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