Grad students Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen) & Bernadette Walsh (Kasi Lemmons) are working on a thesis on urban legends. Struggling to discover something that hasn't been studied to death, they stumble upon a terrifying tale taking place right at home in Chicago. This path ultimately sends Helen down a dizzying rabbit hole led by the horrifying hook-handed Candyman (Tony Todd) himself.

While Chicagoans are quick to recall the location shooting of CANDYMAN in the Near North Side's Cabrini-Green public housing community, few seem to remember just how highbrow this low-budget Clive Barker adaptation really was: the main characters are UIC folklore/anthropology Ph.D. students studying (via ethnographic interviews) the urban legends on which the film's plot is itself based, and the soundtrack is an elegant, metronomic fugue for electric organ, strings, and chorus by Manhattan minimal don Philip Glass. The story, conflating the by-then nearly universal Anglo-American folktales of "Bloody Mary" and "The Hook" (regarding menstruation and castration, respectively) with some vague Shakespearean allusions, a touch of hypnotism, and a lot of bees, centers on the real-world locus of imagined terror for a generation of city residents and journalists: the intersection of Division and Larabee. In a twist which seems rather insightful even for the early 90s, the post-colonialist "Indian burial ground" cliché is displaced onto the contemporary process of gentrification then occurring in Old Town: Virginia Madsen's character's high-rise condo is itself revealed to be part of a redeveloped former housing project. The resulting film oscillates widely and sometimes uncomfortably between clever meta-horror and quotidian actual-horror, but remains an underrated snapshot of the city's pre-"Plan For Transformation" unconscious, in the shadows of the towers which (as of May 2011) no longer exist. - Text Courtesy of Cine-File