Universal Pictures has released the first official trailer for Nia DaCosta‘s Candyman, a “spiritual sequel” to the seminal 1992 horror film. The trailer shows a return to the setting of the original, Chicago’s Cabrini Green, now a gentrified neighborhood filled with refurbished lofts and young professionals, including Anthony (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), an artist interested in exploring the Candyman legend. There’s also plenty of bees and blood, along with implications that Candyman may be looking for a successor and not just fresh victims.
Co-written (with DaCosta and Win Rosenfeld) and produced by Jordan Peele, Candyman also stars Tony Todd, Teyonah Parris, Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, and Colman Domingo. The film hits theaters on June 12th.
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 (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II; HBO’s Watchmen, Us) and his girlfriend, gallery director Brianna Cartwright (Teyonah Parris; If Beale Street Could Talk, The Photograph), 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 (Colman Domingo; HBO’s Euphoria, Assassination Nation) 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.
Although the trailer does look like other horror trailers, this looks like it will be decent enough.