Nia DaCosta on ‘Candyman’ and the Power of Terrifying Legends

For her horror redo, the filmmaker confronted the pressures for success. “There are a lot of people that you want to do well for, and that can be daunting.”

This article contains spoilers for the new film “Candyman.” When Nia DaCosta was a child in 1992 New York, you couldn’t tell her that the villain in the original horror film “Candyman” didn’t really exist. In fact, she vividly remembers the story of a woman who was killed in those days by someone who climbed through her bathroom mirror. “It was something that we talked about because it happened at the projects behind my elementary school,” the director said. “So, for me growing up, Candyman was real. He wasn’t coming from a movie.” It might sound like the naïve belief of a young girl, but when you reconsider the brutal back story of “Candyman” — a 19th-century Black male artist who was murdered by a mob of white men for falling in love with a white woman — the legend feels startlingly real.