This was an excellent version of a story that is almost in itself a horror legend as well as being an exploration of an urban myth.
The biggest strength of this version, unsurprising as Jordan Peele was one of the creators, was the way that the myth was woven into the black African-American urban experience and the horror aspects of the Candyman myth were embedded in and largely arose from, those social experiences. And while the poverty-stricken aspects of this life and world were harshly shown, there was also acknowledgement of how there was, at the other end of the financial spectrum, the exploitation of artists who used such urban experience es as the trigger for their art but which, to collectors became simply a ‘new and authentic experience’ and it became distanced from its source world and material.
Stylistically, I loved the use of Far Eastern silhouette puppets (from Bali) to give an other-worldly sense of the myth and to universalise it so that the story and its meaning was not solely the product of the African-American underclass in urban America.
Towards the end I did feel that the plotting and explanations were somewhat unclear but I think this was because it relied on some knowledge of the events in the past - and the ending did seem, very slightly, rushed. But there was no neat comfortable ending - it was strongly implied that while this one story had come to a degree of conclusion, the bigger socio-political questions certainly remained, so implying that the myth would necessarily continue in to the future.