Helen Lyle

Helen and her colleague study how Cabrini-Green residents use the Candyman legend. She traces the story to its root: a painter, the son of a slave, lynched in the late 1800s after falling for a white woman.

Helen doubts all of it and goes into the projects to see for herself. In the abandoned buildings, she finds the place where the legend lives.

Then Candyman appears to her. He kills to keep the legend alive and leaves Helen as the suspect in several murders. No one believes her.

Helen ends up committed to a psychiatric hospital. She escapes, only to learn Candyman has taken Anthony, Anne-Marie McCoy's baby, and wants her close.

In his lair, Candyman offers Helen immortality; she seems to be the reincarnation of his lover. He breaks his word and tries to burn Helen and the baby on a bonfire.

Helen stabs him with a flaming plank and destroys him, but dies saving Anthony. Later, her guilt-ridden husband Trevor says her name five times in the mirror. Helen's spirit appears and kills him with Candyman's hook.

Nearly 30 years on, Helen's name is still part of the legend. Artist Anthony McCoy learns he was the baby taken the night Helen died, and that his mother kept it from him his whole life.

In "The Forbidden", from Volume Five of the Books of Blood, she's Helen Buchanan, an English university student. Her thesis is about graffiti, which is why she goes to the Spector Street estate to photograph its walls.

In an abandoned building, she finds walls covered in references to Candyman. A resident, Anne-Marie, tells her about savage killings blamed on a man with a hook for a hand. It's the same starting point as the film, with Chicago in place of Liverpool and urban legends in place of graffiti.

Virginia Madsen plays Helen in the 1992 film; director Bernard Rose used hypnosis to make her Candyman scenes feel stranger. In "The Forbidden", she's Helen Buchanan, a student photographing the graffiti of Liverpool's Spector Street estate for her thesis.