The Candyman, a murderous soul with a hook for a hand, is accidentally summoned to reality by a skeptic grad student researching the monster's myth.
The Candyman moves on to New Orleans and starts his horrific murders once more. This time, his intended victim is a school teacher. Her father was killed by the Candyman, and brother wrongly accused of the murders.
The Candyman returns to try to convince his female descendent, an artist, to join him as a legendary figure. To this end, he frames her for a series of hideous murders of her friends and associates so that she has nowhere else to turn to.
For as long as residents can remember, the housing projects of Chicago's Cabrini Green neighborhood were terrorized by a word-of-mouth ghost story about a supernatural killer with a hook for a hand, easily summoned by those daring to repeat his name five times into a mirror. In present day, a decade after the last of the Cabrini towers were torn down, visual artist Anthony McCoy and his girlfriend, gallery director Brianna Cartwright, move into a luxury loft condo in Cabrini, now gentrified beyond recognition and inhabited by upwardly mobile millennials.