I have scanned media in both the present and the past in understanding the history and relevance of Voodoo.
From my research I’ve seen that although Voodoo as a religion was introduced around the 16th century, its media relevance did not show up for a long while after.
Through my research in the past I’ve been able to note that Voodoo made a first real appearance in media in the early 1940's where it increased in popularity quite rapidly where it hit peak around the 70's. In the early 50's was one of the main decades of its rise in popularity as comics and early books touched upon the subject. By the 70's Voodoo hit cinemas and comics mainly although this seems largely to do with the link with Blaxploitation being a massive hit at the time as people came to idolise black people and culture which by conjunction, lead to Voodoo becoming more popular in media of the time due to its orientation as a belief largely in black culture.
From my research I’ve seen that although Voodoo as a religion was introduced around the 16th century, its media relevance did not show up for a long while after.
Through my research in the past I’ve been able to note that Voodoo made a first real appearance in media in the early 1940's where it increased in popularity quite rapidly where it hit peak around the 70's. In the early 50's was one of the main decades of its rise in popularity as comics and early books touched upon the subject. By the 70's Voodoo hit cinemas and comics mainly although this seems largely to do with the link with Blaxploitation being a massive hit at the time as people came to idolise black people and culture which by conjunction, lead to Voodoo becoming more popular in media of the time due to its orientation as a belief largely in black culture.
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| Image from angelesvoodoo.com |
In the present I’ve seen Voodoo still around in today’s media with fun idea for Voodoo dolls and other such being represented in original, interesting ways. Although i have noticed a sharp decrease in the way of Voodoo in media, although still relevant and still common enough to be found, a branch off from the Haitian Vodou belief has become more popular in the form of Zombies.
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| Photo of a person dressed as a Zombie. |
Zombies in the last 20 years has exploded in popularity, going from cult classic in form of films and some comics, its gone to full on mainstream popularity. Since this, Zombies have been all over all kinds of media in TV programs, films, books, advertising and many more forms. Zombies have become a genre of horror in itself and has even been as far as to cause people to have debates about different aspects of zombies and their very own personalised survival guides they make for themselves. These shows how deep and in tune zombies are in the current media. For example a film adaption of the book World War Z is set to come out in later 2012, the game Resident Evil: Operation Racoon city is coming out early 2012, there is a Walking Dead third season to be coming out in 2012 as well as a video game based on it all the while the comic is still being published now with no plans for an end soon and there is so much more coming out with he theme of zombies. From this i can defiantly see that Zombies is not anywhere close to a stale point as more and more different types of media are being constantly churned out.
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| Promotional shot for the game Dead Rising. |
Through this I've seen that Voodoo is fading in media focus for the time being and will most likely continue colliding. But at the same time i feel the branch off of Voodoo that is Zombies will continue to be a big media hotspot for many years to come as it is only just started to see the peak of it, therefore i feel Zombies are a very viable media for future. Although Voodoo wont disappear for a while, it will stay in recession but with the uncertain future, there is a good chance that maybe one day it will have another big hit in media sparking it's return but at current there is just no evidence of it.
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