Spooky Saturdays: The design failure that inspired Candyman
More harrowing than "kooky Halloween fun" :: blogtober 10/12/24
I’m moving, so I’m short on time today, Blogtober rules still apply
If you haven’t seen the 1992 film Candyman, you should, even if you don’t like horror movies. It’s got an incredible score by Philip Glass that stands on its own, but it’s also a uniquely masterful story that reflects on some of the failures of urban design and social housing projects at the turn of the 21st century. I had never seen buildings like Cabrini Green in the US. By the time I was old enough to notice architecture, it was the 2000s, and most American high-rise housing projects were demolished1. Maybe that makes the premise scarier to me - buildings that were somehow so irredeemably bad they could only be imploded, not renovated.
It’s also (perhaps) based on a true story from a Chicago newspaper. In 1987, Ruthie May McCoy was shot in her high-rise Chicago housing project apartment by a person who came through her medicine cabinet. While it’s officially based on Clive Barker2’s story The Forbidden, from Books of Blood, it takes place in Chicago’s Cabrini Green housing projects, not Liverpool. According to a follow-up article, the author of the excellent long-form piece about Ruthie May’s murder spoke with John Malkovich about adapting his article into a movie.
From the excellent 1987 long-form piece by Steve Bogira:
The buildings were designed with the pipe chases behind the medicine cabinets to provide easy access to the plumbing; if something’s leaking, janitors simply have to remove the medicine cabinet to check the pipes. It’s hard to fault the architects; as the Janitor says, they “probably weren’t thinking that people were gonna be totally animalistic.” Deverra Beverly, president of ABLA’s advisory council, says the medicine cabinet break-ins only show “that if people are poor enough and need something enough, they will figure out a way.”
You can read the full long-form piece here.
I also don’t really remember a world before wall-to-wall security cameras or 9/11, so stories from people who lived in cities like New York or Chicago in the 70s/80s/90s are similarly wild to me. If you are old enough to remember what that was like, feel free to roll your eyes, I kinda deserve it. My worst encounters in big cities absolutely pale in comparison to some of the stories I have heard from the 20th century.
yeah, the Hellraiser guy