Within popular culture, the Midwest is regularly depicted as both a site of nostalgic memory and a cultural space defined by the willful forgetting or elision of history. Notably, both American Gods and Candyman take place in the American Midwest this regional setting greatly impacts the conceptualization of each narrative’s supernatural beings (Gaiman’s cohort of gods and the Candyman, respectively). In complementary ways, all three of these texts explicitly reflect on the complexities of adapting monsters to precise locales. To develop these primary arguments, this article extracts a theory of adaptation and location from Neil Gaiman’s novel, American Gods ( 2011), and applies that theory to the acts of adaptation pervading ‘The Forbidden’ and Candyman. This article expands on such existent scholarship by analysing regional mythologies and the cross-cultural adaptation of place-specific monsters within and across both texts. To a lesser degree, Clive Barker’s short story, ‘The Forbidden’ (1986), has received some critical attention largely because of its status as the source material for the film’s general premise and now-iconic central monster. Since Bernard Rose’s Candyman (1992) was first released more than 25 years ago, there has been a great deal of scholarly commentary on the film’s treatment of class, race, gender and urban legends.
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