[eerie ambient music]
- "The Forbidden," Clive's story,
in the "Books of Blood,"
I read that and I liked that.
And that struck me as something
that was worth making a movie about.
So I called Clive
and asked him if I could borrow the rights.
Clive's original conception of Candyman,
he was not an African American man.
He was not.
- The vision of the monster in "The Forbidden"
was completely different from what we came up with.
He had long, long arms.
He was hairy.
He had broken fingernails.
One eyeball was hanging out.
And Bernard wanted to turn it around and say,
what if the monster
that is frightening everybody is a normal looking Black man?
We're a different kind of monster.
It's not just a monster terrorizing the suburb
and some unexplainable, unshapeable monstrosity
that's haunting your nightmares.
This is the monster you created.
[eerie orchestral music]
[cameras shuttering]
Most people know the story of Candyman.
His father was a famous shoemaker
and he wanted to become an artist.
And then because of that turn of the century racism,
he was chased down, covered with honey,
had his hands cut off,
lynched his artistic hand, his right hand.
- Clive's original conception of Candyman,
I mean, I don't know if he was influenced by this,
but to me, I always imagined him.
I don't know if you know a German book
called "Struwwelpeter."
There's some very frightening characters in it.
There's also the long legged scissor man
who comes and chops off the thumbs of children
who suck their thumbs.
So I kind of imagined a bit from the description in the book
that Candyman looked like Struwwelpeter.
- [Nia] I think what's scary about it
is that you bring it on yourself.
Candyman, like you choose him.
Like he says it throughout the entire first film.
- Be my victim.
- And I think that like Freudian instinct
of self-destruction, I think,
is really terrifying to people.
- He's almost more like a vampire than he is a monster.
And you have to sort of look at the deformity,
and a bloody hook, and all that
before you start to think, oh yeah,
this guy is actually monstrous.
- I mean, I almost don't even think in terms of "Candyman"
as a slasher in a sense.
It's more of a monster movie.
It just feels,
you know, even though he has the hook
and he kills people with it,
there's such a dense, interesting backstory to him.
And the way he's dealt with in the first film at least
that I think separates him from the slasher characters.
- I'm scared, scared for my child.
That he never going to catch him.
- Who?
- Candyman.
- It was possibly one of the finest decisions
in horror history
that Bernard Rose had zero interest
in presenting Candyman as depicted in the novella.
I sometimes try to imagine what Candyman would be like
if they'd cast an actor as described in the novella.
And I doubt we'd be talking about him today.
- He was really a revelation
in terms of the portrayal of Black characters at that time.
- Good.
Because you got to rob to get rich in the Reagan era.
- You know, a lot of it tended to be
inner city hood characters.
- Don't you ever pull a gun on me again in your life.
- I hope I won't have to.
- Yeah, we all go down if you do 'cause we all crew.
- So to have this articulate artist,
I think Tony Todd came through
and presented that as a character
that you could really relate to,
regardless of your race.
- You go through the history of horror monsters.
There really aren't a lot of Black horror monsters
and that's fine.
It's not like people are sitting around saying,
God, I wish we'd have more Black villains in movies.
No one's saying that.
But at the same time,
Candyman works because Candyman has a reason for existing.
Candyman has been put on a path outside of his own making.
- Candyman was stung to death by the bees.
They burned his body on a giant pyre
and then scattered his ashes over Cabrini-Green.
- You understand why he's upset.
You understand his pain
and you empathize with him in a lot of ways,
even though he is going around killing people
in Cabrini-Green.
It's unlike any other character because of that.
- I was talking to some people who lived in Cabrini
and they all volunteered for me the story of Bloody Mary.
And so I said,
well, you have to call Candyman
like Bloody Mary in the mirror.
- Candyman, Candyman, Candyman, Candyman.
- It was 13 times in the original
and they start reading Candyman, Candyman, Candyman.
So everyone's falling asleep.
I'll make it five and that was it.
- Candyman.
You chicken!
- I love that the original "Candyman"
uses urban legend and fear of the other.
- We've got a real shot here, Bernadette.
An entire community starts attributing
the daily horrors of their lives to a mythical figure.
- Helen Lyle fucked around and found out basically.
- [Female Speaker] If you look in the mirror
and say his name five times,
he'll appear behind you breathing down your neck.
- I love the idea of a monster who emerges
in order to assert his own identity
and to keep himself in the thought processes
of the people in Cabrini-Green.
- [Candyman] Your disbelief destroyed the faith
in my congregation.
Without them, I am nothing.
So I was obliged to come.
And now, I must kill you.
- Even during the kill scenes, we feel his pain.
And it's all sold through his eyes.
We feel his soul in that movie.
We feel how he got to that point,
how he became the urban legend of Candyman.
- He needs to kill to maintain his legacy
and to keep his spiritual being, his essence.
- [Candyman] Our names be written on 1,000 walls,
our crimes told and retold by our faithful believers.
- It kind of lends into the whole tradition
of African oral storytelling.
The masters didn't allow their slaves
to learn how to read or write
for fear of they would organize and rebel.
So traditions were passed on by oral means.
And so I think this kind of feeds into that sort of thing
where the power of oral stories
get passed down from generation to generation.
- I do remember I was in fifth grade
when I heard about Candyman for the first time.
That's where I was dared to say his name in the mirror.
I never did 'cause that's crazy.
- Candyman.
[glass breaking]
[laughing]
- There's this challenge going on
called the Candyman challenge.
You go to in front of your mirror
and you say Candyman five times over and over.
- Don't be freaking scared, don't be scared.
- Okay. - Don't be scared.
- Candyman, Candyman.
- Candyman.
- Oh no!
- Folklore is an outlet for connecting with other people.
It's really about preserving culture,
about creating our own culture
from what's kind of come before.
And I think Candyman is definitely a part of that.
- What if we go missing
and they play this on the news the next day?
- Candyman is iconic
because of the very real dare system
that happens in a group of friends.
- What?
- There's somebody in there.
I saw a light go on.
- There's nobody there.
- Psych.
- That's not funny.
That was not funny.
- I was totally scared of Candyman
and my brother knew that.
And he used to shove me in the bathroom,
say Candyman five times,
turn off the lights, and then hold the door closed.
Candyman was definitely one of the scariest villains to me,
and one of the most interesting, and one of the most sad.
- Candyman is like this entity who comes for you,
but he looks like you.
He looks like a member of your community,
but he's just kind of different and warped.
- Just trying to understand a full story
because we're a different kind of monster.
It's not just a monster terrorizing the suburb
and some unexplainable, unshapeable monstrosity
that's haunting your nightmares.
This is a person that you created.
This is the monster that is not self-made, okay?
He's a Frankenstein turned upside down
'cause he's created by society.
- Anyone who conjures Candyman
has to suffer the consequences.
And it's kind of a good allegory for the legacy of racism.
Anyone today who lives in a society
that's founded on social inequality,
racial inequality will deal with the consequences.
- Candyman also like,
it's an incantation that brings this force into your life.
And think about what kinds of things
that we bring into our lives as a society.
Like we're in this horrible divisive place
and how much of that do we have a hand in?
- Sometimes, we turn icons into what they are
because we identify with them in some way
or we identify with the phobia that they might represent.
And usually, they reflect something
that's going on in society at the time.
There's some kind of moral panic
that might be reflected in those movies.
- "Candyman" also represents the angry Black man stereotype,
the stereotype of a Black person who is not contained
or controlled by fear or shame.
And he's angry for a good reason.
And I think that's true of a lot of people
who are labeled with that angry Black man stereotype.
We're mad, not because we're naturally mad.
We're mad because we are subjected to real horror every day,
real menace and real fear.
And that's why Candyman is both a monster
and a heroic figure to a lot of people.
- So the monster isn't just Candyman.
The monster in Candyman is the so-called urban jungle.
The monster is Black masculinity
because it's not just Candyman who's scary.
All these Black dudes are scary.
- I hear you're looking for Candyman, bitch.
Well, you found him.
- I find Daniel Robitaille
one of the most fascinating people
I've ever spent time with.
He was more like a Phantom of the Opera
than a beast in the woods.
- The shine of his shoes,
that incredible costuming he has.
He's gorgeous.
You know, that's the bottom line.
Your first reaction is you're kind of entranced
along with Helen.
He is a very unique monster in that way.
- He's wearing dress shoes, and a long coat,
and a scarf and he's elegant.
That's the whole point about him.
- I would love to have that coat.
I think that's a beautiful coat
and Candyman is the most stylish horror monster,
in my opinion.
I don't think Candyman would work if he was bad dresser.
I think he had to look cool.
And of course, there's tons of stereotypes
about Black people being good dressers.
And that's one I don't mind.
- He is charming, he is handsome.
- [Candyman] Helen, you came to me.
- He is debonair, he's classy.
And at the same time,
he looks like he is going to mess you up if need be.
And they were so smart to not do anything to his face,
which is what we did in the 1980s.
We'll put a mask on that, we'll put a scar here.
No, no, we're going to make you look all burned and messed up.
- Candyman did not wear a mask
and did not wear a prosthetic makeup.
Tony Todd has such a striking face.
It's in the eyes too.
It's interesting,
he looks like this handsome, tall kind of powerful person.
So I think that that all kind of comes together
and makes Candyman special.
- Tony Todd kind of proved
that you don't need the layers of makeup.
You don't need any of that.
What you need is someone who is intense,
and who can deliver,
and who can engage your audience.
- There's a bunch of storyboards
that I drew before I cast Tony.
And Tony does look like the drawings before I cast him.
It was just like this guy, he's got it all.
He's got the elegance.
He could be intimidating and he could be ruthless,
but that wasn't what you took from him.
- Your death will be a tale to frightened children
to make lovers come closer in their rapture.
- I think that the idea
that he was this tragic person would have been enough,
but he didn't play Candyman as like an angry avenge person.
He played it as somebody
who you could just tell felt sorrow for what he was doing.
There were so many levels to Tony Todd's performance.
[screaming] [eerie ambient music]
- Anybody can wield a weapon
and anyone can use it to hurt someone.
The power is the way Candyman presents himself.
I am scared of him in the way he says Helen's name.
- [Candyman] Helen.
- I just need to hear him talk,
I need to hear the grumble of his voice,
and I'm already chilled.
- He's written very poetically.
I knew his voice was deeper than my normal voice,
so we worked on that.
Like Helen, Helen, Helen.
Helen, I came for you.
[lightning striking]
Everything that he says has a weight to it.
You know?
And it's not just in the sentences and each word,
you know?
As opposed to me, I'm more of a saxophone.
Daniel was like a cello.
Helen.
The most important thing was his stance.
The way he moves, takes his time, there's no rush.
He never chases anybody
and he calls to people that he wants into his realm.
Come with me and be immortal.
- He is a terrifying figure because of his size,
because of his voice.
- You're mine now.
- Because of the hook, and the coat,
and the bees coming out of him.
But he also has a nobility.
- He leaves an impression on you, you know?
And he has a sort of dignity to him as well.
He didn't feel like grotesque
in the way that Freddy or Jason
or Mike Myers felt grotesque.
It's weird.
Like Candyman wasn't really a monster
so much as like a guy who had a hook for a hand
who had a history of pain that we all understood.
So I think he was like unique in that way as well
from the other villains that I grew up with.
- I've spoken to Tony Todd about the fact
that Black people who saw it as kids
will come up to him and say,
you were such a hero to them as an antihero.
- I can't say nothing or Candyman will get me.
- Not because he was nice necessarily
to any of the Black residents there,
but because he had so much power.
He was a powerful figure
and these were kids who were craving power.
So when you don't really have much to choose from,
you'll take power in whatever form you can find it.
- I was in college when I saw Candyman
and I was studying theater,
so acting, you know,
I wanted to be the first biracial
Teen Beat magazine centerfold.
It was this kind of forbidden interracial love story.
As somebody who's biracial myself,
that just really resonated with me.
- There was almost something
very Dracula-esque about Candyman
where it was the long lost love,
but there was all of these great things
that were kind of coming together in that.
- There's so many different themes going on
within "Candyman."
You have the slavery aspect
where you have like horrible American culture,
but you also have like interracial love.
- I always like to shoot without rehearsal
because you can always do it again.
The first time is usually the best time.
First scene I shot with Tony was the scene in the car park
where we first meet him.
Tony walks in, but he just had something,
and I think it was the way that he walked towards Virginia.
You just felt that he was in love.
It wasn't just about killing or this,
or some story, or some fantasy.
It was romantic.
- We were like, this is a romance.
And the things that he says to her,
even be my victim
and what is blood if not for shedding,
and you know, how glorious it will be,
which it's so dark,
but he means it with this great amount of love.
- We did horseback riding,
we did fencing together,
we did ballroom dancing.
We did that for two or three weeks
before the actual production started
so we had that sort of romantic vibe going in.
- Tony would just glide.
And he was like, I'll just hold you up and do it.
Both of us have this place in our hearts for that sequence.
- We both embraced it because it was like rehearsing
what we were going to be feeling and doing
once the cameras started rolling.
And then we could forget about them.
No offense to camera operators,
but at the end of the day,
when you're on the set,
you want to be as natural as possible.
- So beautiful.
Talk about a score,
a beautiful score that offsets the horror
of what you're seeing.
- Philip Glass. - Unbelievable.
And that absolutely makes Candyman hit different
than any of the other big iconic villains of this era.
- Yeah.
And that's why I enjoyed the kiss with the bees.
- I mean, I had real bees in my mouth.
I worked with over a million bees.
I had a different lawyer at the time
that negotiated $1,000 dollars per sting.
And I think we had 28 over the course of three films.
So that was a nice little perk.
It took a little bit of pain away.
- He's not acting like a man with bees in his mouth.
He's acting like a man who's about to kiss his lover,
you know?
- Allow me at least to kiss.
Just one exquisite kiss.
As soon as I read the first scene,
I asked, we're using practical bees, right?
We're doing practical effects.
And the answer was, yes.
I said, this will be remembered
by anybody that had ever seen it.
[screaming] [bees buzzing]
- I remember seeing "Candyman" in theaters.
Me and two of my friends snuck in to Candyman.
And I was not expecting that.
I was definitely as an adolescent
expecting Mike Myers, Jason, Freddy,
a lot of the other slashers that I had seen at this point.
"Candyman" is nothing like that.
- I was very intrigued by the Candyman's argument
which is that since he exists,
because people believe in him,
if they debunk him, he'll die.
In other words, yes, Virginia, there is a Candyman.
This is a little deeper than your average horror film
and I enjoyed it a little more.
- By the time I was in film school,
that was definitely a conversation starter was like,
Candyman is probably one of the best films of this decade.
And then it would just launch
into like an intellectual conversation.
- I'm a 15-year-old kid going to that
and feeling drawn to him.
- Also keep in mind,
and I always, always tell people this too,
this is when urban films were kind of coming into play.
So I think Candyman came out at a perfect time for that.
We were getting our own horror story with a Black character,
maybe not centralized,
but he was still the person
that drove behinds into seats basically.
- During that period,
I think it just sort of kept bubbling under
in its own peculiar way.
- [Narrator] "Candyman."
- It was because cable was exploding
and cable, the content was there.
So they ran "Candyman."
It was a couple of Christmases after,
I remember I was with my daughter at a mall
and it seemed like every store we went into,
all of a sudden, there were people following us.
And it hadn't happened like that before.
And then by the time we got to another floor,
it was like 50 people.
And my daughter was four at the time
and she was so upset.
She just like dropped her little bag and said,
"That's not Candyman, that's my daddy."
Okay?
- Right after it opened,
this was a big movie and people loved it.
- We had this mega successful movie
with this very cool killer.
- The first one was a big enough hit to greenlight a second.
[eerie orchestral music]
- The second one,
I wanted to make sure that the script
told the backstory of Candyman completely.
That's what I pushed for.
[lightning striking]
- So "Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh"
takes place three years after the original film
and the original murders.
He's down in New Orleans.
A school teacher again is a little bit apprehensive
about who he is and his lore,
but her students are a little bit more fearful.
- That's how he gets you, from the mirror.
- Five times.
You say his name five times, he's supposed to come.
- You guys don't really believe that, do you?
- She calls his name and then chaos erupts from there.
[screaming] [glass shattering]
- As far as Candyman,
it's just like, good, yeah.
Fucking kill everybody for what you went through.
[bees buzzing]
You don't fully side with him,
but you don't want to see him fail either really.
You're in this weird position
throughout at least the first two movies.
[screaming] [eerie orchestral music]
- What's interesting is
sometimes it takes seeing other movies
to know how special something is.
But if you watch Candyman sequels, it's tough.
- If anything,
the sequels are detrimental to the legacy of Candyman.
- Unfortunately, by the time you get to the sequels,
they're really starting to sink under the weight
of all of the issues
that to some people weren't as apparent in the original
because the original was so fresh, so exciting, so scary.
The imagery, the art, the murals,
and then Candyman too is trying to sort of take that baton
and run with it.
But it really did start to become
more about Black men as jump scares, right?
[lightning striking] [screaming]
And so like every Black person
is potentially going to hurt you.
And that's not a good look.
- It's set in New Orleans.
There are a bunch of Black characters.
But still, it's about like him and a white woman, you know?
- You cannot change who you are.
- Like he's still chasing after these white ladies.
And I think a similar thing happened in the third film.
- [Narrator] "Candyman: Day of the Dead."
- [Female Speaker] Help me.
- The third one was more of a money grab.
They meant well, but.
- [Narrator] The screen's most brutal killer
is back for blood.
- It was the quickest shoot.
We had some great Latino actors in there.
[screaming]
But it wasn't as fully conceptualized as the others.
- [Narrator] Revenge never tasted so sweet.
- The third one definitely
was a straight to video affair though.
It was like Donna D'Errico from "Baywatch."
She's like the next generation
and Candyman is trying to get her to die with him.
It's not making sense really to me
'cause there was sort of some seductive overtones
like he was trying to seduce
his great, great, great granddaughter,
but also wanted her to be part of his legacy.
- Come to me.
Do not fear me.
- I don't remember much about the third.
There's a sense of purpose, I guess,
that gives him more leeway for our sympathy
and for our understanding.
- Evil breeds evil.
This man couldn't lash out in life,
but in death, that hate,
that evil was strong enough to bring him back
to reclaim what was taken away.
- Older generations,
when I hear them talk about
when Blaxploitation horror came out,
they had a real visceral reaction to it
because they were seeing people
who looked like them on screen.
So I think the same thing happened with "Candyman."
And I think that's how certain people in my generation
really felt about it.
- You have to build up the icon.
The same way we build it up in our mind,
you have to build it up in the movies itself.
You can't come out of the gate saying it's an icon.
We decide that.
And "Candyman" is probably the last of that true era
that has made that mark, I think.
Not that there haven't been great horror villains since,
but they just don't seem to permeate the way that they did.
- One day, I was doing a con.
It was down in,
it was either Florida or Georgia.
And this whole family, I spotted them from across the way,
literally out of casting central Beverly hillbillies.
And so I'm waiting.
He says, "We like your movies."
And I go, why is that? [laughing]
He said, "We like the way you kill." [laughing]
And I realized at that moment,
me and them may have never crossed paths in life.
But because of this unified moment,
even though my character was a victim of slavery,
and a victim of lynching,
and a victim of physical indignity,
these people wanted to give me their props
from their side of the world.
And that was one of the defining moments
when I realized that culture
and pop iconery can reach and touch many, many people.
- There was a Black American cultural boom.
And we weren't seeing ourselves as a monolith necessarily.
There was more stories and ideas coming out.
And "Candyman" was just a part of that,
which I think was what makes him special even more so.
Fans become filmmakers sometimes.
And the support and cultivation amongst each other,
amongst ourselves is what makes us desire
and motivated to make a film.
- What's Candyman?
- Candyman ain't a he.
Candyman is the whole damn hive.
- [Male Speaker] A story like that,
pain like that lasts forever.
- There's something about
just to kind of resurrecting him today
in the wake of movies like "Get Out" and "Us"
that just makes total sense.
- I think Jordan Peele has really changed the landscape
with the movies that he's made.
And I was thinking in the back of my head,
like he's mentioned it so many times.
I wonder if he's going to come in and bring it back.
- I heard that Nia DaCosta was directing.
I thought these are the right people to take this material
and do something really fresh and interesting with it.
- "Candyman" is malleable enough,
just as a legend is malleable enough
to where you can reclaim it.
You can make it your own
to tell the stories that need to be told
that white people can't tell.
They just can't, not in a good way.
- I think the thing that happened
was a really unique filmmaker, Bernard Rose,
like made this really special, unique film
without really digging into what makes Candyman as a person,
you know, the person behind "Candyman" so interesting
and worth telling a story about.
- [Male Speaker] The story of Candyman.
[indistinct] he walk around
handing out candy to the neighborhood kids.
One day, the police come around.
That's when I saw the true face of fear.
- Get on your knees.
- Any horror fan knows that Candyman
is pretty much like the quintessential Black icon of horror.
We wanted to reinvent that for today.
We wanted to make sure that it was something more
than just another horror villain.
We wanted to give him depth and meaning.
Nia DaCosta brings the authenticity
because it's just who she is.
I think it's really, really refreshing to see that.
- I was like humanity.
This should actually be about the moment
that we're in right now.
♪ Trayvon Martin, won't you say his name? ♪
♪ Sean Bell, say his name
This is not about a monster.
This is about a person.
And it's something that I was safeguarding
and being very particular about
throughout the entire process of directing it.
The very first draft that I read of the script,
Helen was the villain.
And it was sort of like the answer to the promise
at the end of the first film
where her ex-husband says her name five times in the mirror,
which is one of the funniest scenes in cinema,
him being like, "Helen, Helen," you know?
And which I love,
but again was completely besides the point
and the wrong point of view.
- At the end of the day,
I think our core responsibility
was to make it Candyman's story
and show that it's society
that makes him the monster he himself is not.
- I feel really connected to this neighborhood.
- In the new film,
art is such an important part of who he is
and why he's there.
He's drawn to that.
Sometimes, great artists can do things
that conjures up images
that they have no control of.
In the new version,
I think art is the principal weapon
as opposed to the original
where unrequited love was the motivating factor.
But they're both relevant
because they're both the same thing.
Love is art.
- Candyman.
- Anthony.
- Candyman.
- Anthony, no.
- Candyman. - Stop.
Stop it. - Candyman.
- Stop it!
- "Candyman" is about an artist named Anthony
and his search for inspiration.
- I think I made a mistake.
- In his work and his search for identity
in the place he lives,
which is a Cabrini-Green in Chicago.
And in that search,
he stumbles upon an urban legend called Candyman.
- I saw him!
- Candyman isn't real, Anthony.
- Developing that was just really digging into
what does it mean to be Daniel Robitaille,
a man whose proximity to whiteness did not save him.
- He made a good living touring the country,
painting portraits for wealthy families,
but you know how it goes.
They love what we make, but not us.
- How do you juggle the legacy of Candyman,
what's legitimately scary about the first one.
People traumatized for life,
afraid to say Candyman five times in a mirror,
keep all that.
So I love the way the new movie leans into everything
that worked about the previous one.
[eerie choral music]
- The way the film starts
with the drone shot was like amazing.
But now, every movie has drone shots.
So I wanted to kind of, no pun intended,
flip it on its head,
signifying to the audience like, yes, this is "Candyman,"
but this is from a whole different perspective.
It's going to be the city that you know,
that you've seen,
Chicago, a beautiful city,
but turned upside down a bit, you know?
Like it's another perspective, another point of view.
- We wanted to reinvent that for today
and we wanted to reclaim it.
We wanted to make sure that it was something more
than just another horror villain.
- [Candyman] I am the writing on the wall.
- I would call it Candyman: Reclamation.
It's a reclamation of the mythology.
It's a reclamation of the Black vision for the story.
- I'm hoping to spread the story all about Candyman.
The mirror invites you to summon him.
- We have a Black protagonist
and we have a Black sensibility.
- [Candyman] Be my victim.
- This is not real, it's not real.
- Candyman exists because we believe in Candyman.
- [Candyman] Believe.
[screaming]
- Because we afraid of Candyman.
If we stopped caring about him,
he would go away.
And that is kind of, I think,
how we as a society feel about racism
is if we don't think about it, it will go away.
Well, it will never go away
and Candyman can never go away
because Candyman is that representation
of our collective shame.
- Now, do you see what was taken from me?
- Horror can lean into that quite a bit.
They can reflect the nasty bits of society.
And we're seeing it in living color right now,
but the movies can make it even more monstrous
and even more apparent to those who need to see it.
- For me, the stakes are much higher
than like a horror villain that everyone seems to like.
The stakes are Black lives.
- [Male Speaker] Candyman is how we deal with the fact
that these things happen,
that they're still happening.
- Everybody in America has a story.
You may have taken away my arm,
you may have technically killed me,
but you can't silence me.
[intense orchestral music]
And Candyman will be listened to.
- [Candyman] Tell everyone.
- Boy, do I hate bees.
And I was watching "Candyman" at a sleepover.
We get to the scene where he opens his chest
and it's full of bees.
And you know,
the bees are pouring out of his mouth
and I start getting sweaty and nervous
'cause I keep thinking about the sensation of bees
like crawling all over me.
And the more I keep thinking about bees
and the more I can't let go of these intrusive thoughts,
that they're just circling in my head,
I like work myself up into an anxious panic,
and they turn the lights on after the sleepover
and I am covered like neck to chest,
arm to elbow,
just covered in hives, covered in hives.
I worked myself into them.
I can't stop itching.
All of the girls at the sleepover
thought like something horrible happened to me
and I'm next.
Or like, I'm just weird and sick.
And I'm just sitting there itching.
Like, I don't know.
I kept thinking about the bees
and now this is what's happening.
So yeah, the first time I saw "Candyman,"
I worked myself up into giving myself hives.
Put it on the poster.
It made me itchy. [laughing]