The Magnificence of Tony Todd

In honor of the actor's passing I wrote about his tremendous and remarkably different performances in "Candyman" (1992) and the "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine" 1995 episode "The Visitor".

A little over two weeks ago, a friend of mine texted the group chat with a link from Deadline’s Twitter page. The headline read, “Tony Todd Dies: ‘Candyman’ Star Whose Hundreds of Credits Include ‘The Crow’ and ‘Platoon’ was 69.” After going back and forth about the actor’s career, my friend eventually said, “I saw it and immediately thought of you.”

Growing up I never thought of myself as particularly interested in movies more than the next dame, even as they were interwoven into the fabric of my familial life. The first movie I saw in theaters as a child was Jurassic Park but I remember more clearly the tactile hiss of the VHS copy my family owned. Our prodigious collection was nestled in a credenza in the den of our squat Miami home in a then-black neighborhood in the southern portion of the city, a panoply stitched together from local buys and homemade recordings made from the television. (I kept copies of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Farscape, Tales from the Crypt, and Cleopatra 2525 episodes, for starters.) But film and television as a form of scholarship, spiritual communion, and aesthetic bliss didn’t come into full view until I became more carefully attuned to the aesthetic, cultural, and emotional intersections within film acting. Acting exists at the intersection of persona, cultural scripts made flesh, and the material grind of the economic conditions whatever film in question is born into. But to reckon with that I had to first submit myself to what a good performance can do. It can alter your understanding of how a body can move and what it can speak without a word.

Looking back on my youth, there are certain constants. Artists, modes of being, and works that I enjoyed then but love even more as my taste has refined and my understanding deepened. I have always been a yearner, so romanticism — gothic and complicated — is a strong current in both my aesthetic taste and my sense of how to move through the world. Is it any wonder the original Candyman film has been a beloved fixture since my childhood? Is it any wonder that its caliginous underbelly marked by bruised desire and a ravenous death-drive would provide such fecund intellectual ground for me as an adult?

Tony Todd had a voice of singed edges, gravel, and fine whiskey. He fully embodied each of his roles with his broad 6’5” frame, bringing a gravitas that proved undeniable in its force. As an actor, he always met the material he found, but more often than not exceeded and complicated it. He is best known as the villain, Candyman. In the role, he’s less a Freddy Krueger slasher and more an entrancing gothic horror figure akin to Bela Lugosi’s Dracula or even Gary Oldman’s turn in the 1992 adaptation. (“I have crossed oceans of time to find you,” is such a delicious line reading.) To look primarily at Candyman and Todd’s horror career that followed with appearances in the early Final Destination films, is to miss out on his most moving performance in the 1995 Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode, “The Visitor”. In juxtaposing these two performances, it’s evident Todd could work in a multitude of modalities, from erotically charged intensity to heartrending softness. In rewatching the original Candyman (1992), its 2021 reimagining for the first time since around its release¹, and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’s fourth season, it’s clear that Todd, at his best, could blur the rigid boundaries that hold black masculinity and its cinematic performances in a vice grip. Sometimes he complicated what a black man could be on-screen in quite a beautiful manner.

Candyman has seeped into the cultural imagination due in no small part to Todd’s transfixing performance. But it’s also a film crafted with a deep undertow of complication between its seductive gothic tale, its critical eye toward how black poor and working class people are treated, the inescapable shadow of anti-blackness in its histories and functions, and one of the ultimate fuck-around-and-find-out tales about a white woman girlbossing too close to the sun. It’s frightening on a soul-deep level. What has held in the cultural imagination from the film is primarily Candyman himself and the nature of his violent death that turned him into myth.

But it is easy to forget that his backstory tumbles from the mouth of a haughty —older, white, male —academic claiming ownership over Candyman’s story from Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen). She’s a grad student writing her thesis about modern folklore through the lens of the Candyman myth that’s embedded in the minds and hearts of the black folks living in Cabrini-Green, a housing project in Chicago that no longer exists. But it continues to cast a long shadow, evoking a history of poverty, displacement, and the failures of this country to care for its citizens. One of the best decisions writer-director Bernard Rose made in adapting Clive Barker’s short story is in moving the action from Liverpool to Cabrini-Green, which gives the work a completely different, even more ripe socio-cultural history that provides the backdrop for the consuming horror of the tale. Working alongside her fellow grad student, Bernadette Walsh (Kasi Lemmons²), Helen listens to the schlubby academic with, at first, annoyed indifference.

“The legend first appeared in 1890,” he explains. “Candyman was the son of a slave. His father amassed a considerable fortune from designing a device for the mass producing of shoes out of the Civil War. Candyman was sent to all the best schools, grew up in polite society. He had prodigious talent as an artist and was much sought after when it came to documenting one’s wealth and position in society in portrait. He was commissioned by a wealthy landowner to capture his daughter’s virginal beauty. Of course they fell deeply in love and she became pregnant. Hmmm. Poor Candyman. The father executed a terrible revenge.”

By now Helen is transfixed as if in a trance. Rose and cinematographer Anthony B. Richmond frames her face with eyes lit, the rest cast in shadow. “He paid a pack of brutal hooligans to do the deed,” he continues as the soundtrack slowly weaves in the noise of screams and fleshy violence. “They chased Candyman through the town to Cabrini-Green where they proceeded to saw off his right hand with a rusty blade. And no one came to his aid. This was just the beginning of his ordeal. Nearby there was an apiary. Dozens of hives filled with hungry bees. They smashed the hives and stole the honeycomb and smeared it over his prone, naked body. Candyman was stung to death by the bees. They burned his body on a giant pyre and scattered his ashes over Cabrini-Green.” It is crucial to note this academic whilst claiming ownership of Candyman’s story over Helen, whom he derides, never says our villain’s born name: Daniel Robitaille³.

Candyman is such a curiosity. For some, it’s even a point of consternation. Most of the critical and audience detractors wonder, why does Candyman kill black people? Why isn’t he a defiantly vengeful spirit killing white people given he was murdered at their hands? This question animates the laborious pablum of the 2021 reimagined continuation helmed by Nia DaCosta with Jordan Peele as a co-screenwriter. It’s a question that betrays a lack of imagination and understanding of what the 1992 film is actually doing. But it also demonstrates a stunning confusion about horror as a genre. Contradiction is a tool in horror to create friction and unease. It is meant to explode the boundaries audience’s have been taught are immovable in life. The contradictory nature of Candyman himself isn’t a failure of the film. It is its most beguiling feature.

I have found the Candyman of the 1992 film to be a revealing vision of the ways black people can hold anti-blackness in their souls, what black people are taught to covet, and the complex work of de-colonizing your personal vision of desire as an African caught between the sordid shores of American life. Candyman is ultimately a symbolic figure representing the ways anti-blackness and the systemic oppression it has wrought become so totalizing they foment lateral violence amongst the most marginalized in our community, to lightly rephrase what this astute Letterboxd review, from user "strida", states about the original.

Even beyond that misunderstanding, DaCosta’s film remains a sloppy, poorly crafted disappointment lacking a strong point of view and any assured style. In misshapenly recasting Candyman as the embodiment of the most downtrodden black people’s vengeance and its moral dimensions in such simplistic terms, the filmmakers jettison the “hypnagogic death-drive eroticism” of the first film which is carefully embodied by Todd. This is why the best aspect of the 2021 film is its silhouette, cut-out puppetry retelling of Robitaille’s backstory. In those brief moments the film trades enough on the dream-like energy of the original that it almost comes alive.

Tony Todd doesn’t appear in the flesh as Candyman until about 43 minutes into the original film. His leather-clad soles, the hem of his thick fur-trimmed coat is all that’s seen at first. Then his gait. Measured, slow. Hypnotically so. Like everything else about him. “Hellllennn,” he drawls. Wide stance. Backlit by the Chicago sunlight jutting through the concrete structure of the parking facility. “I came for you.” A tear sheds from Helen’s eye. She’s rapt in his gaze. As Candyman comes into full view so does the existential and visceral thrust of the film: this is horror by way of seduction. In Helen, Candyman seeks to recreate the love of his life he lost over a hundred years prior. A tear lacquers her face. He shows his bloody stump, pierced with a hook. “Be my victim. I am the writing on the wall. The whisper in the classroom. Without these things I am nothing. So I must shed innocent blood.” Todd’s voice is used to great effect, somehow silken and menacing in equal measure. Sound designer Nigel Holland uses Todd’s voice so it doesn’t sound like it is coming only from the figure before Helen but from everything around her. The structure itself. The sun. The shadows.

As the film continues — and Helen’s craven disregard for the lives she has plundered irrevocably changes her own for the worse — Todd’s Candyman is a dream-like rupture in the grim and graying lives playing out in Cabrini-Green. There’s a current of woe to Todd’s portrayal. When he gets Helen to agree to die and become myth such as him in order to save a baby from the community he intended to sacrifice, the infamous bee scenes unfurl. Bees clamoring on the decaying, exposed ribcage Candyman reveals beneath his coat. Others pouring from his mouth before he leans down to seal their pact with a kiss. Much has been written about Todd performing these scenes with live bees⁴ and how it was accomplished. But what sells these scenes is more than just physical commitment. It’s Todd’s ability to make the romantic melancholy, the sheer tragedy of his character written in his body — the furrow of his brow, the mournful turn of his lips, the mercurial nature of his physical presence. It’s a performance that further complicates an already complex film rife with the silver pull of folklore. But as much as I love Candyman as a film, I wanted to write this essay in order to delve into Star Trek: Deep Space Nine⁵.

Avery Brooks and Tony Todd in “The Visitor”.

Tony Todd as elder Jake Sisko and Avery Brooks as Capt. Benjamin Sisko, a man transfixed in time who only yearns for his son to truly live.

The fourth season of Deep Space Nine opens with the action-forward introduction of the legacy Next Generation character, Worf (Michael Dorn), to the station as tensions with the Klingons mount and the Dominion War with the Changeling species approaches the horizon. Most people — even the pop cultural literate — don’t have an affinity or base understanding of Deep Space Nine. So let me back up for a moment. The series, which began in January 1993, centers on Benjamin Sisko (played with jazzy delivery and vivid intensity by Avery Brooks), then just a Commander but he becomes a Captain by the time we get to the events of “The Visitor”. He is tasked with helping aid the planet of Bajor joining the Federation after their long, brutal occupation by the Cardassians. (A storyline that hits even harder as Israel continues its genocide upon the Palestinian people). He is also the Emissary of the celestial god-like beings the Prophets, that the Bajoran people worship.

Sisko’s wife was killed in the Battle of Wolf 359, a battle helmed by Capt. Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) when he was momentarily absorbed into the Borg. This leaves Sisko a single father with a young son, Jake (Cirroc Lofton). This relationship proves to be a grounding force in a series particularly adept at threading emotional resonances within political and existential considerations. As an early example in television’s history of sustained, interwoven story arcs, Deep Space Nine functions as a crucial step forward artistically for the franchise and also as its outlier — given just how radically political it often proved to be when exploring experiences of genocide, gender identity, terrorism in the face of an occupying force, and nurturing love when you’re facing the end of one world and the beginning of another that has yet to come into focus. Deep Space Nine is also one of the most loving and dynamic portrayals of black (single) fatherhood ever put to television.

Throughout its entire run, Deep Space Nine takes great strides to ground the relationship between Sisko and his son, Jake. So when Todd is tasked in “The Visitor” to portray an adult Jake, from his thirties into his seventies, he has to create a sense of intimacy with actor Avery Brooks and spiritual connection with what Lofton has done in establishing the character up to this point. He does so seamlessly. “The Visitor” is a great example of how Star Trek, at its best, uses its science fiction trappings to dig into the heart of its characters’ emotional and philosophical landscapes. The episode opens with Jake Sisko as played by Todd in his seventies. The makeup designers overshot how Todd would actually age but the effects don’t impede his performance so much as add to the sadness woven into it. Jake no longer lives on the station of Deep Space Nine. He’s long been a published writer living somewhere near the bayou, but not far from New Orleans. One rainy evening, a young woman, Melanie (Rachel Robinson) raps on his door. She reveals that she came to find him in order to discern why he stopped writing. “You’re my favorite author of all time,” she tells him. “You should read more,” he replies with a warm smile on his face.

Jake tells her the story of why he stopped writing, which dovetails into how his father’s death rewrote the trajectory of his life. In an engine room malfunction on the ship, the Defiant, Sisko is seemingly zapped into nothingness in front of Jake’s eyes. Months and months roll on, and while the rest of the people on the station are able to mostly move on, Jake is bereft. No body to bury. A grief whose shape is amorphous because of the drastic nature of the loss. Jake doesn’t heal, he obsesses.

But soon enough his father appears before him. What seems at first to be a hallucination eventually proves to be all too real. Sisko isn’t dead, he’s stuck in a space separate from time. They remain tethered to each other. Sisko eventually pleads, in one of his brief moments when he’s back in the regular flow of time, for Jake to live. To move on. And he eventually does. Publishing books. Marrying a black Bajoran woman, Korena (Galyn Görg). But soon the pull to save his father returns and he sacrifices the life he built upon the altar of that obsession. Todd uses his voice so differently here. His voice often bridges scenes and thus bridges the peripatetic nature of the episode itself as it moves dramatically through time. His voice is softer. Less dexterous than the silken booming of Candyman. It is encrusted with a reverence that comes when you age with necessary wisdom and grace. Sometimes that voice is caught in the cry of a man still yearning for the father he lost.

I love this interview with Todd in which he discusses his performance in “The Visitor” as a “channeling” experience. The script came to him in the wake of the death of the woman who raised him. It is as if the script came to him at the right time to remind him of his gifts and how to use them:

Even if you have no interest in Star Trek, this episode of Deep Space Nine is worth watching. Yes, even without knowing the full history between this father and son, the episode still offers beauty and communion. This is an episode where black men are given the space to cry, to crack up, to feel embodied emotions. They are allowed to be prickly, imperfect, real. Deep Space Nine offers an intriguing way forward for black masculinity⁶ — one written with a kaleidoscopic approach to emotion and given the space to hold sometimes uncomfortable complications. Yet it’s a vision of masculinity that always remains invested in care.

The scenes between Avery Brooks and Todd demonstrate this marvelously. They establish an intimate, tender rapport and provoke such genuine emotion I remain stunned even after seeing this episode many times over the years. I was struck by how quickly this rewatch had me in tears. It’s remarkable just how different Todd is in this role. Jake’s few scenes with Korena also allow us to ponder how good Todd would have been as a romantic lead. He’s warm, inviting, emotionally embodied. His movements feel tender to the point of bruised. It’s a wonderful performance particularly piquant in the ways it feels like a natural continuation of the younger Jake played by Lofton.

Todd’s performance also acts as an argument in favor of the rich complication and enrapturing connection that blooms between a black father and his black son. This is a connection pop culture rarely explores with empathy. But it is this episode’s galvanizing force. It’s an episode that demonstrates just how dynamic and varied Todd’s skills were as an actor. A few episodes later in Deep Space Nine, Todd returns to play Worf’s impetuous brother, Kurn, further cementing how he could bring such dramatically different characters to life with true interiority and emotional grit. Looking at the gothic eroticism of his performance in Candyman and the piquant yearning that defines his turn in Deep Space Nine, it is evident that Tony Todd was an actor dynamic in ways Hollywood never wholly knew how to fully nurture.

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Important Note: Paid subscriptions have resumed. The first paid essay back drops this weekend and will be from a new, ongoing column I am hype about. The Feminine Grotesque is a column reckoning with the historical, cultural, racial, and cinematic depictions of female madness. Upcoming essays discuss films including Love Lies Bleeding (2024), the tremendous Fronza Woods short film Killing Time (1979), and the work of anime director Satoshi Kon with Perfect Blue (1997). Paid subscriptions will remain $5/a month and $50/a year. I am very excited to use this newsletter as a venue for intimate conversations with my readership and experimental play with my craft. Nothing here is meant to be polished. But every piece is marked by care and deep emotion.

1. I am nothing if not a masochist for the sake of scholarship.

2. Kasi Lemmons would go on to direct many films including one of my favorites a few years after co-starring in Candyman, 1997’s Eve’s Bayou.

3. The movie demonstrates a keen awareness of the audacity embedded in two white academics arguing about which one of them owns a black man’s story.

4. Todd was paid a grand for each individual bee sting. He was stung 27 times.

5. I will be writing much more about Deep Space Nine going forward using the series as a jumping off point for grander and deeper cultural criticism.

6. I’m thinking I’ll write a whole piece arguing this.