Is Candyman Scary? The Verdict and the Whole Plot

Five times into a mirror, as a joke

In 1977 at the Cabrini-Green housing projects in Chicago, a boy sees police beat Sherman Fields, a homeless man with a hook for a hand, to death over the rumor that he put a razor blade in a child's candy. More razor blades turn up afterward, which clears him too late. In 2019, the artist Anthony McCoy shares a Chicago home with Brianna Cartwright, his girlfriend and a gallery director. Her brother Troy and Troy's boyfriend tell them about Helen Lyle, who was blamed for a killing spree and for briefly taking a baby in Cabrini-Green. Anthony goes there looking for inspiration, gets stung on the hand by a bee, and meets William Burke, who owns a laundromat and was the boy in 1977. William tells him the Candyman legend: say the name five times to a mirror and Sherman's spirit appears and kills you. Anthony repeats it to Brianna and does the ritual as a joke.

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An art opening that goes badly in two ways

Anthony makes an installation called "Say My Name" for a show that Brianna curates with her colleague Clive. The critic Finley Stephens and other visitors dislike it. That night, Clive and his girlfriend Jerrica summon the Candyman without realizing it, and he murders them. Brianna finds the bodies, which brings back her childhood memory of seeing her father's suicide. Anthony starts painting grim portraits of men he does not know and digs into Helen Lyle's research. He sees Sherman's ghost in an elevator. When Finley interviews him, he dares her to summon the Candyman herself, and he sees himself as Sherman in a mirror. At a business dinner with Brianna, he leaves suddenly after hearing that Finley has been murdered.

A bee sting that keeps going

William tells Anthony that the legend began around the 1890s, when Daniel Robitaille, an artist, had an affair with the daughter of a white client. She said he had raped her, and he was mutilated and then burned alive. Over the years other innocent Black men who were murdered have joined the Candyman as a hive, and they are the men in Anthony's paintings. Anthony tries to protect Brianna, but his behavior scares her. A teenager who went to his show, along with her friends, summons the Candyman in the school bathroom and they are killed. Meanwhile the sting on Anthony's hand spreads until his whole body is changing. A trip to a hospital shows him that his mother, Anne-Marie, lied: he was born near Cabrini-Green, and he is the baby who vanished on the night Helen died. Anne-Marie confesses that the Candyman did the killing that Helen got blamed for, and that the neighborhood decided never to say his name.

A hand swapped for a hook in a church with no good exits

Brianna goes to find William, who takes her to an abandoned church, where Anthony sits in a fugue state. William tells her he saw the Candyman come back after Sherman died, after his sister and her friend called him up and died. He now wants to build the hive back up as revenge on gentrifiers. The scene people dread comes here, late in the film. William saws off Anthony's hand and replaces it with a hook, then calls the police so they will shoot Anthony as one more vengeful spirit for the hive. Brianna is chased into the Cabrini-Green row houses and stabs William to death with a pen. Anthony finds her and collapses in her arms, and the police shoot him dead.