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"Listen to the creepy proclamation
Blown past the lairs of the forest-nation
Blown past the white-ant's hill of clay
Blown past the marsh where the butterflies play
'Be careful what you do, or
Mumbo-Jumbo, God of the Congo
And all of the other
Gods of the Congo
Mumbo-Jumbo will Hoo-Doo you
Mumbo-Jumbo will Hoo-Doo you
Mumbo-Jumbo will... Hoo...Doo... you...' "
This is a form of magic in either Caribbean or New Orleans-ian flavors. (It'll be interesting to see if voodoo disappears from N'Awlins post-Katrina.) Many practitioners call themselves priests or priestesses, and they almost always do have supernatural powers, regardless of whether supernatural powers appear elsewhere in The Verse. Sympathetic magical dolls are a classical trick, as is making zombies. Other practitioners simply use tarot cards, which predict the future; these cards also always work, even if they have to rewrite reality to do it.
What you don't see in the practice of Hollywood Voodoo is anything resembling an actual religious ceremony. Real Life Vodou is a religion; what Hollywood has is The Theme Park Version of hoodoo , the underlying folk magic system thereof.
Examples
Comic Books
- Marvel Comics has
Brother Doctor Voodoo, a Haitian sorcerer who often collaborated with Doctor Strange.
- DC Comics has the more modern character Empress, of Young Justice, who directly addresses the misconceptions about the vodoun she learned from her grandmother.
- In Preacher, Jesse Custer seeks help from a Voodoo practitioner to get information out of his subconscious. While the ceremony is beginning, he comments on this trope, saying he thought the priest would be more like the James Bond example below. Immediately after he starts hallucinating and sees the priest as that character.
Film
- The early sound film White Zombie, making this Older Than Television.
- The Childs Play film series.
- Subverted in the movie Dogma, when Loki makes a voodoo doll and, well, here is the whole thing:
Loki: "I forgot my little voodoo doll."
[looks at Whitland]
Loki: "Wow. It really does look just like you. Maybe, if I believed enough..."
[pauses, then crushes voodoo doll of Whitland, who is terrified but unharmed]
Loki: [laughs] "I don't believe in voodoo."
[leaves]
Loki: [re-enters with a gun] "But I do believe in this."
[shoots everyone]
- The James Bond film Live And Let Die. Magic and Voodoo are central to the plot, and it works in a universe where nothing else supernatural is even remotely mentioned.
- The Blues Brothers 2000. "Nassau's gone funky..."
- Weekend at Bernie's 2 reanimates the titular corpse (which, due to a glitch in the spell, only works when calypse music is playing) and eventually turns two mooks into a pair of goats.
- The MST3K film Zombie Nightmare
- Pedro Cerrano in Major League
- The Skeleton Key, though they get bonus points for distinguishing between voodoo and hoodoo magic. A fairly creepy movie still, considering the occult subtext is not even revealed until halfway through the move. And no zombies or fortune-telling, the villains are centuries-old hoodoo practitioners who use precise rituals to jump bodies (making them essentially immortal) and leave their victims trapped as senile catatonics in their old bodies.
- The Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, although it's debatable whether this is actual voodoo or the residual power of Calypso.
- She is also described as an Obeah woman.
- Lest we forget, Indiana Jones had to deal with being the victim of a voodoo doll during his Temple of Doom adventures.
- Indian Voodoo Dolls, nonetheless.
- Sympathetic magic poppets are cross cultural, though it is difficult to say if India has a version of the stabby-pain variant.
- A central theme in Eve's Bayou.
- Angel Heart. Although it was difficult to tell where the voodoo ended and the Satanism began.
Literature
- The kid-lit horror book Zombie Queen.
- Parodied in the Discworld novel, Witches Abroad. Discworld's magic has a tendency to make beliefs real, and enough people believing strongly enough can do just about anything. The voodoo works because the voodoo witch, Mrs. Gogol, believes it will... and then she makes the mistake of trying it on Granny Weatherwax, who knows all about belief and magic. She makes the spell backfire ... literally.
Video Games
- These are the favourites of the Voodoo Lady in the Monkey Island games.
- Averted superbly in the first Gabriel Knight game, which features extensive exposition on actual, real-life voodoo and its history.
- Although they somewhat shot themselves in the foot on the issue when the owner of the historical voodoo museum, who gives a lot of exposition about the religious and historical context of voodoo turns out to be an evil cultist after all, whose leader is possessed by the spirit of a dead voodoo priestess.
- Pretty much the central theme in Shadowman.
- A minor mission chain in Grand Theft Auto Vice City has Tommy being gradually zombified by a voodoo priestess crime boss.
- Mr. Sunshine in Saints Row 2. The first time you encounter him face to face he simply drugs you into a stupor, but the next he's knocking you about with voodoo magic.
Live Action TV
- The Carrionites in Doctor Who (mostly based on European witches) also use some kind of voodoo, stealing a lock of the Doctor's hair and using it to make a doll which they then stab in the heart, stopping the Doctor's heart...fortunately, he has two.
- The voodoo used by the Carrionites is actually based on Eastern European witchcraft, which made extensive use of dolls called poppets.
- Still somewhat follows the trope, as real life hoodoo is descended from Eastern Eauropean Witchcraft (amongst many other things). Though Hoodoo isn't that big on dolls.
- The Carrionites are also aliens who predate the existence of planet Earth. So Yeah.
- An early episode of Bones set in New Orleans after Katrina centered around the machinations of an evil voodoo priest. Brennan and Booth also recruited a good voodoo to help them catch the villain. However, all the murders in the episode were accomplished by quite ordinary means, and there's no indication that the hoodoo practiced in the episode (which may also have been called "voodoo") worked any better than any other kind of magic (i.e. not at all.)
- Or *does* it work? They actually do a quite good job of leaving the belief and ambiguity there. Did Bones have issues remembering what happened because of the Voodoo spell, or the blow to the head? :)
- In one episode of My Name Is Earl, Catalina's nephew practices something similar to voodoo, even though he's supposed to come from South Of The Border, which doesn't feature such beliefs.
- Not even Indigenous folk beliefs?
- The Blood Ties episode "Bad Juju."
- Utterly subverted on Castle, as Rick actually talked to a practitioner about the religion, and she was portrayed in a normal manner.
- When he saw her after writing the book he had gone to her to research, she was somewhat annoyed at the way he portrayed her religion (which, apparently, was more along the lines of traditional Hollywood Voodoo).
Web Comics
- At one point, Penny Arcade had a voodoo doll as a throwaway joke. When trying to figure out how to get rid of it, Gabe and Tycho settled on burning it. Cue the victim walking down a sunny street whistling a merry tune...and then "MY FLESH!"
- Sluggy Freelance had Gwynn make a voodoo doll of Riff in an attempt to gain revenge on him; she quickly threw it in a cupboard when Zoe came into the room, with the result that Riff immediately threw himself into a cupboard...
Tabletop RPG
- Somewhat averted with Mage: the Awakening. There is a Legacy of mages who raise zombies and have a strongly vodoun bent. However, they name themselves the Bokor, and base themselves almost entirely around the aspect of the religion of the same name.
- Mage The Ascension has the Bata'a, an umbrella-term for Mages who practice Yoruba-based faiths such as Vodou, Santeria, Lucumi, Hoodoo, obviously Yoruba itself, among others. For a long time it was the largest independent Craft in the world (ie, not part of the Ten Traditions), before joining the Dreamspeakers.
- Scion generally averts the trope by featuring the Loa as one of the pantheons and elaborating on their influences. While the signature character of Brigitte de la Croix does raise zombies and drive a hearse, it's not because she practices voudon, but because her dad's Baron Samedi. And her rival is a daughter of Erzulie who plays the hell out of the "love goddess" imagery.
- Ravenloft's domain of Souragne is built out of this trope. Voodoo also turns up in Gothic Earth's version of Haiti and New Orleans.
Western Animation
- The P Js features Haiti Lady, a practicing Voodoo priestess.
- Of course, the extent of her powers varies from episode to episode. The most believable curse (at least to the other residents) is giving Sanchez (a lifelong smoker) cancer of the larynx.
- One episode of Two Stupid Dogs had Super Secret Squirrel battle a Voodoo practicing goat who has made dolls of Super and The Chief to controll them. Morocco Mole finds the dolls and starts playing with them. Hilarity Ensues.
- Lilo makes Voodoo dolls of the other girls and dunks them in pickle juice, blithely explaining that "my friends need to be punished."
- The Princess And The Frog looks like it'll be using plenty of this, to enhance its N'Awlins setting. Just watch Dr. Facilier's Villain Song "Friends On the Other Side" and you'll see how much "voodoo" to Disney means the same as "magic".
- C'mon, it's Disney. ''Everything'' is magical.
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