Godsmack's "Voodoo": A Painful Misrepresentation

By Kristance Harlow
December 8, 2008
Afro-Caribbean Anthropology
University of Vermont

Vodou, popularly referred to as Voodoo outside of Haiti, has been grossly misrepresented in popular Western media. To focus this discussion on misrepresentation the song and subsequent music video “Voodoo” by the band Godsmack will be my primary media of analysis. Godsmack’s music video “Voodoo” portrays a lonely and angry existence in cult religion. This song and music video portray the Haitian religion as dangerous, scary and evil. The lyrics are non-religious but play on the idea of Voodoo zombies as bodies without souls or thoughts. The symbolism in the images, such as pagan worship, Greek goddesses and naked zombies misrepresent Vodou in every scene.

It is important to know how Voodoo became a Hollywood star. It’s no coincidence that the first black republic (Dubois) has faced nearly insurmountable obstacles, such as the gross misrepresentation of its Afro-Caribbean religion Vodou. America occupied Haiti from 1915-1934 and native Haitians sometimes resisted the occupation with violence. When those stationed in Haiti came back to the United States they “freely leveled charges of cannibalism and reported native superstitions of the ‘zombie’” (Dendle 46). Although zombies are no longer portrayed in film as black Haitians without souls, their continued existence in the media is a symptom of cultural inequality and gross misrepresentations (Kramer).

The inspiration for the song Voodoo has been said to come from the movie “The Serpent and the Rainbow.” The movie is a 1988 Wes Craven film that exploits an ethnography by Wade Davis of the same name. Davis searches for the botany behind accused zombification. In the horror film an anthropologist from Harvard learns about zombification and evils lurking behind Haitian religion (Lawless). That draws a direct connection between Haitian Vodou and Godsmack’s song.

The music video shows individuals draped in black carrying swords as a Medusa-esque woman dances in front of a fireplace. The story of Medusa comes from Greek mythology where she is killed as punishment for being raped by Poseidon. She has become an image of terrifying sexual powers because it was said that anyone who looked directly at her would turn to stone (Garber and Vickers). Medusa’s image was once used to quell female power; it can be argued that now the same symbolism is being used to quell Afro-Caribbean power. Representing Medusa as being akin to Vodou is factually inaccurate and the sexual role she plays in this video shows that Vodou is a romanticized fetish in the Western world.

Images of witches and rituals with swords are intertwined with blurry zombies emerging from a lake and running through a forest into an open field, again with a fire. Zombies are very common monster figures in Hollywood horror stories. The emptiness of a mythical zombie creates a space in which outsiders can place their deepest fears. The zombie acts as someone without morality or without a soul would (Dendle).

In Vodou, zombies (or pwen) are manufactured “spiritual agents” (Apter). There are several mythologies of zombies in Haiti, but none represent the terrifying picture painted in this music video. Zombies are often thought of as hard working bodies that have become emotionless and work “for no one but the person who is responsible for their state” (185 Dunham). Their stories may have been born from the lives of slaves continued their work after years of excruciating toil and tried to not feel the pain anymore. The most likely case for the few stories of zombie sightings is individuals coming back from a drugged state (Dunham).

The lyrics are depressive and consistently mention demons, candles and snakebites. The lyrics “empty thoughts” (Godsmack) and “demons dreaming, breathe in” (Godsmack) play to the zombie myth. The cry “voodoo, voodoo, voodoo” (Godsmack) is prominent throughout the end of the song as the dark ritual progresses and is the tool to unify the imagery and symbolism. All that has come before this point is supposed to be summed up in the expressive cry of “voodoo”. “Voodoo” is the pain, it is the emptiness, it is the cult-religion that calls on dark powers that reflect angry emotions.

At the end a woman holds up a pagan star above an altar. The woman holding the star is Laurie Cabot, an ordained High Priestess of new age witchcraft. She has no affiliation with Vodou. She practices Witchcraft in the United States and has founded several “anti-defamation organizations aimed at correcting the many misconceptions about Witchcraft” (Cabot). Her participation in a video that defames another misunderstood religion is disconcerting at best. She is another player in the war on Haitian religion that has been engrained into the American psyche since the time of Haitian freedom.

Painting Vodou practitioners as savages has an othering effect. Making Vodou and its practitioners exotic disassociates their image from reality. This “mythologized Haiti of Zombies, sorcery, and witch doctors helps derail our attention from the real causes of poverty and suffering, economic exploitation, color prejudice, and political guile” (Hurston 33). This song buys into a prejudice popular culture that stereotypes an original Afro-Caribbean religion from the first free black republic.

Works Cited

Apter, Andrew.
2002 On African Origins: Creolization and Connissance in Haitian Vodou. American Ethnologist 29(2): 233-260.

Cabot, Laurie.
About Laurie Cabot. Electronic document, http://www.lauriecabot.com/About_Laurie.html, accessed December 6, 2008.

Dendle, Peter.
2007 The Zombie as Barometer of Cultural Anxiety in Monsters and Monstrous. Niall Scott ed. Pp. 45-57. Rodopi: New York.

Dubois, Laurent.
2004 Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution. Harvard University Press: Cambridge.

Dunham, Katherine.
1994 Island Posessed. University of Chicago Press: Chicago.

Garber, Marjorie and Nancy J Vickers.
2003 The Medusa Reader. Routledge: New York.

Godsmack
1999 Voodoo. From Godsmack. Hollywood: Universal Records.

Hurston, Zora Neale.
1990 Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica. Harper Perennial: New York.

Kramer, Karen.
1985 The Legacy of the Spirits. 52 min. Documentary Educational Resources. Watertown.

Lawless, Robert.
1989 Review of The Serpent and the Rainbow: A Harvard Scientist Uncovers the Startling Truth about the Secret World of Haitian Voodoo and Zombies. In The Latin American Anthropology Review 1(1): 5-6.

Lloyd, Robin
1995 Haitian Pilgrimage. 27 min. Green Valley Media. Burlington.