Candyman

In Chicago, Cabrini-Green residents blame Candyman for the deaths in the neighborhood. Researcher Helen Lyle chases the story and finds its root: a painter, the son of a slave, lynched in the late 1800s for loving a white woman.

Helen doesn't believe it, and that's when Candyman appears. He needs people to fear him. He kills, leaves Helen as the suspect and offers her immortality. Then he takes baby Anthony and tries to burn them both on a bonfire. Helen destroys him, saves the baby and dies.

Three years later the legend reaches New Orleans, and his past gets a name: Daniel Robitaille. Flashbacks show the painter smeared with honey, swarmed by bees and given a hook for a right hand before he's burned.

Candyman's power is bound to a cursed mirror. Teacher Annie Tarrant learns she's his descendant, finds the mirror in the flooded basement of the house where Daniel was born and smashes it. Candyman is gone. Five years later, her daughter Caroline chants his name at bedtime.

Caroline grows up and, by accident, summons Candyman at a Los Angeles gallery. He starts killing around her again.

A psychic explains that the "good" part of him lives in the paintings he made. Caroline slashes a Candyman portrait with the hook and sets it on fire, and he burns. Detective Kraft, who was on Candyman's side, is shot dead.

In 2019, artist Anthony McCoy, the baby from 1992, hears the legend from William Burke. In 1977, William watched police kill Sherman Fields, a homeless man with a hook, accused without proof.

Anthony learns Candyman isn't one man: he's a "hive" of murdered Black men that began with Daniel Robitaille. William saws off Anthony's hand and fits a hook, and the police kill him. When Anthony's girlfriend Brianna calls Candyman through a squad car mirror, he appears with Anthony's face, kills the officers and turns into Daniel. His message is simple: "tell everyone."

In "The Forbidden" (Books of Blood, Vol. 5), Candyman haunts a Liverpool housing estate, with bees, a hook and the smell of cotton candy. Tony Todd played him in all four films and said he was stung 27 times across the first three. He died in 2024.