Armand Jackson

Wishlisted, a lifestyle platform, compiled a chart listing the most popular Halloween movies by state including the year said movie was released, its critic score, and audience score. According to the chart, Nia DaCosta’s 2021 Candyman, produced by popular horror director Jordan Peele, is the top horror movie in Georgia. The film is a direct sequel to the 1992 classic supernatural horror slasher that starred Tony Todd as the infamous Candyman and Virginia Madsen as the main character Helen Lyle. The original 1992 film was written and directed by Bernard Rose based on the “The Forbidden” short story written by the English novelist Clive Barker. 

It would have two sequels released in the 90s called; Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh in 1995; and Candyman: Day of the Dead in 1999. The Candyman himself would not be present in the silver screen again until this latest installment. The 2021 movie revitalized interest in the franchise while providing fresh new social commentary to the titular villain. This resulted in it garnering a positive reception with 8 awards, 20 nominations, an 84 percent critic score, and a 72 percent audience rating. Wishlisted, according to their methodology, was able to create this chart from a list of 210 horror genre movies from Rotten Tomatoes Top Movies list. 

They then filtered for only “Certified Fresh” horror films with at least a 60 percent Audience Score, sorted them by the Audience Score, used Web Scraper to assemble the list, then used Google Trends to compare search interest for each movie by subregion for the whole U.S. between September 2017 to September 2022. They then used a multi-round plurality ranking system by assigning each Halloween movie to the state with the highest proportion of Google searches.

Since many Georgians are fascinated by Candyman, one has to wonder how many on Halloween night would dare to say the hook handed slasher’s name five times in the mirror.