to haunt you the next time you’re taking a dump.

Helen is a semiotics grad student researching urban legends and familiarizes herself with the Candyman, a scorned spirit who, after naming him five times before a mirror, appears to kill his beckoners. When a series of murders in a Chicago public housing project is blamed on Candyman, Helen calls out to him five times in front of her mirror, an irreversible mistake that draws her deep into his nightmarish world. She awakens to a frightening scene of violence and is blamed by police and the community for the disappearance of a baby.

Based on Clive Barker’s short story, the film reworks the narrative to incorporate themes of racial injustice and historic violence against black people, making Candyman the victim of a Lynch mob who maintains his malevolent existence through the power of belief.