BETWEEN MONSTER PHOTOGRAPH A CONFESSION.

Of course, as films like the original Candyman (1992) show us, some realities refuse to be captured by the camera, and others live only within the boundaries of the frame. Photographs can reveal as much as they distort, clarify as much as they obfuscate. And when it comes to monsters, especially those who remain half-hidden in the dark, we can never quite trust what we think we know—about them, about the world, about ourselves.

Adapted from Clive Barker’s “the Forbidden” (1985), Candyman clarifies the cultural power of monstrosity while hinting at how photographs themselves sometimes have monstrous uses. In Barker’s story, published during the height of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, a mythic killer with a hook for a hand haunts the working-class city of Liverpool. A multicolored creature who wants to keep the stories of secret human suffering alive in the public imagination, the Candyman seems to represent lives on the margins: lives that represent a sort of monstrous vibrancy and excess—too much love, too much desire, too much pain to be accepted by mainstream culture.

The monsters that inhabit Bernard Rose’s film Candyman, which takes place in Chicago, are perhaps even more resonant for contemporary American audiences. The film’s titular monster is the ghost of a slave’s son who had committed the unpardonable sins of excelling in the arts, making money, and falling in love with a white woman. He was lynched—his body smeared with honey to attract a hive of local bees, his hand sawn off and replaced with a hook. Like his literary counterpart, this Candyman’s business is storytelling, and he is driven by the need to make sure that the stories of those forgotten by history do not slip away.

But he is not the only monster in the film. A local gang leader steals Candyman’s name to instill fear into those who inhabit his territories. Both elegant and brutal, this presence is monstrous, to be sure, but he might not be the film’s most terrifying figure.