Sorry folks, it’s been a slow September. I assure you, things are happening and I am making progress on projects. I just completed my interview with Miss Corsair Debonair and sent that off to Exotica Moderne (to be published early 2022). Lots of podcast recording for future episodes. Also, trying to hunker in and work on my MAPCA conference paper on Acylum and Vikings. So of course, stay tuned, lots of stuff going on!
Voice of Olympus Podcast Appearance
Our episode on Mimic for HP Lovecast is going to be delayed by a day. However, this past Thursday Michele and I were on Voice of Olympus as Scholars from the Edge of Time to keep talking about sword and planet films. We discussed the 2021 John Carter film. The episode can be found at BlogTalkRadio.
General Neo-Peplum News
Masters of the Universe Board game
In sword and planet news, there looks to be a He-Man board game being Kickstarted. It’s called Masters of the Universe: The Board Game: Clash for Eternia.
I did a write up of Catherine McCarthy’s short story collection Mists and Megaliths. The review can be found here.
New Episode of HP Lovecast
First episode for September for HP Lovecast is up! In this episode we discuss the one-shot comic book Lady Lovecraft, written by Mike Shea and art by Don Wilkinson. Episode can be found on our Buzzsprout website or via your podcast app of preference.
Mists and Megaliths is Welsh dark fiction author Catherine McCarthy’s second short story collection after her 2019 collection, Door and Other Twisted Tales. Released in the Spring of 2021, Mists and Megaliths contains ten stories of McCarthy’s distinctive voice that draws from personal anecdotes and Welsh folklore. This is a unified, singular collection, with stories featuring coastal and maritime settings, with nods to mountains, mining, and rock formations, and a reoccurring theme of dealing with loss, be it personal or abstract. McCarthy eases readers into her stories by providing introductory commentaries along with definitions for Welsh vocabulary that appear in the text.
Many of the stories in Mists and Megaliths pair well with each other, with overlapping themes and settings. For example, “Cragen” and “The Ice House” are complimentary stories that deals with the abductions of ones daughter by malevolent forces. “Cragen” takes a patriarchal perspective that is sorrow in tone while “The Ice House” is from the matriarch perspective and has a vengeful element. Two different perspectives on similar subject matter, and both executed marvelously.
“Jagged Edges” and “Coblynau” are another set of stories that pair well thematically. Both are from the perspective of an old man, reliving or remembering signifiant moments of their past. Of the two “Coblynau” inches out as the superior story, and that is because of how multifaceted and finely crafted it is. “Coblynau” contextualizes itself within a historic event: the Aberfan avalanche disaster of 1966 where a landslide from a pile of mining remnants (a spoil) flooded the town, destroying a school, and killing many folks, mostly children. The story’s perspective is from a venerable former miner who is committed to a retirement home. “Coblynau” has shades of Joe R. Lansdale’s Bubba Ho-tep in that both stories are critiques on how society treats their elderly by not recognizing their voice and putting them in an institution to keep them out of sight. As in both stories, the main character knows bad things are going on (a mummy vs. another spoil that threatens the town) while the employees of the retirement home refuse to listen. Both stories also have a creature-feature aspect as well, Bubba Ho-tep with its mummy and “Coblynau” with its titular impish creatures that help out miners when left some food. “Coblynau” is the most ambitious and complex story of Mists and Megaliths.
“Retribution” is perhaps the most “Lovecraftian” story in the anthology. A tentacled monster is imprisoned under a church in a mining town that starts to become corrupt. The town’s church is overtaken by the mine’s operators, who rapidly grow prosperous and more malevolent, their power possibly linked to the shackled creature, who like the character in “Coblynau,” is kept out of sight. Cinematically, the story has folk-horror aspects as found in the Dan Stevens film Apostle which is also about a town with an entity lurking within.
“Lure” is the most experimental story in Mists and Megaliths in that it is told through the second-person perspective. As you, the reader, an intrepid fisher-person, read the story/fish in a lake, a horrible backstory unfolds as you, yes you, did something unspeakable to a younger lady. The story is interesting in that it is, theoretically, a gender neutral tale, so it breaks down expectations of what type of person commits (sexual-assault) crimes.
Mists and Megaliths is not all doom-n-gloom, however, with “Two’s Company, Three’s a Shroud” being a lighthouse of comedy in the darkness. An older husband finds himself dead after eating a cholesterol-laden breakfast and discovers that his afterlife is mainly confined to his coffin, atop another dead soul’s coffin. Embracing an indifferent, matter-of-factly, perspective to the afterlife as found in movies such as Beetlejuice and An American Werewolf in London, “Two’s Company..” brings on the chuckles as the story’s protagonist attempts to make friends with his ghostly neighbor, but his boisterous personality is at odds with his neighbor’s more refined demeanor. Of course, the story ends on a note that there are things much worse than death when you have to spend eternity with someone that drives you crazy. “Two’s Company..” gets special mention for also dropping cameo mentions of older darkwave and gothic music acts, such as Dead Can Dance and Cocteau Twins. A reminder that the cool kids who listened to cool kid music eventually get old.
Sporting a fun alliterative title and containing distinct, focused stories, Mists and Megaliths is an excellent representation of McCarthy’s style and author-auteur elements. For American readers, the Welsh voice present in the stories adds an aura to the stories, given them a charm not readily seen in stories written stateside. Fans of L. T. C. Rolt and Arthur Machen will definitely be intrigued by this collection.
Notes
Michele Brittany and I interviewed McCarthy on our HP Lovecast Podcast, specifically on episode 2 of our Transmissions show, which aired May 31, 2021. The episode can be streamed at the HP Lovecast Buzzsprout website or your podcast app of preference.
We concluded our King in Yellow month on the HP Lovecast Podcast. This past Tuesday our monthly transmissions episode went up which contained interviews with James Chambers, Carol Gyzander, and Meghan Arcuri about Under Twin Suns: Alternate Histories of the Yellow Sign. This episode can be streamed at our Buzzsprout website or via your podcast app of preference.
Candyman Essay
Taking advantage of the renewed interest on Candyman ’92 because of the new Candyman ’21, I’ve written an article about bands and music projects that sample the original Candyman. This was a fun article to do and it continues one of my interests to explore the world of sampling.
General Neo-Peplum News
Essay on Antiquity and Far-Right in French Heavy Metal
Fascist Receptions of Antiquity in Metal Music Presentation
Dr. Swist will also be giving a presentation called “Fascist Receptions of Antiquity in Metal Music” at Brandeis University on October 19, 5pm via Zoom.
In sword and planet news, Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc. is publishing a new Carson of Venus novel, Skies of Venus: A Novel of Actor.
The new novel is written by Neal Romanek with cover art by Richard Hescox. The book is available for pre-order at the ERB website and is expected to be released in the upcoming Winter.
On August 27th, Nia DaCosta’s sequel to the original 1992 Candyman, also titled Candyman, was released to commercial and critical fanfare. Opening with $22.4 million at the box office1, Candyman succeeded where many larger budgeted films could not during the COVID-19 Pandemic with its performance. Candyman also set a new milestone by becoming the first black female directed film to top the box office.2
As Candyman ‘21 continues be profitable at the box office, attention can be turned to the original Bernard Rode directed film. Fans of the original will perhaps want to revisit Candyman ‘92 or those only familiar with the new film may want to watch the original for the first time. For those lacking physical releases, Candyman ‘92 can be found on Peacock TV and other VOD services such as iTunes, Google Play, and RedBox.3
Hopefully with renewed interest, Candyman ‘92 will see a flux of such revisitation and even more positive reassessment. There’s a variety of ways to take in and appreciate the original film: essays, fan art, and even homage in other media. The original Candyman no doubt left its mark in cinema canon, but it also left an impression on other content creators (writers, directors, artists, etc.). One curious example of such inspiration is the world of sampling wherein a music group takes samples of dialogue (and other sounds and noises) from a source (such as a film, TV show, radio broadcast, video game, etc.) and incorporates them into their own compositions.
Candyman ‘92 has had the honour of being sampled numerous times by various underground musical acts that hail from a variety of genres: hiphop, death metal, industrial, and so on. These bands use Candyman samples in a variety of ways. Same incorporate Candyman’s (Tony Todd) opening narration of the film into the beginning of their songs, trying to replicate an ominous introduction to set a specific tone and mood. Some instances are used as outright homage in order to broadcast the music act’s appreciation to the film.
What follows is a list of music acts and their songs that sample dialogue from Candyman ‘92. In order to illustrate how each artist uses the sample, YouTube links are provided for each song along with (when available) a clip from the movie that contains the original dialogue. This way the song and the source text and be compared side by side.
Aborted
Belgian death metal act Aborted pulls double duty with the Clive Barker references in their song “Cenobites” which is the last track from their 2014 album The Necrotic Manifesto.
The title is, of course, a reference to the Cenobites that populate the Hellraiser films that are adaptations of Barker’s The Hellbound Heart. In addition to the Hellraiser connection, the song is also tethered to Barker’s Candyman via usage of sample dialogue. “Cenobites” begins immediately with a quote of Candyman saying “They will say that I have shed innocent blood. What’s blood for if not for shedding?”4
These lines are also the very first lines spoken in the film.5
By beginning “Cenobites” with this sample, Aborted accomplishes two things. First, it mimics the original film by settingthe tone that something unsettling is going to happen in the narrative . Second, it takes the acts described in the sample (shedding innocent blood) and relocates it from the Candyman character to the sadistic villain in the band’s official music video who kidnaps a young woman and proceeds to mutilate her.
Da Boy Tommy
Tommy Debie, better known as Da Boy Tommy, was a jumpstyle Belgian DJ who sadly passed away in 2013.
In 2000 he released a song called “Candyman” which appeared on its own CD-single as well as various compilation albums.6
The song begins with a sample of someone whispering “Candyman.” At the one minute mark of the song, a sample of Clara (Marianna Elliott) explaining who Candyman is to Billy (Ted Raimi) while repeating his name can be heard, interspersed with samples of Carol Anne Freeling (Heather O’Rourke) from Poltergeist saying “They’re here.” This combining of samples from two different sources and merging them together to create new textual play is a hallmark of the cut-up technique pioneered by William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin.
Darling Kandie
Darling Kandie is a side project of sorts of Groovie Man of My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult, a foundational industrial-disco act that long ago established themselves as auteurs of incorporating samples from exploitation and pornographic films into their music.
“People Next Door” from Darling Kandie’s debut self titled album is a song that is made entirely of collaged samples (constructed in the same fashion as the aforementioned cut-up technique), including “We need a new unity” which is from George Lucas’ THX-1138 (the sample also makes an appearance in the Laibach song “Regime of Coincidence State of Gravity” from their seminal Kapital album) and “Open your mind to me” which is said by the stomach mutant Kuato in the 1990 film Total Recall.
At the 2:00 mark of the song a sample of Candyman saying “I came for you” can be heard.7
The line comes from the scene where Candyman confronts Helen (Virginia Madsen) in a parking garage and hypnotizes her.8
The line appears once, briefly, before being lost in the sea of other samples in the song.
Deutsch Nepal
Deutsch Nepal is a Swedish industrial project spearheaded by Peter Andersson.
Their eighth album, ¡Comprendido!… Time Stop! …And World Ending contains the track “Gouge Free Market” which has the dialogue “I am rumor. It is a blessed condition believe me, to be whispered about in street corners, to live in other people’s dreams, but not to have to be. Do you understand?” repeated multiple times.9
The lines are spoken by Candyman inside Helen’s mind.10
This is unique usage of the sample, as the song dislocates the dialogue from its slasher-horror roots and, if going by the name of the song’s title of “Gouge Free Market,” applies it to the horrors of capitalism. Much like Candyman, rampant commercialism and capitalism can be inferred as an unseen, yet omnipresent, boogeyman.
Freakin’ Inglish
Freakin’ Inglish was a short-lived UK hip hop group that had only one release, The Rhyme Wrecka E.P.
The cassette contains a song called “Victim” that opens with a sample of Candyman saying “Be my victim.”11
The sample is form the same scene Darling Kandie sampled (see above) and is used to compliment the rapped lyrics “Be my victim” and “Look out, I’m coming to get you.”
Internal Error
Gabber/hardcore techno act Internal Error, operating under the alias Nyeṫ, took their homage of the Candyman movie to the next level by composing a track called “Candy Man” that appeared on their EP Party Madness as well as the compilations TrAUMa 2 (Nightmare On AUM Street) and Napalm Rave.12
The song contains multiple samples of dialogue taken from the film, such as “If you look in the mirror, and say his name five times, he’ll appear behind you, breathing down your neck,” “Be my victim,” and “Where they proceeded to saw of his right hand with a rusty blade.” As with Da Boy Tommy, Internal Error looks to be using these samples to show adoration to the original film.
JNyce
Canadian hip hop artist J Nyce’s 2008 debut Vaults of Horror has a song called “Satanic Rites” that contains a Candyman sample.13
As with Aborted’s “Cenobites”, JNyce uses the “shed innocent blood” opening lines from Candyman as the opening to this song in order to establish a horror-film mood. The dialogue also gets dissociated from Candyman and instead applied to Satanism, which of course conjures up imagery of sacrifices.
Mortician
Deathgrind metal band Mortician wears their affection for the horror genre literally on their sleeves – album sleeves that is. Their last produced album, 2004’s Re-Animated Dead Flesh has a cover reminiscent of the Re-Animator film, and songs that reference numerous horror films, such as An American Werewolf in London, Silent Night, Deadly Night, and The Hills Have Eyes.
The final track on the album, “Be My Victim,” is, of course, an homage to Candyman.14
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sN4QXAw-B-4
The track begins with a sample of Candyman saying “They’ll say that I’ve shed innocent blood. What’s blood for, if not for shedding. With my hook for a hand, I’ll split you from your groin to your gullet.” which is, of course, the opening lines of the film, and seek to replicate that opening much the same way Aborted and JNyce did. The song ends with a sample of Helen calling out to Candyman who suddenly appears and kills her psychiarist. These samples, coupled with the song’s title “Be My Victim” can be taken as another horror homage to the cult classic film.
[:SITD:]
German-based industrial act [:SITD:] (which stands for Shadows in the Dark) has an EP titled Snuff that contains a track called “Mortal.”
The remix of “Mortal” by Solitary Experiments is unique in that it contains Candyman samples from the German dub of the film.15
The track opens with “Fürchtest du den Schmerz oder das, was danach kommt? Der Schmerz wird von erlesener Qualität sein. Was unseren Tod angeht, vor ihm brauchst du dich nicht zu fürchten.” which is a translation of Candyman saying “The pain, I can assure you, will be exquisite. As for our deaths, there is nothing to fear.”
Near the end of the song the sample continues with “Lass uns unserem Leben ein Ende setzen vor ihren Augen und ihnen damit etwas geben, was sie für alle Zeiten verfolgt. Werde unsterblich! Komm mit mir.” which is a continuation of the above with “We shall die together in front of their very eyes and give them something to be haunted by. Come with me and be immortal.”
The song ends with “Man wird sagen, ich habe unschuldiges Blut vergossen” which is an interpretation of “They will say that I have shed innocent blood.”
All of these instances of bands and music projects sampling Candyman ‘92 not only solidify the original film’s legacy, but illustrate innovative instances of artists performing textual play to create a new texts with new meanings, or even pastiches in a post-modern sense.
