FILM critic and author Jon Towlson will introduce Monday's 8.40pm screening of Bernard Rose's 1992 horror movie, Candyman, at City Screen, York.

The director himself will take part in a post-show question-and-answer session via Skype.

Virginia Madsen plays Chicago post-grad student Helen Lyle, whose thesis on urban myths leads her to discover that the local legend of a hook-handed killer called Candyman is all too real. Candyman turns out to be an artist and son of a slave who had had his hand severed and was then murdered.

The legend claims that Candyman can be summoned by saying his name five times while facing a mirror, whereupon he will murder the summoner with the hook jammed in the bloody stump of his right arm.

Helen encounters two cleaning ladies who tell her of the murder of a woman named Ruthie Jean, a resident in the notorious Cabrini-Green housing project who they claim was a victim of Candyman. Helen's research turns up 25 other murders in the area similar to Ruthie Jean's.

Rose's visually inspired adaptation of Clive Barker’s short story The Forbidden mixes social comment with abject terror and almost unbearable suspense to create one of the best horror shockers of the 1990s. 

Towlson is the author of the forthcoming Candyman (Devil’s Advocates). He is a film critic for Starburst magazine and has written the books Subversive Horror Cinema: Countercultural Messages Of Films From Frankenstein To The Present in 2014 and Close Encounters Of The Third Kind (Constellations) and The Turn To Gruesomeness In American Horror Films, 1931-1936, both this year.
 

Tickets for Monday can be booked on 0871 902 5726 or at picturehouses.com/cinema/York