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Say Their Names: ‘Candyman’ and the Horrors of Youth Court

The ‘Candyman’ films mirror persistent issues of juvenile injustice and systemic racism, highlighting the super predator myth’s devastating impact on young Black lives in the justice system.

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The movie ‘Candyman’ has a complicated history, where facts and narratives continue to spill out into future generations. A “villain” created by society, who you summon into your life. A “villain” with a history of sadness, with a history of art and creation, with a history spanning lynching during legalized slavery to police legalized lynching. A complicated oral history with a story we have to keep telling but that remains so repetitive and true and raw that you don’t just hear it, you feel it.

Many of the themes found in the film, gentrification, police violence, subsidized housing, and segregation are as real today as they were in 1992 when the first Candyman was released. Even today with the 2021 remake of the film, these themes not only touch our lives, but also our courtrooms across the country.

The Real Fear: A Justice System Unchanged

Horror works best when it speaks to our personal fear. And as a youth defender for the State of New Jersey, what kept me up that night after watching Candyman (2021) wasn’t the hook or the bees. It was the horror that not much had changed in the almost 30 years since we first saw Tony Todd as Candyman. Walter Jon Williams said, “I’m not afraid of werewolves or vampires or haunted hotels, I’m afraid of what real human beings do to other real human beings.”

As a public defender, I have witnessed many horrors- not just in the details of crimes but in how an entire justice system can treat young black men. Sweeping reforms that made it easier to Prosecute black boys as adults, found their roots in the frenzied media and racist tropes of the super predator myth of the 90s.

The Tragedy of Robert “Yummy” Sandifer

One such story was that of Robert “Yummy” Sandifer. Yummy was an 11-year-old boy who was killed by members of his gang, the Black Disciples in 1994 in Chicago. Terrifying as that sounds, the real-life details of his murder and what it would mean to generations of young black boys in the juvenile legal system are what truly horrifies. Yummy was suspected of the murder of a 14-year-old girl two weeks prior. He was on probation already for a series of arrests.

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His mother was a teen who used crack cocaine and his father was in jail. He was beaten and burned as a child. In an evaluation, when asked to complete this sentence “I am…”, he answered “sick”. Nicknamed for his love of sweet treats, Yummy, and the teen boys who shot him, became the examples on which the super predator myth and media frenzy were built upon.

States used the public’s fear of child boogeymen to fuel reforms to the juvenile court system to allow for more children to be tried as adults, imposing mandatory sentences including life sentences without the possibility of parole. Derrick Hardaway who was 14-years-old when he drove the getaway car following the murder of Yummy received 45 years in prison.

Juvenile Life Sentences: A National Disgrace

The United States is the only nation that sentences people to die in prison without the opportunity to parole, for crimes committed before turning 18. As of early 2020, while Candyman was ready to reemerge in theaters and we were dared to say his name, 1,465 people were serving juvenile life sentences without the possibility of parole. Another 1,716 are serving sentences that amount to virtually life without parole.

79% witnessed violence in their homes regularly

32% grew up in public housing

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Fewer than half were attending school at the time of their offense

47% were physically abused

80% of girls reported histories of physical abuse and 77% of girls reported histories of sexual abuse

And

62% are African American

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There are people who we, as a country, decided were legally too young to marry, buy alcohol, smoke weed, drive cars, vote, or buy a ticket to see the movie Candyman, that we, as a country, condemned to die in cages. Are you scared yet? (Also, can we all agree to stop trying to figure out ways to get out of jury duty? Great. Thanks)

A Glimmer of Hope: Courts Reconsider

But courts are beginning to listen. Just last week, in Connecticut, a court found that Keith Belcher’s sentence of 60 years at age 14 was so improperly tied to the super predator myth that it was illegal and demanded a resentencing. In coming to its conclusion, the Court noted that “[B]y invoking the super predator theory to sentence the young, Black male defendant in the present case, the sentencing court,…relied on materially false, racial stereotypes that perpetuate systemic inequities-demanding harsher sentences-that date back to the founding of our nation.”
And last year, In Jones v. Mississippi Justice Sotomayor ended her dissent with the following: “Jones should know that, despite the Court’s decision today, what he does in life matters. So, too, do the efforts of the almost 1,500 other juvenile offenders like Jones who are serving LWOP[Life without the Opportunity of Parole] sentences. Of course, nothing can repair the damage their crimes caused. But that is not the question. The question is whether the State, at some point, must consider whether a juvenile offender has demonstrated maturity and rehabilitation sufficient to merit a chance at life beyond the prison in which he has grown up. For most, the answer is yes.”

Kristina Kersey is Senior Youth Defense Counsel at The Gault Center: Defenders of Youth Rights. When she is not advocating for reform of juvenile courts, she can be found collecting vinyl, Jersey shore living, and catering to her rescue Chihuahua, Biggie Smalls. She is a fan of Bruce Springsteen, iced coffee, and a fresh mani.

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Editorials

What’s in a Look? The Jason Voorhees Redesign Controversy

The Jason Voorhees redesign sparked heated debate, but is the backlash overblown? Dive into Friday the 13th’s formula and fan expectations.

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If you’re a longtime reader of Horror Press, you may have noticed that I really really like the Friday the 13th franchise. Can’t get enough. And yet, I simply couldn’t muster a shred of enthusiasm for piling hate on the new Jason Voorhees redesign that Horror, Inc. recently shared with an unwitting public.

Why the Jason Voorhees Redesign Controversy Feels Overblown

Hockey mask? Check. Machete? Check. Clothing? Yeah, he’s wearing it. I really didn’t see the problem, but very many people online pointed out all the places where I should. The intensity and specificity of the critiques shot me right back to 2008, reminding me distinctly of watching Project Runway with my friend’s mom while I waited for him to get home from baseball practice. What, just me?

But the horror community’s sudden transformation into fashion mavens got me thinking about other things, too: the character of the franchise as a whole, how Jason Voorhees fits into it, and why I feel like this reaction has been blown out of proportion. (A disproportionate reaction to a pop culture thing? On my Internet? Well I never.)

Baghead Jason

What Does A Jason Look Like, Anyway?

What confused me the most about this reaction was something I couldn’t quite get a bead on. What does Jason Voorhees look like? His look, both masked and unmasked (especially unmasked), changes wildly from film to film, even when he’s played by the same person (in three consecutive movies, Kane Hodder played a hulking zombie Jason, a shiny slime monster Jason, and a Jason who was mainly seen in mirrors and looked like his face was stung by a thousand bees). And then there’s the matter of him being both a zombie child and a bagheaded killer before receiving his iconic hockey mask.

However, if you synthesize the various forms of the character into the archetypical Jason Voorhees, the one that most people might visualize in their head when told to imagine him, the result doesn’t not look like this new redesign. Frankly, I even think “redesign” is too strong a word for what this is. This image shows a dude in outdoorsy clothes wearing a hockey mask. It looks enough like “Jason Voorhees” to me that my eyes just slide right off of it.

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What Do We Expect From Friday the 13th, And What Do We Need?

Ultimately, many people clearly disagree with my assessment of this redesign, which led me to ponder the franchise as a whole. If there’s something to complain about with this new look, that implies that there is a “right” way and a “wrong” way to be a Friday the 13th movie.

This I can agree with. While the franchise is wide-ranging and expansive to the point that it has included Jason going to space, fighting a dream demon, and taking a cruise ship from a New Jersey lake to the New York harbor, the movies do still follow a reasonably consistent formula.

Step 1: Generate a group of people in a place either on the shores of Crystal Lake or in Crystal Lake township (they can travel elsewhere, but this is where they must start).
Step 2: Plunk Jason down near them, give him a variety of edged weapons, and watch what happens. One girl survives the onslaught, and sometimes she brings along a friend or two as adjunct survivors. Bada bing, bada boom, you have yourself a Friday the 13th movie.

If you fuck with that formula, you’ve got a problem. But beyond that, there’s really not a hell of a lot that the movies have in common. Sometimes you have a telekinetic final girl, other times you have a child psychologist. Sometimes the dead meat characters are camp counselors, but other times they’re partiers or townies or students attending space college.

Hell, even the people killing them aren’t always the same. Look at Pamela Voorhees in the original movie or Roy in A New Beginning.

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So why this protectiveness around the minutiae of Jason’s look?

It’s Us, Hi, We’re The Problem, It’s Us

I don’t mean to discount everyone’s negative opinions about this Jason redesign. There are a multitude of aesthetic and personal reasons to dislike what’s going on here, and you don’t have to turn that yuck into a yum just because I said so. But I think we’ve had online fandoms around long enough to see how poisonous they can be to the creative process.

For instance, was The Rise of Skywalker a better movie because it went down the laundry list of fan complaints about The Last Jedi and basically had characters stare into the camera and announce the ways they were being fixed?

Look, I’m not immune to having preconceived disdain for certain projects. If I’m waiting for a new installment in a franchise and all that I’m hearing coming out of producers’ mouths is “prequel” and “television show,” those are fighting words.

However, the constant online pushback to projects that are in early development might be one reason it has taken us so long to actually get more Friday the 13th (I’m talking in addition to the long delays amid the lawsuit, of course). It’s been more than a decade and a half without a new Jason vehicle, and that time keeps on stretching longer and longer.

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Poll taken from Horror Press Instagram account

What Fans Really Want From a New Jason Voorhees Movie

Instead of just letting the creative tap flow and having a filmmaker put out the thing they want to make, then having somebody else take the wheel and do that same thing for the next installment, it seems like producers are terrified of making the wrong move and angering the fans, which has prevented them from actually pulling the trigger on much of anything.

Look, we survived A New Beginning. And Jason Takes Manhattan. Even Jason Goes to Hell. A controversial misstep can’t kill the immortal beast that is Friday the 13th. I say let’s just let them make one. Having something tangible to complain about is better than having nothing at all.

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Editorials

Monstrous Mothers: Unveiling the Horror in ‘Mommie Dearest’ and ‘Umma’

The horror umbrella is massive and encompasses many subgenres including thrillers, sci-fi, and even true crime. I like to quip that movies like Mommie Dearest and Priscilla belong to the latter category. I even point out they have final girls surviving their monsters, but like most jokes, there is a lot of hard truth behind that. To be clear, Mommie Dearest is highly contested even by Christina Crawford, who wrote the book about the abuse suffered at the hands of her alcoholic guardian. However, the fact remains that there is an abusive mother terrorizing children at the heart of the horror. This is a tale as old as time in the genre, and we see these themes of motherhood, mental illness, and generational trauma often. So, why do we typically forget this movie when discussing titles like Psycho (1960), Run, Hereditary, etc.?

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I challenged myself to fill a gap in my cinema history this month and watched Mommie Dearest. I was very familiar with the movie due to how many drag queens reference it and because of Joan Crawford’s villainous reputation. However, I had never seen it in its entirety before, which is weird because I write about my own maternal baggage often. Without ever seeing the film, I knew this movie, categorized as a drama, belonged under my favorite genre label. Some sources even try to meet in the middle and classify it as a psychological drama, which is a phrase that does a lot of heavy lifting to remove itself from what it actually is. After all, what else should we call a film about being abused by the person who should love us most other than horror?

Does Mommie Dearest Belong in the Horror Genre?

The horror umbrella is massive and encompasses many subgenres including thrillers, sci-fi, and even true crime. I like to quip that movies like Mommie Dearest and Priscilla belong to the latter category. I even point out they have final girls surviving their monsters, but like most jokes, there is a lot of hard truth behind that. To be clear, Mommie Dearest is highly contested even by Christina Crawford, who wrote the book about the abuse suffered at the hands of her alcoholic guardian. However, the fact remains that there is an abusive mother terrorizing children at the heart of the horror. This is a tale as old as time in the genre, and we see these themes of motherhood, mental illness, and generational trauma often. So, why do we typically forget this movie when discussing titles like Psycho (1960), Run, Hereditary, etc.?

Mommie Dearest recounts a version of Christina Crawford’s upbringing by Hollywood royalty Joan Crawford. It depicts her as an unstable, jealous, manipulative woman who only holds space for her beliefs. As with most abusive parents, she takes out her frustrations and feelings of inadequacy on those around her. Specifically, those who cannot fight back due to the power dynamics at play. This version of Joan is a vicious bully, which feels familiar for many people who grew up with an abusive parent. How many of us never knew what would set our parental monster off, so just learned to walk on eggshells? How many of us grew up believing we were the problem for way longer than we should have? How many of us normalized the abuse for so long that it carried over into adulthood, letting us believe being mistreated is just part of living?

Watch the trailer for Mommie Dearest

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The Lasting Impact of Abusive Parents in Horror Movies

While my mother wasn’t the active bully in our home, part of my struggle with her is her complicitness in the hell she helped create for all of us. Which is why, while I don’t think Mommie Dearest is a great film, I believe it’s a decent horror flick. It made me want to revisit a better movie, Umma, that also dealt with motherhood, mental illness, and trauma. Iris K. Shim’s 2022 PG-13 horror sees Sandra Oh playing a single mother who has not healed. After growing up with her own mother, who was especially cruel to her, she has built her world around that trauma and forced her daughter to live within its walls with her. As someone who was severely homeschooled by a woman who still really needs to find a therapist, Umma hits me in my feelings every time. 

Watch the trailer for Umma below

Maternal Monsters: A Common Thread in Psycho, Hereditary, and More

Before the film starts, Oh’s character, Amanda, has turned her back on her family and cultural heritage. She has built a life that she’s not really living as she hides in her home, afraid of electricity due to the abuse she suffered at the hands of her mom. So, when her uncle shows up with her mother’s ashes, she is triggered and haunted. All of the issues she hasn’t dealt with rush to the surface, manifesting in ways that begin turning her into her deceased mom. Amanda does eventually force herself to confront her past to avoid becoming her mother and hurting her daughter. So, while Umma is different from Mommie Dearest, it’s not hard to see they share some of the same DNA. Scary moms make the genre go round which is why movies like M.O.M. Mothers of Monsters, Serial Mom, Mother, May I?, and so many others will always pull an audience by naming the monster in the title.

I doubt I am the first person on Norma Bates’ internet to clock that some of horror’s most notorious villains are parents, specifically moms. I’m also sure I cannot be the first person to argue Mommie Dearest is a horror movie on many levels. After all, a large part of the rabid fanbase seems to be comprised of genre kids who grew up wondering why the film felt familiar. However, I hope I am the first to encourage you to watch these two movies if your momma trauma will allow you to hold space for a couple more monstrous mothers this month. Both have much to say about how we cope with the fallout of being harmed by the people who should keep us safe.

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