The Clive Barker short story that originally sparked the Candyman film series makes no racial reference at all; otherness is at work there through class alone. “The Forbidden”, published in Barker’s horror collection Books of Blood Vol 5 in 1985 (series motto: “Wherever we’re opened we’re red”), was set in an unnamed English city, perhaps Barker’s native Liverpool, on a recent but already rotten housing estate.
Helen Lyle, a conceited academic, investigates urban myth as seen in graffiti and falls to one of its main tropes, the Candyman, a “honeyed psychopath” with bees in his rotting torso. “I came for you,” he says, materialising because she doubted him. But he has no name or backstory – in this first iteration, there isn’t even the device of summoning him by repeating the fatal moniker five times in front of a mirror. But the story had legs. And a hook.
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