In so doing, they reflect how narrative practices must conflict narrative emanates from non-self-identical networks of discourse yet is grounded in repetition, repetition based upon difference. The largest shift from story to film resituates the female protagonist's search for Candyman from a white, lower-class British slum to Chicago's notorious Cabrini Green, a housing project readily identifiable in America with black urban despair.3 Both texts, then, marshal national discourses of social difference.

The film's literary predecessor, Clive Barker's 1986 short story, 'The Forbidden,' also draws its fractious narrative relationships from fractured social divisions. Arizona Quarterly Volume 54, Number 3, Autumn 1998 Copyright © 1998 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-1610 9°Laura Wyrick As Candyman examines the relationship oflegend and myth to larger historical legacies, narrative serves preliminarily as an historical symptom, the effect of a specific cultural content. Together, they imply that Candyman is about the status ofnarrative and its roots in representational modes and in historical particulars. Accompanied by standard slasher-movie images filmed 'realistically' so as to construct a coherent short narrative, this sequence suggests that Candyman should be viewed as a conventional horror film, in which a female victim is punished for pursuing her desires-a misleading narrative and generic expectation that the movie subsequently problematizes.2 The two narrative sequences thus counter each other in form and content, stage the contested status of historical narrative, and question the reliability ofvisual proof. Although this account ofCandyman takes place in the past, as the interviewee tells a story about a baby-sitter who used the Candyman ritual (saying 'Candyman' five times while looking in a mirror) to seduce her lover, it, too, carries proleptic force. Nonetheless, it links itself to Candyman's narration through the use of narrative voice-over-this time, of a young woman who is being interviewed about urban legends-and the emphasis on oral history. The first consists of the eponymous villain/hero's voice-over preface it presents the Candyman legend proleptically, beginning with the words 'They will say,' and establishes itself as a fantastical alternative to progressive linear history, as it is spoken against a scrolling aerial shot of traffic-filled Chicago freeways and the Chicago skyline.1 The longer, second sequence foregrounds itself as official history by occurring within an academic setting, a classroom where history is produced and reproduced. LAURA WYRICK Summoning Candyman: The Cultural Production of History ERNARD rose's i 992 film, Candyman, opens with dual sequences of narration. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Clive barker's the forbidden