"The Skeleton Key"

One of my favorite movies, “The Skeleton Key,” with Kate Hudson is based on a tale of voodoo, a type of witchcraft associated with African American slaves back during slave times. The movie is about a hospice nurse, played by Kate Hudson, who is sent to take care of an elderly man who still lives with his elderly wife on a plantation in the Deep South. She starts having nightmares about the history of the old plantation. In one of her nightmares she goes back to when the plantation was thriving, during the days of slavery. A slave couple who were kept as house slaves were caught teaching/doing voodoo on the plantation owner’s children, but not hurting them, and the couple was therefore hanged for that in front of a huge gathering of people on the plantation. Hudson’s character realizes she too is living in a mix of that voodoo that was put in place on that plantation the night the two slaves were hanged, and she must fight for her life before the voodoo spell takes over her too, and she too becomes trapped in its evil never-ending web.
This voodoo is just one of the things that the whites of the slave times became afraid of. Voodoo is really a kind of religion that has different practices that whites were not used to and scared them. Voodoo was brought to America by the slaves that were exported from Africa, and therefore passed along through the generations of slaves and spread all over America. This new “religion” with its odd ritual practices frightened the Christian whites; it was something different and unlike their own religion which whites believed was superior to any other religion. Many thought it was a kind of witchcraft because of the strange ritualistic practices. Many white landowners forbade it to be practiced on their land, and if caught, much like being caught learning to read or write, there would be most severe consequences.
I think the movie, especially the parts of Hudson’s nightmares, were more of visualization to the times of slavery. Even when the blacks wanted to practice their own religion that they brought from Africa, they were forbade to and punished for doing so. When today in America one of the basic freedoms is that of religion, and we look down on the parts of the world where people have to practice their religion in secret for fear of their lives. It is interesting to think that not long ago, people in our own country were doing the same thing, and even trying to learn to read and write in secret for fear of their own life, I think these things are taken for granted a lot today in our country.