Bittersweet Infamy - #29 - Come With Me and Be Immortal

Episode Date: October 17, 2021

Halloween special! Guest host Nadine Bachan tells Josie and Taylor about Ruthie Mae McCoy, Chicago's public housing projects, and the true story behind the movie Candyman. Plus: a trip down Trinidad's haunted Solomon Hochoy Highway, and an island full of decomposing dolls.

Hey, Taylor here. In this episode, we talk extensively about the 1992 movie Candyman, including lots of spoilers. If you haven't seen it, you should watch it. It's a very good horror movie. Otherwise, I think the episode holds up okay without watching the film. You decide. Enjoy the show! Welcome to Bitter Sweet Infamy. I'm Josie Mitchell. I'm Taylor Basso. On this podcast, we tell the stories that live on in infamy, the shocking, the unbelievable, and the unforgettable. The truth may be bitter, but the stories are always sweet. Hey Josie. Yeah? Hi. I heard, hi. Good to see you as always. I heard that if you darken a room and go to a mirror and say

Nadine Baichan five times, she will appear and host a podcast with you. Oh my god. Should we try it? Do you want to try it? Yeah. I mean, obviously. Okay. Turn of the light. Turn of the light. Okay. Wait. Blow out the candles. Nadine Baichan. Nadine Baichan. Nadine Baichan. Nadine Baichan. Oh, hey Nadine. Okay. We're just kind of in the middle of something here. Do you want to like wait outside? Well, you called me. I was very busy lying on my couch today, and I heard you call me, and I had to leave. You had to come in through the mirror, through the phone. I have no control over this. That's fair enough. You are part of the lore. You need to be available when summoned. This, everybody is a dear friend, Nadine Baichan. She is the coolest. She was born in Trinidad and raised

in Toronto. She's both an editor and a writer. Her writing has been anthologized and appears in several publications. Haslett, Canthius, Maisonne Nouveau, The New Quarterly, the best Canadian essays series. If you want the best Canadian essays, talk to this woman. Early next year, you can find her essay about Paul Bernardo and Carla Hamolca in a true crime anthology called True Crime Stories, Partners in Crime. She currently lives in Vancouver with her partner Brody and is working on personal essays and a collection of link short stories. Nadine is newly represented by the Transatlantic Agency at Shaly Night. Congratulations. Thank you. That's so exciting. It is. It is. I'm happy. So, first of all, welcome Nadine to the podcast. Thank you both so much for having me.

This is, I've been listening from the beginning. Wow. And I've loved it from the beginning. You guys have such a nice flow. I just like it a lot. And you make me laugh and it's great. And so, hey, thank you for complimenting our sixth flow. This is an honor for me to be on this podcast. Well, we're all honored. We've gotten that out of the way. Talk to me a little bit about, so you've written this essay about Paul Bernardo and Carla Hamolca, which for those of you who don't know in the audience is a very, like, it's the most famous probably Canadian murder case ever. Maybe, maybe picked it in the conversation. Yeah, I would say coming from the, from Ontario. Oh, God. Yeah, right. It was huge. It was huge. I grew up when I was a kid. I remember it being on the

news. I remember very vividly. My parents used to watch the six o'clock news. And when they were talking about Bernardo, they would have that disclaimer. If you have small children in the room, please make them leave. Yeah. And my parents would make me leave. So of course, the allure was all that much heightened, more heightened. Yeah, for sure. You're at the door. You're like, what's going on? I just remember they were talking about tapes. And I'm like, Oh, those tapes, tapes, they would like the basement tapes. You'd hear about the basement tapes all the time. And I was assuming in my young mind that they were showing the tapes on the news. Oh, God, can you imagine horrifying? Of course they weren't. Because, you know, no one has seen those tapes except for the

people who are in the trials that were like the jury and the people who are there. Jesus, imagine being on that jury. Oh, God. I feel like I was now. Yeah. Wait, have you seen the tapes now, maybe? You cannot see the tapes. They are, they are sealed. Rightly so. Possibly been destroyed. As far as I know. Oh, wow. Yeah, they, I can only imagine if anyone got their hands on those tapes, it would just explode the internet. Yeah. So just to just to take us back because people listening, if they're not familiar with the particulars of the case, the very broad strokes are there was a couple, a young, very kind of yuppie white couple, Paul Bernardo and Carla Hamulca living in Ontario. And Paul Bernardo himself had a long history of rapes and violent

crimes against women. He gets married to this woman Carla Hamulca, and effectively their stock in trade becomes kidnapping young teenagers, torturing them, teenage girls, torturing them on camera, like they tape it, and, and then obviously eventually killing them. And part of the infamy of this case as well is that before law enforcement was totally clocked in on how much Carla, the wife had participated, they offered her a real sweetheart plea deal. And then afterwards, they, it came out via these tapes that we're talking about right now that she was very much involved. It was one of the most contentious deals in recent Canadian history because a national disgrace. You talk, you talk to people about, you talk to Canadians about this case,

and they, and especially Carla, I've noticed because she got this deal, are very like, like people, people won't, I remember when Donna from that 70s show did the Carla movie, that was like the Canadians were like, I'll never watch that 70s show again. Yeah, I'll never watch anything with her again. She should be ashamed. Yeah. Whoa. It kind of, it nosedived her career quite a bit in terms of. She got into Scientology. And there's, I mean, she's, I mean, she was so in orange as the new vibe, she's okay. She, she cultivated that bad girl vibe, I guess. I will say to, to pluck myself, please do read my essay. I really tried my hardest to, to just sort of disseminate everything and try to show a timeline of him, yeah, her and how these two very tortured, damaged souls found

each other and started this monstrous nightmare together. So I've got just a, just a quick house keeping note before we move on to this next segment. You may hear some occasional squeaking and groaning and fart like noises. I'm in, we're in an unusual seating configuration. I've got, I'm in a squeaky swiveling leather seat. Nadine and I have one year, but in a piece we've got the microphone propped up on the GameCube. It's, it's really a Rube Goldberg situation here. So my apologies for any squeaking you might be hearing. Nadine, before we dive into our minfamous, I want to get into a min minfamous. We were talking a little bit about the subjects that you were going to do on this, this week's show. And in the end, yeah, you've settled on

something, but briefly in there, there was conversation about a haunted or cursed Trinidadian object of note. And I want, when you inevitably fly me out to Trinidad, all expenses paid. I want to know what I'm looking out for. Yeah, there's the story I heard when I was 10 years old. I was in Trinidad on a trip and the thing we did, regardless of the time of year, at this time of year, it was Christmas of all times, but my cousins decided to sit around and tell scary stories because we were all together. It was a rare time for us all to be together. So we were doing that. And my eldest cousin Stacy told us the story of this highway in Trinidad that has been plagued with accidents, just many, many accidents for no apparent reason.

Because it was a relatively new highway and people were saying, some people were saying, the reason that they got into these accidents was because they were seeing a girl, a ghost of a girl walk into their path and they swerved to avoid her and got an accident. Others were saying they saw her in their backseat when they're looking in the rearview mirror and that caused them to have an accident. So Stacy, too scary. So we're saying Stacy while Stacy was saying, well, the reason that this girl is walking across the highways because she's, she's been sort of attached to this statue. So it's a statue that was never moved. So I'll tell you the story that I know. Okay. So there are many different versions of the story because everyone there's many

different versions of the best stories. Of course there are. Many years ago, so Trinidad in the beginning was a plantation based income or economy. So you had white people from England and all overcoming building their plantations and you had the people of color who worked on these plantations and a man, his daughter lived there and she had an accident in the field near his plantation. I think one version is she was bitten by a snake and another version was she just mysteriously died. Okay. So he was so grief stricken that he built a statue to her and her name in the story is Maria. So they built this statue to her that they said was immediately haunted by her. They paved over a lot of this land for infrastructure, you know,

the population was growing and they built this highway but they didn't want to move the statue. For whatever reason, they felt it was important, I guess, because her ghost lives in it. Their people are superstitious to a fault. Of course, you're not going to mess with the statue. So they left it there and as the story goes, sometime about 20 years ago, somebody went there, got drunk and got upset because the statue wasn't listening to her prayers. She would pray to it and she attacked it and broke the head off of the statue. So it's a headless statue now. And that is when the the sighting started to happen of this ghost. Well, no shit, she's looking for her head. Yeah. So yeah. So in some cases, some people say it's a small child.

In some cases, they say it's a grown woman or it's an old woman with a chicken bone sticking out of her neck. But the other version of the story is the statue was never about a little girl, two dad and a plantation. It's the statue of the Virgin Mary. Oh, that was put there for worship. Yeah. Again, the head got broken off and it's the ghost of Virgin Mary coming to. Coming to fuck up this one stretch of highway internidad. Yeah. Well, yeah. This is the one thing that she can't put up with. So that is what I know. The story I know is the little girl who died on the plantation very tragically. Does the story, does the statue like undeniably exist? Could I go and look at the statue? Absolutely can. There's a bunch of websites on Facebook now

where people are looking at different artifacts and there is one where the people went to visit it and took a look at it and it's just like in an overgrown field with no head. Interesting. And did we, but of the actual, of the actual statue, is it of a little girl or is it of the Virgin Mary? The statue itself is of a woman. So it's the Virgin Mary. So it's likely very much the Virgin Mary. So someone did a piss up knocked the head off a sacred statue and now we have ghosts. Now we have ghosts. There we go. It's a fact though. That makes me. But you don't buy it. I don't. I mean, again, I've never seen a ghost. I have no ghost stories to tell of my own really to say that I would buy that some drunk swerved off a highway instead

of ghost walking in front of his car. I'm going to take y'all down to an ancient city, to know Jitland. Okay. The capital of the Meciche. Is that how you say it? I don't know. I don't know either. The capital of the Aztec people. There we go. Nice. Well, well before contact, the Aztecs lived in the Valley of Mexico of what we call like Mexico City. And the whole thing was big swamp and they had built this elaborate series of canals to connect all these different areas. So even though it was swamp, they had built up artificial islands and then that created space for canals, which acted as transport between this really huge area. So you could get from one side of the valley to the other

all by boat. And then of course, when the Spaniards came, it all got filled in and got, you know, that's why Mexico City is uneven ground, very unsafe for the earthquakes that happened there. But to the south of the city, there are still some of these canals that exist. Okay. The Xochimilco canals. Xochimilco. I went to Xochimilco together. Yeah. Really? Yes. A personal connection. We hopped in a cab. We drove in this cab for what, like an hour and a half. We got dumped out at like a little, what would that, a harbor area? Yeah. A little pier. A little pier that was covered in these boats, these like flat bottomed Chalupa boats that had these big decorated roofs on them. And they all had these huge,

bright signages. Each one was named. Like you would name a boat, but instead of just having it on the side, the sidewall of the boat, it had this big, like marquee style. Yeah. And these big, brilliant, like almost neon colors painted the whole boat. There was an Annemarie boat. There was an Annemarie boat. It was so cute. There was like a, I think, I think, I think I still have a photo of like a Lociento boat. It was just like, I'm sorry. Yeah. There was a Lociento boat. You're right. And they're designed to have a table in the middle so you can like bring a whole feast with you. And there's mariachis that you can hire to serenade you on the boats. They're moved through the canals by an operator, not unlike a gondola. Like they have a long stick and the canals are narrow

enough that they can push along the bottom and move you through the canal. It sounds so capital are romantic, you know? It is. It is. And it's very, everyone there is like kind of having the best time. So like for us, it was me, Josie, and Adam, and we were just like kind of splitting a bottle of wine and people watching, but like... Yeah, wearing flower crowns. Yeah. The next boat would be like somebody's birthday party and the whole family was there and they were bumping loud music. And it was cool. I like that. Yeah. It's a really popular spot on Sundays for families or anybody from Mexico City to come down and like spend a day on the water. So when we went, we were very excited to be there, of course, and we're like, well, we need to go to the spookiest attraction

around because that's what you do. And so we had kind of tentative plans like, okay, yeah, we'll take a boat to Isla de las Muñecas, the island of the dolls. Little did we know. Little did we know it's a two hour boat ride. Yeah. Oh, yeah. The canals are still pretty expensive. You're not around these like bumping parties. You're probably just like making small talk with the guy on your boat. Yeah. And he's like huffing it, like sweating. Yeah. And he's like, and you're just thinking how high that tip's got to be for making you go to the doll island. Yeah. So I'm going to tell you all about Isla de las Muñecas. Nice. This will make up for us not going. In the early 1950s, there was a man named Don Julian Santana, who up and left his wife and child. He had a young, a young child,

toddler age, and they seem to have been very happy. Neighbors, family weren't quite sure why he had left. It was all very sudden. But he left and he moved on to one of these built up islands on a lake in the Zochimilco canals. And of course, it's very, very south, south, south edge of the Zochimilco canals pretty far from everybody. And he has this house there. And it's not even really a house. It's like a small cabin that he lives in. And he's living there by himself. And he sees one afternoon as the sun is going down, he sees something floating in the canal by his house. By the cabin. And there's these beautiful stands of lilies that are there because it's kind of on the edge, almost like a little eddy bay. And he sees something kind of float into there. And he

goes down and he inspects it. And it's the body of a little girl holding a doll. Oh, he sees this little doll. And the water has kind of, you know, swirled its hair. And it's almost kind of gathering some of the moss from the water. And of course, the little girl as well. But he sees this little doll, and he looks at its eyes. And he knows that the little girl's spirit is in the doll. You lost 80. So he, not this specific doll, but he starts gathering dolls from Mexico. Why would you not get this specific doll? That's the whole doll? Well, the authorities had to take it. It was, oh, I see. It's evidence. I see, I see. So she's just,

this poor girl's just haunting some evidence locker somewhere. Yes. Yeah, that's all. Got you. But Don Julian, he takes any dolls that he can get. And he arranges them in the trees all around his island. First, it was along the perimeter, along the canal. And then those trees and branches started to fill up. So it became the whole island, including his cabin inside and out, are covered in dolls. And he's, he's trying to, to create a space for the little girl to come and be safe, because obviously her doll, it's either that or he wants to ward off the evil spirit of the little girl with all of these dolls. That option two would be my option. Yeah, yeah. He covers the entire island with them so much so that the neighbors are like, wow,

quite the collection. So they would, they would give him dolls for produce in exchange, because he also farmed a little bit on his island. And so he was gathering all on all of these dolls, and the island just fills up and fills up. And he doesn't clean the dolls or tend to the dolls, nothing like that. They're just hanging either suspended by twine or rope, or they're perched in branches, and they start to gather cobwebs and dirt, and limbs start to fall off, hair starts to fall off, they're covered in moss, eyes start to like, come out of them, or there's some, you know, new shit growing out of the eye hole, spiders coming out of their little doll mouths. Oh, god. What little girl wouldn't want that, right? Like, come, come, come, come play with your

weird spider doll and be safe. It's a dreamland. Exactly. Yeah. And people would start to come visit, because it was such a, such a sight to see. And he would let them, he'd say, you can come on, you can take photos, you can make a donation, or bring a doll. And around 50 years after he started doing this, he wasn't seen on his island for a little bit. People would try and come visit, but no one seemed to be there, so they kept going. And then a few days later, his own body was found among the lilies, where her little girl's body had been found. Oh, dear. And still to this day, all of these dolls infest this small little island in the canals, and you can go visit it if you have like four hours for the round trip. I was gonna say, that's like a solid,

you could drive to Fort Worth and go to bar 9-11 in that time. Yeah, that's true. But you're not on a beautiful canal. Hogtown, The Six, or Toronto. Whatever you call it, you can fly nonstop to Toronto on porter airlines. When you fly porter, you'll enjoy free fast Wi-Fi, and beer, wine, and premium snacks included with every fare. You'll also love that our planes have no middle seats. Discover why porter has been Eastern Canada's favourite airline for the last 16 years. Visit flyporter.com. Porter, actually enjoy economy. You go. Okay. Start us. Start us, mama. So we're getting into the flesh of this podcast episode. Oh, creepy. I say flesh because we're talking about

Candyman today. We're talking about this wonderful, amazing cult classic from 1992. I've seen it many times. I don't know. Can I ask you two, have you seen Candyman? wrote Josie, have you seen Candyman? I saw it just like maybe two weeks ago, because I had a little inkling. I was like, maybe this would be a good story for October, but I couldn't, I couldn't figure out an angle. So I'm glad. I'm so glad. I'm so stoked to hear this. This is awesome. Wow. So you saw it for the first time two weeks ago? Yeah. Wow. I can do you one better. Okay. So I had never seen the original Candyman. I've seen, I've seen the, the, the new one, the Jordan Peele one, although it's not direct. I think it's produced by Jordan

Peele, but it's directed by somebody else. Yeah. If a female director, a Nia, a Nia de Costa, yes, Nia de Costa. I hadn't, I didn't realize necessarily what the original Candyman was all about. My cousin, Talia was, and I mean this affectionately, the greatest ghoul of my young life. She was very, she was into all this spooky shit, right? So like, you know how you always know an older kid who's into all this spooky shit? Talia was that for me. So I had this notion that if Talia liked something a lot, it was way too scary for me. And Talia liked Candyman a lot. So I never watched it. I was like, too scary. If Talia is into it, this has got to be, you know, this has got to be the, the, the far reaches. And so I hadn't watched it, but I knew

that this was going to be your topic. So I watched it last night for the first time. For the first time. For the first time. I love this. I love that you guys are coming to it fresh. And as adults, because you're seeing the nuance in it, I think you can see the nuance in it as an adult. Beyond it being just a horror story. It is so many more things than just a horror story. Yeah. So for, I guess for the listeners out there who don't know anything about Candyman, the story of Candyman, it is a story, the protagonist is a woman named Helen, and she is a PhD student working on a dissertation on urban legends. Helen Lyles. Helen Lyles. So Helen is working on this dissertation and you've got to be careful

how many times we say her name. Very true. I think so. I want to just say spoiler alert for anyone who hasn't seen it. Yeah, we'll be talking about it. We'll be talking quite a bit about the plot of the original movie right now. So and throughout the rest of this, this podcast. So she and her, her friend who was, I guess her, her colleague and her research partner, Bernadette, they hear about the story of Candyman and they hear it from these two women who are working at the university. They're cleaning staff and they overhear her talking, doing an interview with someone and they said, well, you know, we know this story. It's true. It's about Candyman. It's about a woman who was killed by a hook. Before I get into anything else, I just want to say that

is a true story, but I'm going to get to that later. The, the kernels of that is true. Okay. So of course, like any good scary story, like any good story story, there is their curtain, there's a headless statue somewhere, there's a headless statue somewhere or something that as anything, it evolves from something, right? So, which is sorry, which is exactly what this movie is about. 100%. What is the truth, right? The truth is what you can handle. Put that on a button, Nadine. Damn. I nod, I noded forcefully as you said that. I was like, she's right. That's true. So she asked where this happened and the women tell her it happened in Cabrini Green. And this, so this is where we kind of go into fiction because although this story, that story

is true, it didn't happen in Cabrini Green, but I will get to that. So she goes to Cabrini Green, which is a housing project in Chicago. So Chicago is known for many things. And one of the things is their housing authority, which puts people in low income status in certain areas. They group them together and use different pockets to help them. I have a big air quotes when I say to help them. She's doing it. So Cabrini Green, specifically the William Green Homes, was this gigantic high rise in Chicago. And you see it in the movie. So she goes to visit and she goes into these dilapidated graffiti covered, just torn, worn down, disgusting units in this apartment building. And she goes into one and it's covered in graffiti and she walks through a hole in the wall.

And what she looks back is this amazing scene where it's the face of a gaping mouth and a man's face. And that's Candyman. That's the face of Candyman. And she takes a bunch of pictures. She's completely fascinated. She's super happy. She's gonna get a book out of this. Like she's like, my thesis is gonna become a book. This is gonna be big. What every young white lady grad student going into the projects is thinking. There's a book in this. Absolutely. There's a book in this. You know, she meets people, she meets this young mother named Anne-Marie. The other Vanessa Williams, we should note, of Melrose Place fame. Of not being the other Vanessa Williams fame.

So Anne-Marie has a baby in a stroller and she sees Helen and, you know, Helen goes in and asks her and talks to her about Candyman and how it is living there. And she tells her, you know, this is Islam. No one helps anybody here. There's gangs, there's violence, there's death. And this is the life we live. And you coming in here and, you know, taking photos doesn't help anybody. You're just like a lawyer. I don't want to get into the whole plot of the movie. But Candyman does make himself known to her as we find out because she's trying to debunk the idea of urban legends and how urban legends are just stories people tell to scare each other, keep each other complicit and things like that. And meanwhile, she has a shithead of a husband

who's a professor who's also doing stuff about urban legends and is, you know, leering at his grad students in such a long way. Helen Lyle, who's played by Virginia Madsen, one of the most beautiful actresses. So amazing. Oh God, she looks like she gives me a big whip, a hitchcock in this role. Absolutely. Icy blonde, thin, curled up hair. She looks like Grace Kelly, the whole movie. Piercing. And she's got this great voice. Tony Todd as Candyman is so sexy. Interesting take. No, no, I'm dead serious that the sensuality of this character, he's in this, he's six, five. He is very striking looking dude. He's in this fur coat. Good shoes. Yeah. Great shoes. Everything he says is so poetic. And in his like deep voice, and it's like dripping

with this like raw sensuality, every with this bee honey. Right. And I was watching like, kiss me with your mouth full of bees. Like honestly, I get I get it. I am I'm really glad you said that because I think this is where we're going to go into the origins of this story. The origins of this story comes from a writer named Clive Barker. So Clive Barker is a horror writer. He's a playwright. He's a novelist. He's a director of films. And he's from England. I think most people when they hear his name, they'll think about Hellraiser, the Hellraiser series. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, he is Hellraiser. Right, right, right. He wrote the original story for that, which was the Hellbound Heart. There's that sensuousness, like, absolutely. He does this thing. I went ahead and I read some

of his short stories. He does this thing. He does absolutely pair sex and sensuality with horror. Yeah. And he does it quite well. Yeah, he does. So in 1984, he started writing a series of anthologies of short stories, and he called them the books of blood. And Candyman, the story that Candyman first appears in is from 1985, and it's from a story called The Forbidden, from the fifth volume of the books of blood. So he wrote this story in 85. And Bernard, I want to talk a little bit about the director. So Bernard Rose, he's also English. He came upon this story and decided right away he wanted to adapt it. And he wanted to bring it to America. So according to Bernard Rose, he did his own research with his own team and found Cabrini Green. Right. There are other

people, including journalists, who say he must have been reading about the news in Chicago because there were a lot of things happening in the years preceding him doing this movie or even preceding even Clive Barker writing the story. What I want to tell you a little bit about Bernard Rose is he started out as a music video director. He has a little bit of controversy around him already. He did the very controversial video for Relax by Frankie Goes to Hollywood. What? What? Sorry, I don't know this music video. No, I know the song. Oh, I'm sorry. So... But I don't know the video. Thank you for apologizing. I was waiting for it. I think it's a great song that was also quite controversial,

and that it was banned in the UK for a time. Okay. Okay. Because of its overt sexual domes. So the music video, most people know, is just the band in front of some lasers. Yeah. Like singing the song. Isn't there some spandex involved too? And there's spandex and big puffy jackets and white gloves and hats and sunglasses and all that. Very typical 80s. Yeah, sounds air appropriate. But he did the original video, which was set a very straight laced man in a suit, which is the lead singer walks into a gay club, which is... Susie. S&M themed gay club and proceeds to rive and kiss and grind on a bunch of men and leather Wow. Throughout the entire music video. And he's having a great time and everyone's having a great

time. Relax. Yeah, relax. Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. Exactly. And that was too much for the British TV and media at the time. Yeah, we weren't allowed on TV for a long time. That's right. But that was a huge... That music video was a big deal for a long time. But so he decided to bring the story to America. So he wrote the screenplay for it. He found this housing project, which is Cabrini Green. I want to go back a little bit and I want to talk a bit about Cabrini Green and the CHA, which is the Chicago Housing Authority. Can I ask a question really quick? Sorry. Absolutely, you can. In the original short story, is Candyman Black? Or did that get adapted? As far as the story tells you, without telling you explicitly,

all the characters are white. Okay. It's white England. Okay. The character, all the characters, which are the same. You do have an Anne Marie character, you have a child, you have Candyman, you have... He's actually... His skin is described as quite pale, I believe, in the short story. Anne Helen was white in her scandalous, adultering husband slash boyfriend is white. Okay. Okay. So that was part of the adaptation. Okay. That was absolutely part of the adaptation. I think Bernard Rose, being a homosexual himself and experiencing a lot of prejudice where he came from, he wanted to bring that element into the story in a major way. And he could do that quite easily in the Chicago Senate. Very easily. Very easily. And I think that's probably one of

the best changes he made to the story. It was by making Candyman a black man. Yeah. With a story that is all wrapped up in racial prejudice. And miscegenation and all this shit. And, you know, modern segregation and all of that. Yeah. So it was great. So let's talk about Cabrini Green. So Cabrini Green, again, is not one building. It is a series of different areas of housing. So Cabrini Green is named after two people. So there was Francis Xavier Cabrini, which was an Italian nun who became a mother. She was born in 1850. Wait a minute. Nuns aren't supposed to fuck. What's going on? Capital M mother. Oh, she knew me. I thought she was a relapsed nun. Okay. Yeah, I was gonna say. I'm sorry. I'm not an expert on being a nun. She was married to

Jesus to the very end. I'm sorry. She was born in Italy and she wanted to go on missions and she wanted to help people. And her initial plan was to go to China. But she held audience with the Pope at the time and the Pope said, no, you have to go west. So she went to America. She went to New York and she lived in New York for a time where, and that's where she became Mother Cabrini. And she had her own group of nuns that would do service in her name. And she ended up in Chicago where she died. So she died quite young at the age of 67. Okay. In 1970. So this is years ago, but she was such a prominent figure in Chicago and she did so much good. They said that they wanted to honor her and they decided to name this housing project after her. Bummer. And then green. Bummer.

I think if she were alive today, I would hope that she would be appalled by what what her name has been attached to. Yeah. But and then green is just the name of this guy named William Green, who was the president of the Federation of Labor in Chicago for for a while. So he's just some bureaucratic man. I don't I don't know too much about him. They just talked about he had some policies that were good and bad for labor. And yeah, he was just a man of a white man of prominence in Chicago. Right. So that's what Cabrini Green stands for. So Cabrini, the name for her buildings. So it was the Francis Cabrini row houses. So there are these row houses, low rise units that were built in 1941. I mean, row houses were a thing that were easy to build and you could

cram a lot of people and they're all identical. And they're all identical cookie cutter, highly densely populated, if need be. And in the way that they're constructed, it becomes its own little community, right? Yeah, kind of cut off from other types of houses. And you come out the front door and you see your neighbor or you see the person fucking four doors down because there's nothing in the lawn. That's right. It's just well, just rows upon rows of houses with very little privacy and a very little space. So you had they had that and they built some mid right mid level and high rise buildings a little further north of that. And they called those the extension houses. And then we have the William Green homes. The William Green

homes is where Candyman was based or where it was filmed. And that was the high rise. So yes, eight gigantic high rises that they built in 1962. Of course, they were like, okay, these are gonna be good homes for people with low income. They're gonna be it's gonna be subsidized housing, you know, only a small percentage of their income will go to living in these places and they'll rise themselves out, they'll raise themselves up. Yes, as you do, as you do when you are cut off from everybody else and resources and everything. So that was where Chicago was in terms of the most densely populated areas where low income people were living, which were predominantly people of color, black people. All these complexes together, particularly green, the green homes,

was called Little Health, because it was rampant with crime, murders, there was a lot of drug trafficking going on, the gangs that were sort of running the streets would do a lot of their turf wars there in these areas. It got so bad that in 1981, the mayor at the time decided to make an example of things and to quote unquote, bring people in the public aware of this place, decided to move in to the green high rise. What? Yeah. So Jane Byrne, she was reading the newspaper in 1981 and said, there are murders happening in Cabrini Green. They're happening on a weekly basis. What's going on? I want to go and see what's going on. Oh, wow. So she gets in her limousine, goes there, talks to some people and she's like, you know what, I'm gonna move in there. Oh,

Helen Lyles, no. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Oh, Helen, no, don't do it. Sure, initial plan was she wasn't going to tell anyone she moved in, and she wasn't going to tell anyone when she was moving out. But she held a press conference and put out a giant press release saying, in a few days, I'm going to move into the high rise. They'll notice when the limo pulls up, man. Of course, the city sends a crew in to do a clean of where she's going in. Of course. And so they clean it, there's graffiti, the lights in the hallways don't work, so it's pitch black in there sometimes, the elevators don't work, there are children playing in the hallway, like dozens of children

on every floor playing in the hallway, cockroaches everywhere, and just like filth. So they go in and they kind of clean it up a little for her because she's going to be staying in this fourth floor apartment. I think it was a three bedroom apartment she was going to stay in with her husband. Right. So she goes in, she's got her limo, she goes in, and in according to her memoir, she's like, well, I wanted to go in alone and live like the people live, but I'm the mayor and you can't do that. Yeah, you can't do that. So she brought with her, let's see, I mean, consult my notes, so I get it right. 16 personal guards. So split into your average case, your average, let me stop you right there. Your average person living in this unit does not have access to 16

personnel. Or cleaning crew. Or cleaning and maintenance crew, right? Or a light bulb. Yeah, right. Yes. So right away, you are not doing what you said you were going to do. Carry on. So she moved in in late March of 1981. And according to a report, and I quote, this was the second day she was there at a news conference in a small, freshly painted and scrubbed social room in the building about a mile away from her Gold Coast apartment, which was a luxury apartment about not too far at all. She could see Cabrini Green from her apartment. Mrs. Byrne, wearing a lavender suit, said that she and her husband had a while the way the evening watching the Academy Awards on the television. The television set was on loan, as was the rest of the furniture

in the tube. She was living in a two bedroom, two bedroom, fourth floor apartment. She announced her plan to slip in to the apartment with little notice. But 11 days ago, it was a friend, a media friend. So she goes in there, she's got 16 personal guards. So it's eight people during the day, eight people at night. And this is she's got a two bedroom apartment. She's got a two bedroom apartment that has been furnished. And also, because the apartment across the hall was vacant, two security guards were living there and there at all times. Right. And there was always at least one person standing outside the door when she was home. So when she told the people that she was moving in there, a bunch of children who lived in Cabrini Green wrote her letters and said,

Mrs. Mayer, do not move in here. You will be killed. You will be shot. You will die. Do not move in here. Oh my gosh. It's just heartbreaking. That's so sad that a child needs to concern themselves with writing that kind of letter. Yeah, exactly. They were interviewing like mothers on the street and some of them are like, this is a publicity stunt and it's disgusting. Of course. And some of them are like, you know what? We want her to come. We want her to do something. Yeah. Maybe if you see what this is like. She's here. Yeah. Yeah. So she goes in and spends 25 days there. While she's there, she did do some good. She started some sports clubs for the kids. She got the complex sort of cleaned up and stuff. She did a lot of walking around during the day talking to people. But what

she also did was because of the fact that she was there, there were police there all the time. More police than there would have ever been because the police were scared to go there. Right. The police used to go there and if they saw that the lights were busted out in the building or the elevator didn't work, they weren't going to go and uncheck on anything that had been reported because they feared for their lives. Right. But because she had her detail there, because there were a bunch of bodyguards and stuff, they felt like they could do their job finally. It's also an implicit value judgment of the worth of any particular life because if you think that if you go into a building with a broken light bulb and it's Helen Lyles up the stairs, you know what I

mean? That's right. Then all of a sudden you've found your courage maybe. That's right. Whereas opposed to oh this person is black, poor, maybe a criminal. But the other thing she did was she invited the police to come and start arresting people for petty crimes because she thought the problem here is the gangs and the crime. So yeah, we wipe out the petty crime then. They actually, there was a police station nearby that they set up a misdemeanor's court at because she knew there were going to be hundreds and hundreds of people going through there because she was there. She's like this is great. She also went and made sure that the building inspection people would go into like the local liquor stores and grocery stores and shut them down if they were not up to

code because she's like, you know, liquor is also equals to crime. So she did a lot of that too. So you had a lot of young people going, getting crimes charged against some misdemeanor crimes. Yeah. And she said she didn't see any gang violence when she was there. Well, of course. Because all of your bodyguards would like scramble that out of your view. Exactly. And there is a rumor that there was this really, really famous, well-known activist named Marion Stamp, and she lived in Cabrini, Green, and she and her people were watching the mayor the whole time. And she said, I cannot corroborate this with a source, but she said that she saw the mayor leave every night. She said the mayor never stayed overnight. She saw her

leave every night out the back door. She heard a gunshot when she was watching the Academy Award. She's like, that's it. Yeah. I'm out. So Jane Burns' husband also was getting involved with the community. He even said, I'm going to coach the Little League baseball team. That's what I'm going to do from now on. So she left. After 25 days, she left after Easter. So before she left, she had this huge Easter celebration set up in the grounds. She had a choir there singing a religious song. She had a minister who called her the newest and truest resident of Cabrini, Green. I don't know. Half right, maybe. Maybe newest, yeah. And that she had come and done amazing things. And she had done it by the hand of God and had brought her here. And she was going to be this,

you know, the white savior to the max. Right, right. And the people were there and they seemed appreciative. And she was leading songs and she had brought like junk food and cotton candy and some rides for the kids. And they had a film crew there documenting it. And you can find an edited version of this footage of just her singing her hams and telling the children, bring your friends, go up to the building, bring your friends. And there's an unedited version where the film crew turns away to look at some protests. So there are people protesting led by Marion Stamp and some other people and they're yelling at her, we don't want eggs, we want jobs. Yeah. And they're there, they're just doing their thing. They've got their placards and they're being peaceful. Some of them

calling her the Ku Klux Klan. Some of them calling her full of shit. You know what though, that's that's the right to protest. Yeah, absolutely. The police descend upon them and it's on film and started costing his people and they're pulling the signs away, they're pulling the bull horns away. And they started resting people. And you can hear people yelling, what's their crime? Why are you resting them? The police aren't saying anything. And the crew actually follows these people to the the jail and follows them and Marion Stamp goes on and talks about, you know, Jane Byrne is here trying to be a white savior, we don't need her coming in here. And it was really quite a thing because on one side you have her screeching hallelujah into a

microphone. And on the other side, you have these people being like beaten and put into cop cars who could who dare to say anything against her. So she left and I she talked a little bit about it in the memoir about how she used to go back and visit sometimes and her husband still went and coached the the Little League until she lost the election two years later. Then according to an article, a little boy went up to her husband and asked, are you going to continue coaching? And he's like, no, we lost. And that was it. So I think that's one of the reasons why Bernard Rose decided that Cabrina Green needed to be the setting of this movie. Yeah, because there was so much around it. So many big hard feelings

around it. And nothing changed. This movie was set in 1992. Yeah, that's 10 years later. Yeah, more than 10 years later and nothing had changed, right? The people were still overcrowded in these apartments. Nothing was being maintained. They would ask for the CHA, the Chicago Housing Authority, to come and do little fixes here and there. They never would. They'd never send anybody. The saddest part about this story is that Cabrina Green was not the worst of these projects. So I'm going to talk to you now about the story of she's called Ruthie Jean in the movie. Her real name was Ruthie Mae McCoy. She also lived in a project, but she lived in one of the projects called the ABLA. So the ABLA was another grouping of low-rise and high-rise

apartments that was south of Cabrina Green. So to be clear, this is the woman who, in the movie Candyman, when Helen Lyles first hears about someone getting killed by Candyman when the two kind of cleaning staff are in, this is the story that they told her is now, we're getting the real life version of that. We're getting the real story of that. So in the movie, they say that Ruthie Jean was living in Cabrina Green. In real life, she was not. She was living in the ABLA homes. Specifically, this home called the Grace Abbott Homes, which was a high-rise as well. Okay. But it was a smaller high-rise. So Ruthie lived in this high-rise where, yes, you had that cabinet, the construction where you pushed a cabinet out and you could see into your neighbor's

apartment. Yeah. So in that apartment, every level had that. And they had it that way so that maintenance could go in and check the pipes and stuff. Okay. Okay. So they did it that way, but they never maintained it anyway. So they didn't maintain it. And people were, it was a regular thing where people were breaking into apartments that way, because a lot of the apartments were vacant and stuff. So this woman, Ruthie May, she was a 52-year-old grandmother who was living alone at the time. And she became this sort of like poster person for the crime that was happening. And I feel like her story got kind of pushed back. But there was this one journalist. His name was Steve Boguera. And he believes that Bernard Rose, the director of Candyman, read his articles,

because that's where he got the story about they came through my menacing cabinet. Because that's what she told the police. So she called 911 one night in April of 1987. And she said, someone is coming through the wall. Please come. The elevators are working. Okay. Someone said, she said the elevators are working because the cops would not come into the buildings if they knew the elevators were not working. Yeah. God love. So horrible. So the cops go, they go in, they, she was living on the 11th floor. They go up, they knock on the door. No one answers. And there's all these rules about you can't just break into a building, into a room, unless you can hear something going on, or you have a warm to do it. They had neither. So they said, okay, we'll go,

we'll come back. So five minutes later, they come back, they're asking the janitor, they find a janitor, say, come open this door. Well, the door, the lock, the key won't work in the lock. So they leave again. And they leave for a day. Even if a call for even if a distress call has come, they can't open the door like that. They didn't want to bust in. They were afraid of being sued. They were afraid of the CHA getting involved and saying you have damaged our property for no good reason. And, you know, she was apparently an old woman, they were asking around about her as well. She was a crazy old lady who made up stories. So this is why I had to look into Ruthie May. And Steve McGeer, the journalist, did a really, really great article about her because he wanted

people to know who she was. Of course. So Ruthie May, so to finish the story of her death, they finally get into the apartment a day and a half later and they find her in her bathroom. She's been shot four times. She's got a hand in her chest and she's dead. And she's been, they figure she's been dead for a day and a half. So they figured about five minutes or 10 minutes after she called the police, she had died. And the cabinet had not been pushed off the wall because the cabinet had been off the wall for a year. So Ruthie May's apartment had been broken into a year before by some young people who had just run through her apartment. They were running away from somebody. Maybe they were pursued by the cops. And she called the CHA to

tell them, I am an old lady and I cannot put this back up myself. You have to come do it. And they never did. So she had a gaping hole in her wall in her bathroom. And there were people, she said that there were people who were living in the vacant, squatting in the vacant apartment across. And she was scared for her life. Of course. Correctly so it turns out. Yeah. They finally did come through her bathroom and killed her. And so that is sort of the beginning of her story in terms of knowing about her that when they went in and realized this cabinet's been off the wall for a year, they needed to look into this. What's going on in this building? Yeah. Right. So Ruthie May, she was the grandmother. She had a daughter who had two kids. And her daughter used to live with

her. Her and her two kids. But Ruthie May had mental health issues. She was very angry, very curmudgeonly. She was very paranoid. People said that she used to walk around jiggling people's doors to see if their door was locked. And if their door was unlocked, she'd walk in and yell at them. And she's like, well, you know, you live here, what are you doing? Go in and curse them out and yell at them. And they say like, if you heard a car going off, a car alarm going off outside, it's probably Ruthie May checking the door to see if it's locked or not. Because she was so paranoid about things. So she was a very religious woman. But Ruthie was right in the end. She was right. Absolutely. She was right. You could get killed in this part of town. Was that her intent? Like,

you need to lock your doors, that kind of thing? Yes. Yes. She was checking on people in her very curmudgeonly way. She wasn't nice. People didn't like seeing her around because she was just so crotchety. But her story was she at a very young age, around her twenties, around the time she had her daughter, she was showing signs of mental illness to her family. She had outbursts and she would talk to herself and things. And it kind of was never treated. And it came to a head where she and her daughter used to have a lot of fights. And her daughter had actually spent some time in jail for misdemeanors and things. And they didn't get along. And they were both living, I think the daughter was not living there officially. So Ruthie was the only one on the lease. And at the time,

with government assistance, she was only making $146 a month. Okay. So that's why she had to live there. And there was an incident where she was left home with one of her grandchildren. And she brought him to the hospital with some bruises and told them he'd fallen down some stairs. And they didn't believe her because she was acting erratically. And so this is the thing about that the author talks about that people who live in these homes and have mental health issues, they're often exacerbated. So anything that happens, any stressful thing that happens will push you over the edge. So they told her, did you do something to your grandchild? And she said, no, we fell down the stairs. But they didn't believe her. And they think they admitted her to

psychiatric facility to have her checked. So they found out that she had residual schizophrenia. Yeah. And they told her, you can get help. You're on assistance. If we can prove that you have this disability, which is mental health, we can get you more money. So she said, okay, so she went and she was going into this, it was a psychiatric psychiatric center in Chicago. And she was going under her own volition and they were helping her. She was getting her GED. She was learning about how to cook. She was becoming more even killed in terms of her temperaments. And she would go there every day and she'd go back home. And she would tell people at the center, I need to get out of the JNAB at home. I need to get out of there. And if I can get this money, then I'll be able to

leave. Yeah. The CHA finally approved her application. And because she had applied for it a few months before, she got a lump sum of money. Okay. She got about $1,000 that she immediately took out. And she's like, I'm going to move out. Yeah. And what we think happened was, or what this journalist thinks happened was, is that people found out she had $1,000 on her. And thus the break can happen. Yeah. Because they couldn't find the money when they went in. They assumed that she was broken into because she told one too many people she had money and she was leaving. That's Ruthie May's story. That's so fucking tragic. And the one, the tiny little glimmer is that because she was on the outs with her daughter, the daughter and the two grandchildren

were not living there at the time. Right. So she was alone. Yeah. And they said, well, you know, no one wanted to say they knew anything. Because when they were asking people, who did you see leave this apartment? No one wanted to say anything. Because if you say anything, you're a turner. Yeah. You're next. Yeah. So they eventually caught these two young men. Their names were Edward Turner who was 19 and a 25 year old named John Hondres. And they're both also living in the apartment complex. And they used to go hang out in the vacant apartment at the time with their girlfriends and other people and gangbangers and drug dealers and stuff. As you do your young, you're trying to build a reputation. Yeah. Or like this is the community that's right in front of you. This is

your community. They charged them with murder and robbery and all of that. But they could not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they were there or they didn't do anything. So they both were eventually freed of all charges. So guilty or not, Ruthie May's killers have gone. There hasn't been any justice in the case of Ruthie May before. So that is Ruthie's story. So that is sort of the context for the movie. And so I want to talk about the movie a little bit because because from there we have Candyman who I mean Ruthie Jean in the movie is just a tiny little nugget of a thing. Yeah. Spoken up but never seen. Yes. Spoken up and never seen. We don't even get like a little flashback of something happening. She's the inciting incident. But

absolutely. We have Helen Taylor use the great word interloping into this community for her own purposes. She's trying to get people to talk to her. No one wants everyone's cagey except for Ann Marie and her little cute little baby and you know telling her the story. And she I think it's at that point she I think she feels remorseful that she didn't bring her camera so she wants to go and bring her camera and go back and her friend Bernadette's telling her why are you going like why are you you know rolling the dice twice sort of speak with this place. Right. So Bernadette is immediately worried for her. Right. Bernadette it should be noted is a black woman and she's sort of they're narratively to represent I guess the perspective of a black woman whose

background is more similar to Helen's. Yeah. She's coming from this kind of more ensconced academic field. She's not the cabrini green life isn't her life and she's kind of also quite uptight about going there. And there is of course the little boy that kind of is her guide who shows up this very morose sad little boy who seems like he's seen a lot of shit. Yeah. He looks tired. A tired little boy. A tired little boy. And this little boy character is actually also in the short story. Like he's also he also kind of appears to tell her you shouldn't be here. And the short story also has this idea that they're getting ready for a bonfire. They're going to do this big bonfire. She goes with her camera takes the photos and that's when she gets accosted. That's when

she gets assaulted by the man with the hook. Yeah. And that's when everything changes because finally a white woman's been accosted in this place and she's going to speak out and people are going to get arrested because and they believe that this man is the one who's been masquerading as the candy man has been terrorizing. Right. A real world a real world killer. A real world killer. He's hiding behind this veil of a community story to carry out real world killers. To carry out real world killings and to absolutely protect himself from ever coming to any kind of justice. And then she's super excited because she's got her pictures. She thought her camera was destroyed and she but she's got her pictures and she's walking in this parking lot. Always scary place.

Always scary even in the even though it's like the middle of the day. We love a spooky parkade. And she's looking at her slides of her photos and we are introduced to Candyman and you just hear his voice first and it's a sultry calling of her name Helen. I just love it just and she's almost like like who's that? Like she just seems like she's instantly entranced by that. Who is that? She's not scared at the get go. Which is actually like a an interesting move for a horror film because it would be so easy to tap into that fear right away and just capitalize on that. But to kind of shift it to this like entranced seduction is like it. Well the whole movie kind of changes there. I feel like. Yeah. Yeah. I think you're right. Yeah. It becomes way

more of like psychological thriller about a woman maybe losing her mind. It's unclear and committing all of these seemingly committing all of these violent atrocities that she has no memory of. Yeah. That's right. And it's all there's this really cool sort of gothic turnout happens. You've got the music playing. The music is one of my favorite music. That's right. It's so great. Yeah. Especially in the beginning credits where we're looking down on the city and this music is playing and it's haunting and it's minimalist and it's just yeah it instantly kind of sets the tone for what to come what's to come. It's an artier horror movie than I expected. Yes. Yeah. Yes. Absolutely. It definitely taps into those like tropes. Like he's almost like the phantom of the opera a little

bit. You've got this idea of him this looming figure that's got a romantic yearning under him. He's got a big heart full of bees and they're all for you. That's right. Every single little stinger. And she falls she faints and she wakes up to Ann Marie screaming her head off you know and she's in a pool of blood and she's in Ann Marie's apartment and and just everything is covered in blood and there's the dog there beheaded and the baby is missing. Yeah. And you immediately turn to a scene of her being walked out by a bunch of policemen out of this apartment and she's been deemed crazy like okay you've you've killed this dog you've taken this child where is the child. So now she is now the villain in the movie like you

we've turned it she's this villain. Yeah. Which is great which is another great turn. Very adventure. It's so good. Yeah. Yeah. Because all of the theme of her extracting this white woman coming into this space and extracting something for her own benefit and not giving anything back like it becomes a reality in a very clear way. Yeah. And instead of becoming from the outside world a damsel in distress she has now become the person to be afraid of. And not only is now she being terrorized by Candy Man she now has to prove that she's not this crazy killer. And so she's tied up in I guess it's a psych ward she's like strapped down to a gurney. Yeah. And Candy Man appears again with his mouth full of bees and he kisses her. Was that was that a part you

liked to hear? Yeah I did. Sorry. Taylor she's a bee now and he's like oh hey Tavis sent me a text. And she gets put out on bail I suppose this is the point where she's just put on bail and she's trying to explain what's happening to her and she goes she feints again and wakes up and now Bernadette is dead. Yeah Bernadette. Oh yeah Bernadette there's that's gonna be a closed casket for Bernadette I'm afraid. She's taken away this is when she's strapped down to the gurney and everything and she's being further terrorized by Candy Man and we're getting these he's showing her this glimpses of his lair with all these candles lit and it's like oh it's it's again if we're not in the movie it's super romantic because it's like candy and stuff.

It's but it's also like decrepit. It's decrepit. It's just like this crumbling murals that are kind of falling apart and I mean if you're into that it's probably a wonderful time. That's true. But let's just put that out there. So he's he's lowering her because Dooly noted Taylor. He's lowering her because he's showing her that the baby is there so he's got the baby the baby is alive. I believe at this point in the movie she's been held in this ward for a while. A year at least yeah. It's some time has passed she's been drugged to a stupor and it's been months maybe a year. So she gets out and the first place she goes of course is home. But is it? But is it home? When that she goes home and the dandy grad students

they're painting your walls. Pepto-Bismol pink. I was gonna say Pepto pink. Total Pepto pink. The most nauseating. If you came in and found some chick half your age painting your walls of this color you would be livid and she was. Yeah absolutely. And Trevor comes in like at half mass Hey babe come back to the neck bite in fact. Whoa. He's like wearing a bathrobe or something in the scene and he's just he also goes completely pale because she's shown up. She's distraught. She has nobody right? She has no support whatsoever. I think she's crazy. She goes back to Cabrini Green and confronts Canyon man who tells her he has the baby and he will spare the baby if she comes be it's with him. Bees with him. Bees with him. Yeah.

Be his murder victim. I mean that's the line right? Be my murder victim. Be my victim yeah. And I'll you know I'll let the baby go. Yeah so she passes out again she's she's constantly passing out in this scene. She's heavily drugged. Also yeah. She just got off like aunties like deep deep anti-psychotics. Fair enough. Which she's been on for months. She probably got some bad vertigo we don't know about like come on. Cut her cut her cut her break. Cut her a break indeed she's doing her best and she wakes up and she has his voice telling her you you have to understand why and she sees the mural of him and she sees the mural of this woman this beautiful blue eyed woman that looks just like her. Yeah and like the way that they've like styled her hair too it has Grace Kelly vibes

but then it also has like colonial like 18th century vibes too if you just see it in the right way which in the mural you begin to see because yeah. Yeah so the mural has sort of I think it's like a collage of things but you do see her and she realizes oh I look like this woman he loved. So she goes out and the bonfire is is all set up like is there's piles of like old old furniture and stuff set up in the courtyard. Great climactic scene. And she hears the baby crying and she realizes the baby canyman has put the baby in there so she runs out crawls in there he's in there taunting her to come in. This is a just to sorry just to set the stage a bit this is like a gigantic pile of like chairs mattresses old lumber springs metal shit. Yeah it's like two stories

high. It's a massive massive massive pyre. And it's a combination of stuff they've been putting there for weeks or something. Yeah so it's just gigantic so she's able to crawl in through spaces and he's there with the baby and he grabs her and holds her with the intent that I lie we're going to die all three of us will die. Trapped in this bonfire. Trapped in this fire which has been lit now and poor Anne-Marie is out there looking at the fire like a ghost like she's just staring she's just dazed. So you know Helen eventually gets away because of course she has to get to get away from him he's burning up and screaming and as she gets away where you know you're hoping she'll get out but of course she starts burning and she but she has the baby right and she has the baby so she's

she's grabbed the baby from Candyman she has him and she's crawling out and I love the scene where she's on fire and she's still crawling out yeah gets out her entire back of her body is in flames and they they crawl they all come to her and they see that she has the baby the baby is safe she looks up at Anne-Marie and she dies yeah and meanwhile Candyman is in there burning to death I don't know how a spirit can burn to death but the movie tells us he burns to death he's not dead it's Candyman it's Candyman so this entity has been extinguished I guess and that's and the story is you know you see you know they they see that she's brought the baby out that she saved the baby and she dies and we go forward and it's her funeral and we have this scene that's so weird

where you're looking inside her casket right and you see her dress in her face all white she's got like a flower wreath around her head and like an obvious wig because her hair has been burned off right yeah yeah and this is very angelic looking figure that they have her dressed as and the people of Cabrini Green show up to the funeral and they throw a hook into her coffin as like a sign of respect we're definitely supposed to take it okay yeah I was so confused by that I didn't know what was how to take it yeah I think that the film ultimately seeks to redeem the Helen character like I think that I was saying to Nadine I think it's an unusual um well one of the main differences between Candyman this and Candyman 2021 is that Candyman 2021 follows black characters interacting

with this lore and this myth and and coming into harm's way because of it whereas Candyman 92 is very much like an affluent white woman's sojourn into this but having said that as much as that is sort of an old school move I think that where Candyman is an unusual film for its time is that it's very um critical in a lot of parts about Helen and her methods and what she's doing and how she's being a bit of a vulture on this community with that said I think too yeah and academia yeah hers like a stand-in for a larger anthropology yeah with that having been said I do think that the film ultimately seeks to redeem her like I think that and that's kind of what that end scene is about I guess I I got those vibes but then I also felt like maybe the hook putting the hook

in you know in with her casket was you are the Candyman like you have become the Candyman here's your hook here's your hook like and I had two I had both going in my head and I didn't know where where to land on that so I didn't I don't know if it was like a an honoration or an accusation and maybe it was both I I don't know when I was younger because I came to this movie when I was way too young yeah okay yeah how did you watch this but you didn't like your parents were like oh six o'clock news says you need to get out of the room get out of here nady well here's the thing when my parents went to bed they went to bed they weren't getting up right so the TV was cut so the TV was kind of free range for us and at night there was this sci-fi channel that used to

show random movies on Friday nights and Candyman came on and I was probably 10 years old or something when I saw Candyman for the first time and I've watched it many times since and I agree with you there's an ambiguity in that scene where it seems like they're grudgingly coming to pay respects to her yeah yeah but there's no love loss there like there's just like you are now the monster here's your hook yeah it can yeah I think you can interpret it either way and be satisfied yeah yeah yeah so they come they throw the hook Trevor is there when his new girl confused yeah and like you don't even you don't even like you don't even do like oh yeah Candyman she was talking about that a lot he had a hook right yeah nothing and he goes I guess these are

those black people she was hanging out like where was this guy these are the people that she terrorized exactly um and then the last you know the last scene is he's home and he's sad because he misses his poor Helen and he's not happy with this girl that walks around without a bra at home the Pepto is Pepto Bismol girl Pep the Pepto Bismol girl who's just trying to I think grudgingly be a housewife to him she doesn't seem too happy and he goes and he's crying about Helen and he says her name five times and she shows up yeah looking like Kimberly Shaw at a Melrose place pretty rough as you do pretty rough as you do looking like looking like she just crawled out of that fire which is great I love it yeah and she and she takes care of him she takes care of him

and the last scene is the girlfriend walking in and seeing him and screaming and that's just the end the end yeah and that is Candyman and I saw that movie and the music comes on again and you just pulled right back into the atmosphere with the power of cinema the power of cinema and I think it it terrified me I was terrified by that movie but but it was also so good so yeah it's just it's one of my favorites and I'm so glad I just got to talk about it but you're glad too but there are two more there are two sequels so there's two so there's candyman farewell to the flesh okay um which came out in 1995 okay so in relatively short three years I think I mean as much as I say it's a classic I think

people really liked Candyman yeah Candyman is critically well-recognized so they wanted to bank on it so they wanted to figure out well what story do we follow and they just follow the story of a woman living in New Orleans who is connected to Candyman because um her bloodline she's part of his bloodline she's like okay so it trying to it really stares really hard at the the race theme right and that you have descendants who are blonde white women who have basically denied their heritage they've denied him his uh ancestry because the mother is is completely ashamed that this man was her grandfather so just the story of that and he starts to haunt this character this great granddaughter character named Anne but again another white protagonist is that yes it's

a blonde another blonde white girl very beautiful white woman who finds out about how she's related to Candyman yeah and then there's a third movie okay which is supposed to be set in 2020 because it's 25 years later okay but when did it come out it came out in 2000 okay and that movie is just it's it's a low-key B movie there's a lots of tits around okay it's an asshole over the place okay and um it's about so Annie has a daughter at the end of the second movie so it's Annie's daughter all grown up right and she is she's an artist herself so she wants to bring her heritage to to the people to the masses so she finds Daniel Robotide's paintings and puts them in on an artist's exhibit and then he just starts terrorizing people for no apparent reason because he's candy

man and they allude to the fact that he wants to like have us a romantic sexual relationship with his great great granddaughter oh it's very poor very poor Tony Todd himself said and i quote i do i do not care for that movie oh no is he in it but he's in it he's in it okay and he does he acts his heart out yeah as candy man slash Daniel Robotide and he is 100% a villain in that movie okay right he is now the villain to defeat what she does quite easily okay uh Freddy Krueger yeah got you so he's he's he's completely at that point unredeemable like you've lost any sense of his character and his nuance yeah for like his motivations to be yeah he's a horror movie bad guy he's a horror movie in the third in the third installation in the

franchise where you're there for kills splatter count you know that kind of thing kills splatter count and like yeah blood covered breasts yeah very nice looking boobs and um yeah it's it's very lacking in substance and plot and i watched it because i felt i should yeah yeah that makes sense look it for you and you know i was kind of zoning out on it because yes and it's set in LA called day of the dead and it it it kind of evokes some of the mexican culture uh and also talks about the police uh prejudice against mexican men okay a little bit very little yeah but it's sort of it's sort of there because like candy man is sort of a socially conscious horror franchise and so we need to get a little bit of that in there but let's have three titty

shots for everyone yeah yeah let's make sure we see the main character naked in a bathtub crying so yeah there's that so i would say as as a completist the completist in me decided to watch those two movies for sure now you we just got just solid two minutes of material out of it so yeah time well spent and so that was the trilogy and i think the trilogy ended on a pretty low note so i was very excited to hear that they did a new movie the the new candy man yes 2021 candy man josey have you seen this i have not and i actually teller i um because after i watched the earlier one i was like i don't know if i can go see it in theaters and i knew you had seen it so i was almost about to text you and be like do you think i could handle it in theaters

because yeah yeah okay okay then i ran out of time i didn't i couldn't go but um yeah that's all right the kills are less graphic okay i think the or the first candy man is the scarier movie okay yes but i agree you know that i'm not good in like especially a theater situation with scary movies it just like notches it out like a few runs so watch it at home watch it at home with batman curl that next year i won't spoil it but i will say the nice the thing i loved about it is that we returned to cabrini green yeah good yeah good and they absolutely the great thing is they talk about what cabrini green is today which is a hundred percent gentrified so i think one of the last things i'm going to tell you is a little bit about what the chicago housing projects is like

oh god so around um late then the late 90s they started condemning those buildings so they started condemning the green buildings um some of the families refused to leave because they had nowhere else to go they knew anywhere they went was going to be the same or worse yeah and this was their home if for all that they had a lot of crime and a lot of issues it was their home yeah so the row houses remain so the the cabrini row houses stayed there's 584 row houses 150 of which are currently livable because they renovated 150 okay the rest are are condemned and boarded up right so people are still living in those but um like the jane abbot home where ruthi may died that was demolished and all of the green high rises were demolished totally yeah okay totally demolished so i as i

do what i'm reading about places i went on google earth to look at these places so um the abla which was the grace abbot home it's nothing there's nothing there there's a couple churches and like some small buildings but there's just like a field okay so they haven't done anything there yet uh the row houses are there but where um candy man takes place is now a really lovely middle class red brick a bunch of like town houses and a lot of upper class people live there now and there's a giant target right next to it and like a sacks with avenues nearby so all of these people who live there have been displaced into communities that are south and um like west and there was this article that um this university did where they interviewed this guy who grew up in

cabrini green and he said the cha told him that they have this thing called the right to return so that anybody who got moved out would allow to return if they could to the renovated buildings because they're supposed to be like mixed community housing in there okay but of course as things go they there's a bunch of people who live there who were refusing to allow the cha to let people move back in they don't want crime to return they don't want these undesirable people to return and there are only certain places he can live anyway because of how the cha works you can only live in certain buildings you can't go above a certain amount of rent because they cover you get to spend 30 percent of your income on rent and then they cover the rest they're not

going to cover a huge amount of money yeah so they're stuck so they're they've moved but they're in the same place in terms of their livelihoods and the quality of life they have yeah meanwhile people like they say a lot of real estate agents don't want to use the words cabrini green when they talk about those units yeah and it's in one of the most desirable parts of the city it's downtown it's near everything and the movie the new movie addresses that head on yeah it does that's really cool i think yeah some people might say it's not subtle enough but i don't think this is the point yeah the subtlety is not the point if you want subtlety go watch the original movie which in itself is also not very subtle right yeah um but you have which is great you have

really good strong black characters yeah that are leading the film yeah strong black actors too they're everyone everyone in that movie does a bang up job i think people anyone listening to the podcast would probably recognize um the protagonist's partner she's plays monica rambo in the marvel universe right now so she's huge like for all the nerds out there like me that know marvel she's playing a character people are really excited about so i was happy to see her and yeah yeah um tiana paris yeah yeah yeah she's good yeah and so i it's a great movie i would definitely recommend that you see it okay now that you you're completely ensconced in candy man well i know you know that you have the sweetness of immortal living on your tongue bees everywhere

yeah totally yeah on that note thank you so much nadine for uh bringing that story and for giving us something sweet to nibble on uh this halloween but a little bitter too so a little bit as well next uh the next episode the next time you hear from us it will be halloween day the nadine will be gone but we will still be here you get to hear what happens when josie and i kind of pick the same subject not quite not quite almost wow wow wow yeah nadine do you want to send us out with a stay sweet stay go right in the mic go right in the give it a little candy man vibe yeah candy man vibe stay sweet everybody yeah that was good dude that was good all right get back in the mirror now thanks for tuning in if you want more infamy go to bittersweetinfamy.com

or search for us wherever you find your podcasts we usually release a new episode every other sunday and you can also find us on instagram at bittersweetinfamy and if you liked the show consider subscribing leaving a review or just tell a friend stay sweet thank you so much to nadine baychan for that awesome story uh you can find out more about nadine at nadinebaychan.com you can find her upcoming essay about paul brunardo and carla homulka in mitzi sereto's partners in crime edition of the best new true crime stories anthology in 2022 the sources that nadine used when compiling this story were books of blood volume five the forbidden by clive barker 1985 that's the short story compilation that uh included the origin

story of candy man horror rella talks tollstoy Beethoven and candy man with writer director bernard rose august 12th 2015 by horror rella a day to cool my chicago by jane burn 1992 northwestern university press cabrini green by ben austin february 5th 2018 in chicago magazine and that was excerpted from high risers cabrini green and the fate of american public housing by ben austin by harper collins chicago's mayor spends a lovely night at project by douglas e bieland special to the new york times in april 1981 jane burns easter celebration at cabrini green 1981 the tom weinberg and tom finnardy's edit from the media burn archive they came in through the bathroom mirror a murder in the projects by steve baggiera september third 1987 in the chicago

cause of death what killed ruthi may mccoy a bullet in the chest or life in the projects also by steve baggiera for the chicago reader july 12th 1990 a city within a city 10 years after the last cabrini green high rise came down former residents take a look back at the community that shaped them by adam m roads for the chicago reader march 30th 2021 a map of the cabrini green complex also from the chicago tribune and former cabrini green residents report painful discrimination in redeveloped mixed income housing by yilin chang for metal reports chicago november 6th 2020 our interstitial music is by mitchell collins the song you're currently listening to is tea street by brian steel thanks for listening we'll see you halloween day for our season finale