HELLAH HORRAH: THE MYTHOLOGICAL HORROR ORACLE Descent into : Candyman

Written By Tya Alisa Anthony

Tarot Card: Judgement

The newest Candyman doesn’t haunt you.

It turns the mirror on to you.

This isn’t a sequel so much as a living archive. A contemporary art exhibition disguised as a horror film. It understands that the myth has evolved. The monster no longer needs to appear everywhere. He needs to appear where attention already is.

Enter Yahya Abdul-Mateen II.

We’ve seen him polished.

Hero-coded.

Myth-adjacent already.

With Wonder Man, he’s positioned as spectacle of strength, charisma, narrative control. A man meant to be looked at, admired, framed inside power fantasy. That role carries light. Accessibility. A promise of rescue.

Candyman does the opposite.

Here, Yahya’s body becomes a site.

A gallery wall.

A threshold.

Anthony McCoy isn’t possessed, he’s activated. The transformation is slow, conceptual, almost academic. This is horror as research. Trauma as methodology. His artist practice mirrors his descent: repetition, fixation, recontextualization. He doesn’t summon Candyman for thrills. He summons him for meaning.

And that’s the shift.

In 1992, Candyman needed belief.

In 2021, Candyman needs visibility.

This film understands contemporary art’s obsession with authorship, citation, and legacy. Anthony isn’t losing himself, he’s being absorbed into a lineage. The myth doesn’t erase him; it uses him. That’s the terror. The question isn’t “Is Candyman real?” It’s “Who gets remembered when violence becomes aesthetic?”

Judgement card energy is everywhere.

Judgement asks us to look at what has been buried and decide what rises. This Candyman isn’t about punishment, it’s about recognition through repetition. Every saying of the name is a citation. Every mirror is a museum wall. Every body is a footnote in an unfinished history.

Candyman demands the bill be paid.

Yahya’s brilliance is that he lets us see the hinge between those worlds. Between myth-as-empowerment and myth-as-burden. Between hero narratives that protect the body and horror narratives that consume it. His performance asks a brutal question:

What happens when Black mythology is only allowed to exist through trauma?

The answer isn’t subtle.

The answer is bees.

Oracle reading for the present moment:

  • Naming is not neutral

  • Visibility is not safety

  • Representation without control becomes sacrifice

  • Art can summon what it critiques

This Candyman scares because it doesn’t let the audience off the hook. You don’t leave cleansed. You leave implicated. You said the name by watching. You participated by witnessing. The mirror didn’t crack, it held.

Final Hellah invocation:

Some myths are warnings.

Some are memorials.

Some are instructions.

Be careful what you elevate.

Be careful what you repeat.

Be careful who gets to survive the story.

— Hellah 🖤

Tya Alisa Anthony

Tya Alisa Anthony is an American artist, photographer, writer, and independent curator whose work explores memory, mythology, ancestry, and the quiet ways people leave themselves behind in the objects they touch. For more than twenty years, her practice has existed at the intersection of visual research, education, and cultural storytelling, investigating resilience through the body, the landscape, historical archives, and the natural world.

Working across photography, collage, cyanotype, botanical collections, handmade books, and mixed media, Anthony approaches each body of work as an evolving archive rather than a finished statement. She is drawn to weathered photographs, heirlooms, medicinal plants, folklore, ritual objects, forgotten architecture, and the symbolic language that connects cultures across time. Her work asks how identity is preserved, transformed, and remembered.

Alongside her studio practice, Anthony has spent more than two decades building educational programs, exhibitions, and community-centered initiatives that expand access to the arts. Her leadership has helped shape institutions, mentor emerging artists, develop sustainable systems, and create spaces where creativity becomes a lifelong practice rather than a privilege.

Anthony’s artwork is included in the permanent collections of the Denver Art Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver’s Octopus Collection. Her work has been exhibited nationally and is held in numerous private collections.

She is currently creating Organic Tarot, a 78-card hand-collaged tarot deck and accompanying memoir that intertwines mythology, autobiography, botanical symbolism, and the archetypal journey of transformation. The project reflects the central thread running throughout her career: that art is not simply something we make—it is a way of understanding ourselves, preserving what matters, and leaving a map for those who come after us.

http://www.tyaanthony.com
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