Deconstructing How ‘The Skeleton Key’ Depicts African Spiritual Beliefs (and 3 Films That Do It Better)
The Skeleton Key is a Southern Gothic horror story about a young woman who encounters the supernatural in the swamps of Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana. It’s easy to see why it was a big hit at the box office. But, as a New Orleans native, I have a few thoughts on its depiction of Hoodoo and African spiritual practices.
Don’t get me wrong. Films are duty-bound to deliver a fun romp. Creative license is great if it produces a well-paced, entertaining movie, and The Skeleton Key absolutely delivers. But, it slightly misses the mark on African spiritual beliefs by disconnecting the practices from the underlying narrative reducing it to “good” versus “evil”.
With that in mind, let’s deconstruct three ways The Skeleton Key addresses African spiritual beliefs and highlight three films that do it better.
The Skeleton Key (2005)
The premise in a nutshell: When Caroline (Kate Hudson) is warned by her employer not to enter the attic with her skeleton key, she promptly does just that. The room houses ritual items from former “servants” Papa Justify and Mama Cecile—let’s call them what they were: slaves—who resided in the house 90 years prior. Caroline fights for her life when she attempts to rescue Ben, her patient, only to become part of a body swap ritual between herself and Ben’s wife, Violet (with Cecile lurking inside her), unaware that Papa Justify jumped from Ben into Luke, the real estate attorney, before her arrival.
So, what are the three sticking points?
First, Hoodoo is portrayed as an escalating series of folk rituals and spells. Caroline must “believe” in the danger of the magic for it to work. However, if belief is a prerequisite, faith is a required aspect leading to the second issue…
Hoodoo is divorced from its religious context. Actually, Hoodoo was a form of resistance against slavery and covertly hid its religious traditions through “invisible churches”—places where practitioners could plan and worship outside the oppressor’s purview. But the film is silent on this aspect.
Lastly, Hoodoo on its surface is not about harming others. Hoodoo should not be the boogeyman. Nor should Justify or Cecile. Honestly, if you’re faced with the end of a rope for the vague infraction of sharing your beliefs, you would pull a few strings to help yourself, too.
Now, The Skeleton Key got an old practice right but didn’t explicitly call it out in the film. At the beginning of the film, Violet/Cecile is shown sweeping the front walkway. Yard sweeping is a bygone tradition once practiced in the South and is believed to have originated with the enslaved African population. Cecile would be familiar with such a practice, so perhaps it’s an unspoken nod to her presence in Violet.
So what does it look like to successfully take African spiritual traditions and integrate them into a narrative? Let’s look at a few examples.
Daughters of the Dust (1991)
Daughters of the Dust takes place in 1902 as three generations of the Peazant family relocate from the island of their ancestors to the mainland of South Carolina. The unborn child of Eli and Eula Peazant narrates the journey, tracing the legacy of her family before her birth using poetic imagery and a circular narrative structure to represent the past, present, and future.
Prior to leaving their homes, Eli destroys a bottle tree as he grapples with Eula’s pregnancy and her violation by a white man on the mainland. He struggles with the possibility that the baby is not his. The bottle tree symbolizes the connection to ancestry and spiritual protection. It also represents the belief that evil spirits can be trapped in the glass, acting as a talisman to safeguard the family. The tree highlights the tension between tradition and modernity as some characters, like Eli, reject this belief system.
As the family comes together for a traditional feast on the beach, the old and new ways mix as the elder women practice religious rites on the beach and conduct a Bible-study session. The matriarch, Nana, uses this time to call on the family’s ancestral spirits who once worked on the island’s indigo plantations. She combines the power of these ancestors with the Bible, symbolizing the blending of beliefs.
The decision to leave the island is framed as a transition from the old ways to the modern, a turning away from their African ancestral history and traditions. The family matriarch embodies this conflict as she continues to practice African spiritual rituals and hesitates to leave not only the island, but also the old ways behind.
Eve’s Bayou (1997)
“The summer I killed my father I was ten years old.”
Eve’s Bayou opens with the startling confession of Eve Batiste, a young girl who resides in the titular Eve’s Bayou on the outskirts of New Orleans with her well-to-do Creole-American family in the 1960s. The land they’ve lived on for generations was bequeathed to their ancestors by a French general named Batiste. He fell deathly ill and a root woman named Eve saved his life. In return, General Batiste granted the root woman the patch of land where Eve and her family now reside.
The gift of future sight is a thread throughout. It’s a tie that binds Eve to her Aunt Mozelle, a Hoodoo practitioner who regularly sees clients for readings. Framed as commonplace and a means of assisting the community, this ability isn’t labeled “evil”. However, characters take actions out of context based on readings including Eve’s mother, a defrauded elderly woman, and Eve herself.
It’s later revealed that Eve has the same gift. She then uses it to discover the truth about her older sister Cicely’s accusations that their father harmed her. Eve uses her gift to understand the objective truth.
The Hoodoo practiced in Eve’s Bayou is a vehicle for exploring and observing the impact of unreliable memories at the heart of this film.
His House (2020)
His House is the story of Sudanese refugees fleeing ethnic violence and the aftermath of their treacherous journey across the English Channel to the United Kingdom. Bol and his wife, Rial, escape with their daughter, Nyagak, but the child does not survive the journey.
Bol experiences menacing visions upon his arrival in the UK. Rial puts a name to these frightening images—an apeth, or “night witch”. Rial recounts the story of an honorable but poor man in her village who wanted a home so badly that he stole from others. One day he stole from the wrong person, an apeth. Soon the walls of the man’s home whispered the spells of the apeth and would not stop. Rial believes the night witch has followed them from the ocean and will not leave until they repay their debt. The truth of what haunts Bol and Rial is the decision to kidnap Nyagak from her real mother, a decision that would see the child drown during the voyage to a new land.
They resign themselves to living with the ghosts of the massacre they left behind and the souls lost in the English Channel. They adapt to the spirits knowing they will never repay their debt to the apeth.
Daughters of the Dust, Eve’s Bayou, and His House don’t flatten the ideas of African spiritual practices to good versus evil. It is more nuanced than that. Instead, their horror is a layered appraisal of African traditions in a modern world.
Enjoy a film like The Skeleton Key but also be cognizant that this does not really represent African spiritual beliefs. It’s entertainment, but hopefully, it will pique the audience’s interest in learning about real ancestral practices.
Categorized:Editorials
