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A stock trick in any Hollywood Voodoo practitioner's arsenal is the Voodoo Doll, a tiny figurine created to vaguely resemble another person (sometimes using that person's hair or blood) which is then tormented in various ways, such as by being held over a fire or jabbed with needles. As the doll is damaged, so is the person connected to it, making it a wonderful long-range means of revenge.
In reality, so-called "voodoo dolls" are not a part of Vodou at all. They originated in Europe where they were called poppets, and Vodou's actual use of dolls (which have nothing to do with sympathetic magic) was most likely mistaken for this by European onlookers. And contrary to what Hollywood shows, they aren't just for torture. Some places in New Orleans and Haiti do sell "voodoo dolls" marketed to ignorant tourists, though.
Occasionally Played for Laughs in which the victim jerks around like a puppet when the doll is moved.
Incidentally, there is a real Vodou practice involving sticking nails into dolls, but all they do is nail them to trees to serve as guides to wandering spirits.
Examples
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Advertising
- Many commercials like using voodoo dolls for humorous effect, such as the Sprint Commercial with the guy sticking pins into dolls representing overages and roaming fees.
Anime & Manga
- Skip Beat! gives us Kyouko, who has quite the spread of voodoo dolls based off Sho. In the early part of the manga, she also has a large amount of Ren-themed ones as well. This later becomes a point when she gives Maria a realistic Ren-doll for her birthday. In more recent arcs, she has created a Reino doll in around 7 minutes.
- Lime-iro Senkitan's Kinu Fukushima has personalized voodoo dolls for everyone aboard the Amanohara, and non-personalized ones for other occasions. Her favorite thing to do with them is stab nails through them to stop her friends from getting in her way, for love or otherwise.
- Basil Hawkins in One Piece has them stored inside his body somehow. When attacked, he remained unharmed while the collateral damage took out buildings around him. Elsewhere, several unfortunate bystanders were flattened because they'd taken the blows for him. This also overlapped with a One winged Angel, since Hawkins can somehow become a gigantic living voodoo doll as well
- Muteki Kanban Musume: At episode 4B, Megumi is trying to curse The Rival Miki by nailing a wara ningyo (a straw doll that represents people) to a sacred tree in the Temple at the top of the hill.
- Ranma ½'s Gosunkugi often uses them, but they have absolutely no effect. And he hits his own fingers frequently trying to nail them.
Comic Books
- In one issue of The Spectre, the eponymous hero fights against a Gypsy who uses one of these to attack people for no good reason.
- In Prisoners of the Sun, the Incas reveal this was how the seven archaeologists were tortured remotely. When the dolls are destroyed, the archaeologists are released from their trances.
- Baron Sunday, a minor Superman villain from the 80s, was a crimelord who used voodoo dolls to assassinate his competitors.
- In a Richie Rich comic book story, Richie's father was the victim of a voodoo doll.
Literature
- In The Wise Man's Fear, mommets (figurines made of wax or clay and using bits of hair or blood) are key components in Malefesance magic. Kvothe uses an even more grisly version, stabbing an actual human corpse to maim people nearby.
- In Witches Abroad Mrs. Gogol has a voodoo doll intended to be Lily, but when Granny Weatherwax gets in her way she makes it of her instead, stabbing it in the leg and making her stagger. Granny Weatherwax deals with it by sticking her hand into a torch, causing the doll to burst into flame.
- In Sweets to the Sweet, Creepy Child Irma makes a voodoo doll of her abusive father, rendering him bedridden and unable to carry out his regular beatings of her. When his equally Jerkassish brother figures out what's going on, she claims the doll's just a bit of candy, and bites its head off to prove it...
- This is how one of the witches defeats Septimus in Stardust.
- In Fool Moon, Harry Dresden uses the same principle to temporarily disable a very powerful loup-garou. Saying precisely how would be a spoiler — and ruin a Crowning Moment of Funny.
- In The Witches of Eastwick, the titular women make a wax doll to curse their romantic rival, Jenny Gabriel. The film version changes the victim to Darryl Van Horne presumably to keep them sympathetic.
Live Action TV
- Mimi once used one on Drew in an episode of The Drew Carey Show. Oddly it causes him pain in his arm although she's stabbing the doll somewhere further south.
- For all the liberties they take with the various mythologies their Monster of the Week episodes are based on, The X-Files actually gets this one right on not one but two occasions. One episode involving actual Vodou has no mention of dolls at all, while another has poppets used to inflict harm from afar used not by a Haitian witch doctor but a practitioner of Appalachian folk-magic.
- In one episode of Tales From The Darkside, "Baker's Dozen", an evil hoodoo witch and her slimy business partner sell gingerbread men that act as voodoo dolls. The hoodoo witch also regularly torments her assistant by using the magical dough to turn him into a mouse. In the end, both of them get a nasty Karmic Death. The witch sneaks a gingerbread man of her partner into his belongings with a lipstick stained napkin. The man's wife sees this and crushes the cookie in a fit of jealousy. Cut to the man in the shower screaming in agony as blood fills the tub. The witch laughs in triumph and turns her assistant into a mouse again just for kicks. Suddenly she starts to get a headache. As the pain worsens, she realizes that her assistant must have baked a thirteenth cookie (hence a baker's dozen) that represented her. She shrieks off-screen while the camera focuses on a mouse nibbling the gingerbread man's head off...
- A witch doctor used voodoo dolls to control the castaways (and turn the Professor into a zombie) in the Gilligan's Island episode "Voodoo".
- In an episode of Seed, Zoey's grandmother erroneously believes that Harry is the man who knocked Zoey up and left her to raise the child alone for nine years (Zoey is actually a lesbian and Harry was just the sperm donor). She puts a curse on Harry and makes a voodoo doll of him. When Harry gets hold of the doll he decides to store the doll between two Playboy magazines just in case it really works.
- On Good Eats, Alton sticks metal skewers (the kind used for kabobs) into a doll made to look like W. As he analyzes what's wrong with each kind of skewer (wrong shape, not sturdy enough, too sharp, not sharp enough, etc.), he causes W lots of pain.
Music
- In the video of "No Light, No Light" by Florence + the Machine, a voodoo doll is used against Florence, causing her to fall off a skyscraper.
Tabletop Games
- In the Masque Of The Red Death setting for Ravenloft, certain voodoo-inspired magic users can do this.
- Scion features voodoo dolls as a possible Relic for a child of the Loa; however, as the authors have done their research, they swiftly outline that the dolls are associated with hoodoo, but some of the Loa have picked them up for laughs.
- A number of cards from the early days of Magic: The Gathering (such as Black Vise
 and The Rack) feature a poppet getting maimed somehow to represent effects that targeted your opponent. The poppet itself got its own card in Time Spiral, Stuffy Doll.
Video Games
- These crop up fairly often in Monkey Island games. They tend to work at a limited range, and the spell to make them is a riff on the "Old, New, Borrowed and Blue" quatrain.
- In StarCraft II Gabriel Tosh has a thing for these, and if you chose to side with Nova instead of him he tries to use one on Raynor. It gets Tychus instead. And Nova decide to stab it on her goodbye.
- The title character of Voodoo Vince is a voodoo doll who can perform Limit Breaks based on doing absurdly violent things to himself.
- In Blood, a voodoo doll is one of the weapons you can find.
- Dragon Age: Origins - The Feastday Pranks DLC gives each party member two special gifts, one that puts their approval through the roof and one that reduces it by the same amount. Morrigan's gift is a voodoo doll of Alistair. Its effects include "Burning Sensation", "Two Left Feet", and "Strangely Stimulated".
- Elements has the card "Voodoo Doll", which inflicts all damage and harmful effects onto the opponent.
- Terraria has the Guide Voodoo Doll, which will allow you to harm the guide. However, he respawns after you kill him. If you throw it in lava while in the Underworld, it causes Wall Of Flesh to spawn in addition to killing the guide normally, which turns on hardmode for your world if defeated.
- In Touhou: Subterranean Animism, Parsee's "Midnight Anathema Ritual" is derived from the Japanese version. In this case, she's skipped the doll and is trying to pound nails into you directly, but the idea is there. As a result, she's often shown with such dolls in fanart.
- Alice, a character specializing in creative use of dolls, doesn't do this in canon but sometimes does in fanworks.
Webcomics
- God pulls it on Satan in this Sinfest strip.
- Gwynn of Sluggy Freelance made one of Riff and had some fun poking it in the eye, microwaving it, and throwing it in a desk drawer.
- The Repository of Dangerous Things has a few including one "living" doll. It's kind of cute, but smacking it around turns out to be a very bad idea, as it can choose whom it depicts and is capable of self-mutilation (the doll can be repaired later, after all).
- For 25 cents Mama Zora can make a reversible version of this (see next pages).
Web Original
- Played for Laughs in Teen Girl Squad Issue 12. Early in, The Ugly One is seen sticking a series of pins into a doll resembling the Arrow'd Guy. Later on, the Arrow'd Guy jumps up from behind a skeleton with an Ugly One voodoo doll, screaming "BAD JUJU!!!"
- Smosh has an episode where Anthony uses a voodoo doll of Ian to sabotage Ian's job interview. He later gets one of himself and uses it for...other reasons.
Western Animation
- Filmation The New Adventures of Superman episode "The Deadly Super-Doll". A supervillain named The Sorcerer is a master of the ancient arts of wizardry, occult ritual and Black Magic. He creates a Superman doll from the magic clay of the ancient wizard Philbias and uses it to control the Man of Steel's body.
- A variant of this trope appears in The Smurfs episode "Denisa's Greedy Doll" when Gargamel puts Greedy's apron on Denisa's doll and casts a spell on it so that whatever happens to the doll wearing the apron also affects Greedy. The Smurfs turn the tables by having the doll wear fabric from Gargamel's robe.
- A Super Chicken cartoon has him and his opponent The Fat Man fighting by hitting and twisting voodoo dolls of each other.
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