From Hoodoo to Horror
Traditional Celtic Symbols
Walking out of Weapons yesterday, something unsettled me beyond Zach Cregger's expertly crafted horror. The film refuses to connect every dot, which I appreciate, but what struck me wasn't what remained unexplained: it was how effortlessly it positioned European Folk Wisdom as inherently sinister. When the town turns against teacher Justine Gandy, it's Archer who first scrawls "WITCH" on her car, yet he's also the one who seems to understand from the beginning that something non-corporeal is occurring. The utility in naming this character Archer feels particularly appropriate... someone skilled at targeting, someone who knows how to hit the mark while maintaining distance from the consequences of his aim.
Weapons (2025) exemplifies how white folk psychically attack themselves into staying trapped within their spiritual psychosis, while films like Ryan Coogler's Sinners demonstrate Black people using cinema as reclamation work: retrieving our spirituality from the psychotic grip of colonialism.
In Sinners, Annie embodies Hoodoo wisdom as the first to see through Remmick's vampiric deception at Club Juke. Her magic serves as effective protection against vampire attacks, representing what I've written about as counter-cartographic resistance: how marginalized communities create alternative maps of knowledge when dominant systems seek erasure. As Dr. Yvonne Chireau, the film's Hoodoo consultant, explains in Religion Dispatches: "There's a lot of Christianity in Vodou, in Hoodoo... The film shows that Hoodoo is part of the Christian heritage, part of Black religion's heritage."
This spiritual disconnection pattern echoes through history. The Salem witch trials provide haunting precedent: a complete farce rooted in terror of girlhood, somatic weathering from inhabiting foreign land, and fear of surrounding darkness. Settlers distorted biblical teachings to reckon with their anxiety about occupying stolen territory, projecting guilt and displacement onto the very women who might have carried earth-based wisdom. The pattern repeats... when people are severed from ancestral connection to land, they attack the carriers of that wisdom.
European people need to investigate why popular media insists on depicting their traditional belief systems as parasitic. The usual suspects who benefit from this disconnection aren't mysterious: they're corporate entities obsessed with maintaining consumer-based society where we're so busy hating each other that we forget humanity's primary role we can all agree on... stewarding ancestral lands, understanding unique ecosystems, and caring for Earth with deep reverence. These suspects create false hierarchies where only billionaires benefit, meanwhile they pollute the Earth with their jets, cheapen construction materials, ruin ecosystems with fracking and drilling, and sic us on each other while they hide their hands. They conjure new and even more imaginary currencies so that they can continue fading in the back while we remain stuck in the same pain cycles over and over.
Consider how Coptic Christianity represents one of the oldest, most sophisticated branches of the faith, deeply rooted in African soil and wisdom. Yet Anglo-Saxon Christianity spread with such ferocity, eclipsing foundational pagan worldviews Europeans had maintained for millennia. This violent eclipsing fractured their relationship with land, and perhaps some extremes of those beliefs continue breathing through the ferocity with which Europeans weaponized Christianity. They understood that the perfect way to subjugate a people is by rewiring their spiritual beliefs via religion... because that's what happened to them. Consider the Slave Bible, which deliberately omitted passages about liberation and freedom while emphasizing obedience and submission: this demonstrates the calculated nature of spiritual manipulation as a colonization tool.
This spiritual disconnection now fuels Europeans to depict their ancestral pagan roots as dark and vampiric in films like Weapons, when those traditions were infinitely more nuanced. This depiction angers me as a non-white person because it represents continuous attack on their own Earth connection, deluding them into believing they didn't lose anything worth revering through Christianity, colonialism, and imperialism.
I personally know many white people of Irish, Scottish, Italian, and German ancestry embarking upon journeys of reconnecting with pre-colonial ancestral worldviews, and there's profound pain in that work. They're excavating spiritual practices from beneath centuries of conditioning that taught them to fear their own ancestors as demonic and reprogrammed them with this idea of racial superiority (Manifest Destiny). They're healing from mass categorization of "White People" as if they too don't have complex, place-based ancestry that was sacred before weaponization.
When I examine the cartography of sound in Sinners, Sammie's music literally summons spirits of past and present into the establishment. The film understands music—like blues emerging from Black American crucible—as bridge between worlds, technology for healing and resistance. But where is this understanding for European folk traditions? Where are films showing Celtic druids or Germanic wise women as bridges rather than threats? And old hags or crones that can't reckon with mortality and aging... that limited ageist perspective doesn't feel like an accurate depiction of elder-hood and is a direct attack on aging women.
I want clarity here: I'm not advocating for reverse migration back to pre-colonialism. That's neither possible nor necessarily desirable. What I'm exploring is how all of us can reclaim traditional worldviews and create something that reroots us all back into harmonious relationship with Earth, with deeper consideration for the land we now inhabit. This requires facing hard truths on all fronts... not to establish hierarchies of superiority or inferiority, but to transmute this era of extractivism and close this chapter entirely.
We need technology, modern conveniences, and yes, even our relationships to lands that may not be our ancestral homelands. But we need them in right relationship, guided by wisdom traditions understanding reciprocity rather than extraction. I guess what I'm advocating for is a global reconstruction era where all angles impacted by global imperialism confront the pain and privilege of past eras, then recommit to being better, wiser, more honest stewards of Earth.
This means European-descended people healing their relationship to ancestral wisdom, and all of us learning how to be good relatives to the land we're on now. There's a way to be here now that folds in our complex journeys on all fronts.
The vampire in Weapons isn't the folk practice: it's the system keeping people afraid of their own spiritual power. But let me acknowledge what feels most urgent... we're all living through death throes of extractive civilization, and healing has to happen on all fronts if any of us are going to make it through.
Wishful thinking, I know. Let me stay out of white folk business.
Additional Resources:
Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition by Dr. Yvonne Chireau
The Old Religion in a New World: The History of North American Christianity by Mark A. Noll
Decolonizing Therapy: Healing Indigenous Spiritual Traditions - Contemporary work on spiritual reclamation
Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers by Margot Adler
