For what it does right – and it does do plenty right – Bernard Rose’s 1992 cult horror-slasher Candyman feels like a dated product of its racially off-putting times. Hone in on where it focuses the spotlight: Virginia Madsen’s curious and lily white grad student Helen Lyle, out to deconstruct the urban myths of a hook-handed boogeyman terrorizing the Black community. A white woman in distress scouring the trauma of the African-American hood, Helen is a peculiar cypher for a story about the lingering horrors of race.

By putting a white woman at the center of a story about Black trauma, Rose’s tale fell prey to the missteps of a particular deconstruction of American racial horrors: one that needed to be processed through white eyes to have any impact. Rose’s film studiously accounted for the connection between American Great Guilts throughout the ages: how slavery, Jim Crow laws, community redlining, and the policing of Black neighborhoods tethered violence and injustice throughout time; but in the end, Helen is the one who saves the day. A white savior in the darkest of hoods. It’s no surprise that Rose, a white man, working from a story from Clive Barker, also white, framed his tale of urban decay and racial inequity this way.

29 years have passed and social consciousness regarding Black stories have changed. Perhaps the most poignant shift is one that calls for Black voices to tell Black stories. Nia DaCosta’s Candyman is precisely that: a Black woman telling an unmistakably Black story. A direct sequel to Rose’s film, DaCosta’s riff on the Candyman legend is a startlingly effective flavor of nightshade. Make no mistake, this is a horror movie with much on its mind and DaCosta, working in conjunction with co-writers and producers Jordan Peele and Win Rosenfeld, doesn’t mince her words nor blunt her imagery. Her Candyman is scary, yes, but what it has to say about the unyielding cycle of Black trauma is doubly horrifying.

After a quick and intentionally disorienting 1992-set cold open that involves a black suspect and white police officers, DaCosta returns viewers to the present day where gentrification in Chicago’s infamously dangerous Cabrini-Green housing project has transformed the bulk of the area into an up-and-coming hotspot. Complete with trendy high-rise apartments, expensive art galleries, and places to #treatyoself with some ‘grammable brunch, there the disenfranchised make way for hungry upstarts and artist types hoping to score affordable rent. The stain of injustice may linger in the soil but you’d be hard pressed to sniff it out amongst the rapid change and colorful shops. The window dressings may change, DaCosta hints, but some places stay haunted forever.

There, Anthony McCoy (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) struggles to make a name for himself in the art world, trying – and failing – to evolve his artistic exploration of black trauma beyond the promising material he once produced in grad school. Put on by his successful curator girlfriend Briana (Teyonah Parris), Anthony is set to be featured in an upcoming gallery show but keeps coming up dry on ideas. A chance encounter with one William Burke (Colman Domingo) beggars a name long held to be unmentionable in the community: Candyman. Say his name five times and death becomes you, the legend goes, and Anthony finds himself inspired to create a series to honor the Black Boogeyman, only to unleash him once more upon the gentrified Cabrini-Green community.

DaCosta’s direction proves fearfully effective, employing Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowes’ booming score and John Guleserian’s nightmarish cinematography to create an eerie backdrop to unspool a tale of tainted legacy and cyclical trauma. That she manages to inject a fair degree of humor along the way helps to soften the mood, if never erasing the depth of her messaging. The haunting use of shadow-puppetry to bring to life the legend of different black men falsely accused, mutilated, and thereby turned into Candyman is among the film’s most effective and staying imagery and one will want to linger in their seat throughout the credits to take it all in. Commanding strong performances, particularly from Abdul-Mateen II, Domingo, and scene-stealing comic relief Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, Candyman suffers some murky motives and plotlines that don’t entirely add up upon first viewing but with an identity this strong and voice this loud, it’s a waste to hone in too much on these shortcomings and miss the forest for the poplar trees. Comparing the two Candyman films, one a prototype for the kind of social horrors that would become mainstreamed and socially salient with Jordan Peele’s Get Out, the other a clear-eyed response to precisely the kind of trauma evoked by that very film, we get a picture of how Black horror has evolved. Some may mistakenly call it “woke” (a hair-trigger fear response of the right-leaning towards anything not white male-centric) whereas the film really is bottled Black rage. Rage against the inequities of gentrification and the policies which allow Black communities to crumble into crime. Rage against the cyclical nature of violence against Black bodies. Rage against the way that racism evolves in its presentation throughout the ages but never really changes. Nor goes away.

Candyman goes by many names. Sherman Fields. Gil Cartwright. Daniel Robitaille. So too does racial injustice and violence against Black bodies. George Floyd. Trayvon Martin. Breonna Taylor. Alton Sterling. Daunte Wright. The names change. The faces change. The circumstances change. But violence remains. Candyman is DaCosta’s response to that violence. He’s mean, he’s blunt, he’s in your face. He’s been torn down, stripped of his corporeal body, and transformed into some new horror. Say his name.

CONCLUSION: A bone-rattling, conscious-stirring explosion of socially-conscious horror, Nia DaCosta’s ‘Candyman’ sequel brings the series into modern times with plenty of gore, effective performances, and searing social commentary to create a potent treatise on the cyclical nature of Black trauma.