Snoop's Devil Dogg: African American Ghostlore and Bones

The 2001 motion picture Bones, starring gangsta rapper-turned-actor Snoop Dogg, is perhaps not the most "serious" horror movie ever made. Near the end, while on his bloody rampage to destroy the murderers who turned him into a revenant, lead character Jimmy Bones, played by Snoop, decapitates his victims and carries about their still-talking severed heads, providing what some feel is an awkward sequence of comic relief. Yet the film also less humorously portrays popular elements of the African American sacred world, ones Snoop Dogg himself to some extent incorporates. Among other things, Bones leads us to consider the history of ghost dogs in black folklore.1 The spectral hound in Bones, part vengeful spirit, part corporeal dog, acts as a familiar and helps bring about the resurrection of Jimmy Bones. Their symbiotic relationship signifies distinct, layered connections between Snoop and earlier properties of African American culture. The dog is no exception to the complexity of folk processes in ultimately being more than a scary story uprooted from a haunted countryside and placed in the film. In Bones, ghost dog lore is urbanized and ghettocentricized, representing the horrors of the turn-of-the-millennium inner city. Equally important to this study is how this symbol has developed. With Snoop, the devil dog blends with secular "badman" folklore and "dogg" iconography in black tradition. Popular conceptions of dangerous masculinity and the dogg persona help provide for a unique manifestation of the modern supernatural canine. I rely here on Eithne Quinn's works, which interrogate the gangsta rapper as badman as well as African American vernacular uses of "dog," the latter remaining underexplored by scholars (Quinn 1999, 2005). Her grounding of Snoop Dogg in the black cultural past has influenced the following analysis. Finally, Bones is not the only recent movie to suggest the ghost dog amidst filmic conventions of the hood. The subtle spectral environment of G^osr Dog: The Way of the Samurai (2000) is highlighted and compared. Origins2 The devil dog, or black dog, has a rich history in western culture. The Egyptian god of death Anubis was pictured with a dog's head, while "[t]he Greeks and Romans associated dogs with Hecate, goddess of the infernal regions and of witchcraft" (Woods 230). Large black hounds with fiery eyes haunt locations and follow people at night in German folklore. In Britain, the Barguest is a shape shifting demon dog, although other specters are viewed as less-antagonistic ghosts of human beings or of dogs (Briggs 115). The supernatural creature survived the trip across the Atlantic and appears in the "wonder" records of early New England. At Salem, Sarah Carrier was promised a black dog for her witchcraft. During a trip into the woods, William Barker encountered "the Shape of a black dog w'ch looked Verry fercly Upon him" (Hall 88). While African animistic and ancestor beliefs (and tales about dogs) played some role in the existence of the ghost dog in African American lore, European sources likely provided a larger inspiration than what has heretofore been recognized. In his article on black spirits, Elliott Gorn correctly notes the amalgamation of traditions that shaped slave ghost stories (Gorn 551-52). However, I feel that the dog ghost is mistakenly identified as African in origin due to his reliance on J. Mason Brewer, who was unaware of the motif's larger existence in America beyond black usage. Also, Brewer's focus was on tales of benevolent canine spirits, hence his citation of an African myth about the dog as a helper to man (Brewer 3). To be sure, non-Anglo ethnic sources should not be ignored. Jennifer Hildebrand has recently argued that Igbo belief in the transmigration of spirits lay behind tales of humans in animal form (Hildebrand 127-52). But to the best of my knowledge, the question of a specific West African tradition involving ghost dogs, or humans as dogs, remains an open one. …