They Will Say

Abstract

Bernard Rose’s 1992 film, Candyman, and Nia DaCosta’s 2021 remake of it use memorial rituals of naming and summoning that give life to Black memory and trauma. Through the use of Achille Mbembe’s work in Necropolitics, Christina Sharpe’s description of wake work in her book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, and Émile Durkheim’s sacred-profane dichotomy, this article illustrates how, when both films are read together, they enact a ritual of mourning and proclamation with the utterance of Candyman that is adjacent to the #SayTheirNames hashtags of the Black Lives Matter movement. By reading these films as one ritualistic endeavor, this article looks at the uses of mirrors, naming, and summoning as sacred rites that implicate those within and outside the film to say the name of Candyman and revive not only the fictional dead but also the real memory of Black victims of brutality. Overall, the article aims to demonstrate how the 1992 and 2021 films encourage a ritual that insists on Black memory, breaks through the world of the living, and resuscitates the dead into the single configuration of Candyman.