The Skeleton Key (2005)

Image credit: Skeleton Key: Merrick Morton

I KNOW MY CONTACT IS HERE SOMEWHERE Come on and show us the ''hoodoo'' that you do so well

Zombies are, if anything, overrepresented in today's movie marketplace. Yet the spiritual tradition that invented them — Afro-Caribbean voodoo — rarely gets the spotlight, serving mostly as a genre backdrop for all-too-familiar stories about good-looking white people in over their heads (e.g., Angel Heart). Naive hospice caretaker Caroline (Kate Hudson) certainly falls into that category, but The Skeleton Key, a basic bayou thriller distinguished by a very self-conscious subversive streak, rises nicely above C-level.

''Hoodoo,'' we're informed, is different than voodoo. (It's à la carte folk-magic, whereas voodoo is a bona fide religion.) All of this is news to Caroline, a caretaker who's taking a crash course in ''conjuration'' because she believes it's connected to the catatonia of her latest sickly charge, Ben (John Hurt). Blocking her path is Ben's wife, a honey-tongued battle-ax named Violet (Gena Rowlands, having a blast), who complains, rightly, that this Yankee interloper doesn't ''understand the house.'' Because the house, of course, has a past. That's clear from one look at its rotting plantation colonnades. It comes as no surprise to learn it might be haunted. Ditto the revelation that, once upon a benighted time, a pair of black servants were terminated, shall we say, with prejudice. But what comes next, depending on your point of view, is either a canny manipulation of racist movie tropes or an exercise in facile genre-flick reductivism. The distinction may not matter: For anyone zombified by creaky thriller clichés, Skeleton is a fine little shot in the head.