Jordan Peele’s ‘Candyman’ Trailer Repurposed Another Classic ’90s Song And Fans Are Freaking Out

Someone please take away Jordan Peele’s record collection. Seriously. After terrorizing both hip-hop and horror fans with a creepy remix of Luniz’s “I Got 5 On It” in the trailer for Us — and eventually in the movie itself, thanks to the outsized social media reaction — now he’s coming for fans of turn-of-the-millennium R&B. In the new trailer for Peele’s Candyman revival, the familiar refrain from Destiny’s Child’s “Say My Name” can be heard in the background, just under the sound of all the screams and squishy, hook-handed murders. Instead of warm nostalgia, the eerie strains evoke cold dread, as if calling the viewer, challenging us to do the one thing we all know we shouldn’t: Say his name.

— Demetrius (@DemetriusHarmon) February 27, 2020

That’s how he gets you. In the 1992 original Candyman, the titular phantasmic serial killer was the son of slave and a well-known artist who was lynched in 1890 for falling in love with a white woman. Candyman haunted the Cabrini-Green housing projects of Chicago, violently killing anyone who said his name five times while looking into a mirror, becoming an urban legend in the process. In the new “spiritual sequel,” Watchmen‘s Yahya Abdul-Mateen II portrays an artist who moves to the location of the former Cabrini-Green projects (long since torn down in real life and in the film) and inadvertently revives both the legend and the ghostly killer.