With its release coming up later this summer, Universal has dropped the second official trailer for Candyman.
The film Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Teyonah Parris, Colman Domingo, Nathan Stewart-Jarret and Vanessa A. Williams. It is set in “the now-gentrified section of Chicago where the Cabrini-Green housing projects once stood.” Abdul-Matteen portrays Anthony McCoy, a man who becomes obsessed with the bloody legend and Parris will play his girlfriend, Brianna Cartwright, who is an art dealer.
The official description reads: For as long as residents can remember, the housing projects of Chicago’s Cabrini-Green neighborhood were terrorized by a word-of-mouth ghost story about a supernatural killer with a hook for a hand, easily summoned by those daring to repeat his name five times into a mirror. In present day, a decade after the last of the Cabrini towers were torn down, visual artist Anthony McCoy (Mateen) and his girlfriend, gallery director Brianna Cartwright (Parris), move into a luxury loft condo in Cabrini, now gentrified beyond recognition and inhabited by upwardly mobile millennials. With Anthony’s painting career on the brink of stalling, a chance encounter with a Cabrini Green old-timer (Domingo) exposes Anthony to the tragically horrific nature of the true story behind Candyman. Anxious to maintain his status in the Chicago art world, Anthony begins to explore these macabre details in his studio as fresh grist for paintings, unknowingly opening a door to a complex past that unravels his own sanity and unleashes a terrifyingly viral wave of violence that puts him on a collision course with destiny.
At an event for the first trailer back in February 2020 that was attended by Shadow and Act, DaCosta explained the film’s themes.
“Gentrification in our film is what helped us to reimagine the story, because Cabrini-Green is gone,” said DaCosta. “The movie in the ’90s has a vision of Cabrini-Green where its on its way to being knocked down. So going back there and seeing what’s happened around there…there is an ArcLight close to where Cabrini-Green used to be. There is a lot of development in that area [because] Cabrini-Green has been torn down, but Cabrini-Green itself has kind of been left untouched. What we do in our film is talk about the ghosts that are left behind…and that’s how we find our way into our reimagining of Candyman.”
Candyman is in theaters August 27.
