Nia DaCosta’s 2021 sequel to Bernard Rose’s 1992 film, Candyman, employs the trope of inversion to acknowledge and critique the story from an updated perspective. Since the action of the original film, the primary setting—the former Chicago housing project named Cabrini-Green—has undergone gentrification. In this article, I argue that DaCosta uses the inversion represented by gentrification as a leitmotif to highlight Candyman’s connection to the place where he was originally lynched and where he has continued to haunt the current residents. I conclude by considering how DaCosta uses the monster Candyman to address issues of toxic narratives and to offer a glimmer of hope that, as a final inversion, the monster might be deployed as a weapon against oppressive forces.

Read Space Inversion: Haunting Gentrification in DaCosta’s Candyman

The moral quandary of killing ‘monsters’ is not new and the horror genre has made a point of walking a line between perceptions of good and evil. As the taste for violence and gore increased these discussions lessened and the ‘monster’ became fodder for the visceral brutality and righteous salvation of humanity. Using selected supernatural and fantasy texts this article explores the morality of killing everything that is not human. Additionally, though death marks a beginning for many of the protagonists in the shows cited, the article examines the impact of a final death for show characters. In a world where death is not necessarily the end for some, how is it navigated when it does eventually come for others? This article explores the development of the sympathetic other in telefantasy texts Buffy the Vampire Slayer, (1997-2003), Supernatural (2005-2020), iZombie (2015-2019), Z Nation (2014-2018), In the Flesh (ITF) (2013-2014), and Lucifer (2016-present).

Read It’s a Question of Degrees: Morality, Justice, and Revenge in Telefantasy

Read Call for Papers: Fearful Sounds (Audio and Horror)