“Say His Name”: Candyman (2021) as a Critique of Black Trauma Porn

Abstract

The Candyman films assemble traditions of extreme trauma whereby past events, despite local efforts of collective disremembrance, return in the form of a violent avenger killing strangers as symbolic substitutes. Innocent Black men systematically targeted and lynched are reborn as vengeful revenants in search of communal recognition and propagation, conjured through performative utterance. The creation of a new Candyman signals that anti-Black hostility persists in American society. This dreadful realization that the past will repeat, the fear of fatalism due to communal and racial associations, is gothic in tone. Candyman (Nia Da Costa 2021) laments this construction of Blackness as eternally afflicted such that this racialized history (suppressed by the current culture wars) contributes to the origin story of a new villain/hero. Candyman’s rebirth invites spectators to reflect on the spectacle of Black trauma porn (a ritual for white guilt catharsis). The recent Candyman creators reimagine the revenant as a vehicle for “Black wrath”: he avenges his death following police brutality, killing those that gentrify and terrorize his community. Candyman (2021) provides answers to novel questions: How do Black horror and Black trauma transcend the exploitation of Black bodies? What if white bodies were tortured on screen in service to Black social catharsis?