The people that were subject to this colonial ambition were generally portrayed as primitive savages.  True to this form, a “pre-colonial kind of ‘savagery’” exists in both Anderson and Cabrini-Green. The former’s residents are vaguely similar to pop-culture depictions of tribal cults. The gang leaders’ cholo – their declaration of revenge against the police – resembles a typical imagining of voodoo. It is a blood ritual, and when completed, the gangsters are impelled to attack the station without any regard for their own safety, like (popular depictions of) voodoo zombies. Similar rituals are seen in Candyman: in the room bordering Ruthie Jean’s, offerings of sweets and razor blades are left at an altar, while the ghost himself requires a ritualistic sacrifice (either of Lyle, or the “innocent blood” of a toddler) to ensure his survival in the supernatural realm. At the film’s climax, Cabrini-Green’s residents collectively burn him in a ritual which also elevates Lyle to the supernatural.
Candyman retains some self-awareness about the problematic aspects of portraying the project’s residents as primitive ritualists, however. This is shown through their increasingly questionable treatment by Lyle, who “constructs herself as a missionary of social truth”. While she and her colleagues speak of Candyman as an urban legend based on a historical artist, Lyle assumes that any Cabrini-Green resident who mentions him must earnestly believe the legends. Even when it is revealed that a gangster using his name was behind the killings, Lyle continues to condescend to Jake, a schoolboy who fears that Candyman-the-gangster will be exonerated, telling him not to worry, since “Candyman isn’t real”. Her increasingly questionable treatment of Cabrini-Green’s anxieties is an apt portrayal of the settler-coloniser’s wilful misunderstanding of the colonised.
In each case, the Establishment has failed to eliminate this esoteric savagery. Instead, the middle- and upper-class populations are reassured by the way that the violence Anderson, and Cabrini-Green can be encysted within ghettos and housing projects, isolated from the rest of society. In Precinct 13, this is successful: the gang’s violence never breaks the ghetto’s borders. In Candyman, the city of Chicago is not so successful with Cabrini-Green. Cabrini-Green’s isolated violence threatens to infect the rest of the city Candyman kills outside of its borders several times. His violence is only put to an end when the residents of Cabrini-Green ritually burn Candyman and elevate Lyle to his place. While Precinct 13 suggests that the violence in the ghetto cannot be ended, but can be successfully avoided, Candyman suggests that in some cases, the violence of the housing projects cannot be contained, but that it may be brought to an end — if its residents band together, supress their own violent tendencies and histories, and embrace middle- and upper-class society.
