Candyman

Bernard Rose's Candyman is the most socially conscious horror film of the 1990s and features one of the genre's most tragic, complex villains. Tony Todd's Daniel Robitaille — the son of a slave, murdered for loving a white woman, transformed into a hook-handed specter haunting the Cabrini-Green housing projects — is simultaneously terrifying and heartbreaking. Virginia Madsen's Helen Lyle is a graduate student whose thesis research into urban legends draws her into Candyman's orbit, and the film uses their dynamic to explore how white academia exploits Black suffering for professional advancement. Clive Barker's source material is elevated by Rose's direction into a genuine meditation on race, gentrification, and the way America turns its victims into monsters. Philip Glass' minimalist score is hauntingly beautiful — one of the most unlikely and effective horror soundtracks ever composed.